“Change is inevitable and companies must be willing to embrace it rather than resist it.”

(Ries and Trout)

The gaming world has slightly changed over the last decade. This has to do with the introduction of mobile phones and apps that let you play really good games wherever you want. Children are now given a tablet or a smartphone at an early age, and they mainly use it to play games. Nintendo kept resisting to the idea that the way people play games is changing, until this year.

As my peer Jason Tse stated in his blog, I also think that Nintendo has finally realized that they now have to expand into the app market. The company has been resisting to move away from the games on consoles, but after they saw the huge impact that Pokémon Go had, they announced they’re launching their first game for smartphones in December 2016: Super Mario Run.

From my point of view, this is a really smart move from Nintendo. First, because kids grow with games that they can play on their tablets. If Nintendo develops apps that all these children can play, they will position the brand in early ages. This would eventually lead these customers to buy a Nintendo console in later years. Also, the company has thousands of customers that grew playing Nintendo games, like myself. It would be really easy for all these people to relate the apps with the original games and, therefore, download the games.

However, going into the mobile market has some negative consequences. I think the most important one is the decrease in console sales. If Nintendo starts launching a bunch of apps with its iconic games, people will prefer to download the app version rather than to buy both the console and the game.

We can either see this issue as a problem or as an opportunity. In Nintendo’s earnings report for September 2016, we can see a decline in one of its console sales (53% decrease). In general, the console sales worldwide have been falling and I think it’s due to the fact that now people play on their phones. Nintendo could start developing apps and sell them instead of giving them for free. This way, they could reach a higher volume of sales; and more consumers would buy the app because it’ll be cheaper than buying the consoles.

Nintendo has to decide whether it’ll continue with the same strategy, or change it. The market will keep changing, and one must be willing to fight all these changes in order to stay in the game.

Word count: 434

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Sources

The Comeback of Nintendo?

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/171587/20160727/nintendo-suffers-major-predictable-q1-loss-wii-u-3ds-sales.htm

http://www.quickmba.com/marketing/ries-trout/positioning/