Mobile Now Makes Up Majority Of Gaming Sales And Nintendo's New President Wants To Get The Company On Board
from the choo-choo dept
With the advent of the smartphone, these mini-computers that most of us carry around in our pockets, it was only a matter of time before the mobile platform became a dominant player in the gaming business. That said, it will likely still surprise some folks to learn that this will be the year that mobile takes over gaming revenue, with a forecasted majority of all revenue being spent on mobile games.
Newzoo's 2018 Global Games Market Forecast now predicts that mobile games will make up a slim majority (51 percent) of all worldwide gaming revenue this year (including smartphones and tablets, but not dedicated gaming handhelds). That's up from 34 percent in 2015 and just 18 percent in 2012. Console and PC games will split the remainder of the pie relatively evenly in 2018, at 25 percent and 24 percent of worldwide spending, respectively.
The growth of the mobile market doesn't show any signs of stopping, either: by 2021, Newzoo estimates that 59 percent of all gaming spending will go to mobile platforms, with console and PC games dividing up the scraps.
It's been quite interesting to watch gamemakers themselves react to this brand new market over the past five or so years. Indie developers sprung up everywhere, taking advantage of the new platform for revenue, while established game studios and companies embraced mobile in a more mixed fashion. Some studios, such as Bethesda and Square, began dipping their toes in the water fairly early, only to ramp up releases of past and new titles fully optimized for a mobile experience. What should have been immediately apparent is how perfect mobile devices are for any gamemaker's back-catalog, where games that require less graphical power can be offered to satisfy a nostalgia movement that is essentially a market in and of itself.
Nintendo, on the other hand, balked at the mobile marketplace as recently as a few years ago. Nintendo has long favored a walled-garden approach to its games, exerting strict control over both game titles and the hardware that runs them. It was only in 2015, in fact, when Nintendo, then headed by company president Satoru Iwata, followed by Tatsumi Kimishima after Iwata's death, struck a partnership with a mobile developer to begin releasing Nintendo games for mobile. By any measure, the made Nintendo late to the party, with only a tepid public embrace of mobile gaming as a revenue generator.
Well, Nintendo has a new president now, and Shuntaro Furukawa is looking to get the company fully invested in mobile gaming.
Furukawa is taking over from Tatsumi Kimishima, who took the helm temporarily after the tragic and sudden death of the beloved Satoru Iwata in 2015. He’s only 46, and clearly as a member of the younger generation has a different outlook on mobile, which the company completely avoided until very recently.
“The idea that something will emerge that transforms into something big, in the same manner as game consoles, is the defining motive of the Nintendo business,” he told the Nikkei. “From what I can see, smartphone games are the ones I want to expand the most.”
He said he envisions the smartphone side of the game company to become a 100 billion yen business — short of a billion at the present exchange rate, but why not round up? The company did a trillion yen in sales last year, so it’s not like we’re going to run out of zeroes.
While we could spend time kicking at Nintendo for getting into this so late, the more interesting take on this is that it's a signal that mobile game revenue might actually be undervalued by forecasts. After all, if the market forces are so great so as to drag a company like Nintendo along for the ride, it seems likely that gaming on mobile devices is going to be the gaming market of the present, never mind the future.
Filed Under: gaming, mobile, mobile gaming
Companies: nintendo
