Bittersweet
We're very concerned.
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2009
- Messages
- 856
- Reaction score
- 214
First off, I am going to say that making a game easier is a way to kill the time spent for many people. Next, they don't care whether you keep playing it. All they care is that you buy their game. Considering the massive sales of the series even after smartphones came into play, so there's no real need to compete with them. No other franchise, Nintendo or otherwise, is doing that as far as I'm aware. Third, as I said before, forty bucks is a lot of money for a mobile game (or a game intended to be used as one). If you're going to spend forty bucks on a game, then you want it to be a game with actual depth. If you try to sell a mobile-esque game for forty bucks, few will be willing to buy it. And considering console gamers and mobile gamers are far different crowds (sure, many console gamers have smartphones, but that doesn't mean that they use it to play games). Many console gamers don't want games that are needlessly easy and nothing but positive feedback. They want games with depth and difficulty to justify a purchase of a 200-500 dollar console and 40-60 dollar games. Try to make console games reminiscent of console games, you lose that crowd, which is the majority of the consumers. GAMEFREAK/Nintendo/whoever is making some idiotic business decisions that could lead to the Pokémon series either being killed or moving to smartphones, neither possibility of which excites me.
Like I said, Nintendo isn't trying to compete directly against phones in terms of sales; they are competing for your time so as to get product exposure and justify game sales for the consumer. It is easy to justify spending $3 for a new game on a phone if you are on your phone a lot already, but a lot harder to justify spending $40 on a new game for a handheld you don't use that often or only really play for an hour or so at a time at home; this is why they are introducing push notifications and StreetPass and stuff. They encourage checking your 3DS every so often. As the creators of the games have said in interviews, they do care whether people keep playing the games after buying, and they know they are competing with smartphone apps now in the market of on-the-go games. There is a lot of crossover in those demographics.
Everyone knows what an iPhone is, and what an Android phone is when they see it. Comparatively, just last week I was playing Pokémon in the break room at work and a co-worker asked me "Is that a phone?", pointing to my 3DS. Compared to smartphones, Nintendo products seem to have some branding/public perception issues, which is, from a business standpoint, kind of bad.
Nobody asks what an iPhone is when they see one because smartphones have a very clearly defined place in consumers' minds. The 3DS, not so much (unless you're a Nintendo gamer already).
forty bucks is a lot of money for a mobile game (or a game intended to be used as one)
As I wrote earlier, Pokémon and a lot of Nintendo games for 3DS sort of fall into both categories of mobile apps and console games. They compete with mobile apps as "time passers" but also work as "proper" RPGs, depending on when and where you're playing and what you're doing at the time.
Just because the game is competing with mobile apps in some aspect does not mean that the are making the game into a mobile app. Pokémon works well as both.
I feel like this "problem" could be solved if you just switched the Exp Share off, since that seems like the main complaint. Just saying...
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