To Free or Not to Free: Nintendo’s quest to maintain a unique brand identity in the homogeneity of the Mobile Games Market

• Author / Creator

  Wilson, Maren

• As recently as 2013, Nintendo made bold assertions that they would never enter into the mobile games market (Byford, 2013). However in 2016 the market saw three games using IP commonly associated with Nintendo launch on both iOS and Android: Miitomo, Pokemon Go, and Super Mario Run. Nintendo has a long and storied history of tightly coupling hardware and software development in house, meaning that Nintendo develops both games and the consoles upon which they are played. This has led to the common rule of thumb in regards to their game, that should a player want to play a Nintendo game, they must first purchase a Nintendo console (Gilbert, 2018). Since Nintendo does not have a smartphone line, adhering to this long-held principle of coupling hardware and software would mean forgoing the chance to develop games for iOS and Android phones. And yet, in 2016, they did just that.

  This was a major reversal give how outspoken Nintendo had been up until recently. What could have possibly sparked such a change? Market potential. Market potential refers to the size of the market Nintendo gets to access with their games. Nintendo has never sold more individual titles of games for a console than the number of units sold for the console itself. For example, Tetris is the best selling game on the Nintendo Gameboy, due in part because it was bundled with the Gameboy, but it sold only 30 million units, to the Gameboy’s 118 million units (Nintendo, 2016). Nintendo’s player base is restricted by the number of people willing to purchase their game consoles. From 1985-2017 Nintendo sold about 735 million game consoles globally (Statista, 2017). This significantly outpaces Sony — Nintendo's closest competitor in console sales —- who have sold roughly 532 million consoles. Nintendo has easily earned their place as a household name in the video game market. However in 2017 alone, 1.5 billion smartphones were sold worldwide, and so the potential user base on smartphones in 2017 alone is almost double what Nintendo’s lifetime of game console user base is. Coupled with the fact that in 2018 the mobile games market made up 51% of the total revenue in the games industry (Wijman, 2018), it makes economic sense why Nintendo would move towards mobile games with their world renowned IP.

  However, console games and mobile games traditionally have used very different market strategies. The massive revenue mobile games rake in tend to be at the expense of the user. Most mobile games are free and make money through incentivizing players to spend small amounts to get through gated content. The World Health Organization in 2013 recognized microtransactions and player incentives in freemium and gacha mobile games as affecting the brain similarly to the way gambling does to addicts (WHO, 2019). Nintendo is a family friendly game company, whose identity has always centered family play and child friendly games. And so Nintendo's move into the mobile games space is not so simple. They must find a way to be economically successful in a market renowned for its predatory and anti consumer practices while staying true to their family friendly values.

  We will explore Nintendo and it’s identity, the mobile games market and its economic practices and models, and then apply our understanding to the various successes and failures Nintendo has had in the mobile games industry from 2016-2018. In doing so we will paint a better picture for Nintendo’s behaviour in the mobile games market going forward, and seek out an understanding for how mobile games will change the face of modern gaming as we know it.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Gacha
  • Nintendo
  • Freemium
  • Mobile Market
  • Video Games
  • Mobile Games

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-m01s-bf68

• License

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