December 30, 2017

Unsurprising

Remember when people said that consoles were dead, and that Nintendo’s only chance for survival (and probably Apple’s only chance to get really good high-budget games on iOS) would be for Nintendo to make iPhone games?

Well, Nintendo’s new console is doing really well,1 their good iOS game "disappointed" Nintendo, while their shitty manipulative gambling-based mobile games seem to be doing well enough. And now, great iOS devs are leaving the platform.

Telling Nintendo to abandon its hardware platform for iOS was never a good idea. It doesn't help Nintendo, and it doesn't help iOS. There is no sustainable market on iOS for really good, non-abusive, fairly priced mid- to high-budget games, and Nintendo can't fix that. The only company that can fix that is Apple.

I don’t think anyone should be surprised by any of this.

  1. Importantly, so is the PS4. The Xbox One is doing okay, but considering that Microsoft nowadays seems to view the Xbox as merely a platform for playing Windows games without the hassle of actually running Windows, that's probably not particularly surprising, either. ↩︎

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