What Nintendo’s new consoles for emerging markets need to do to really succeed

Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata said today that, moving forward, the company will be developing new consoles from scratch for emerging markets, rather than taking the cheaper alternative of repurposing existing hardware. This is a smart statement from Nintendo, given its struggle in recent years to stay relevant to a market increasingly spoiled by fellow industry giants Sony and Microsoft, but does Nintendo fully understand what its new hardware will need to do to succeed?

It’s more than just creating a cheaper version. To truly redeem itself as a gaming powerhouse for the region, Nintendo needs to go deeper and look at what gamers in Asia really need.

(Or not: Iwata’s letter is further proof that Nintendo has no idea what it is doing)

Using what is already there

Nintendo doesn’t want to delve further into mobile, in spite of its Mario Kart mobile and web companion apps launching later this year. Iwata doesn’t think the company’s 30-year-old console business can simply be transferred to a smartphone model. However, this is probably the best route for Nintendo if it wants to tackle emerging markets in Asia.

Simply put: everyone in Asia has a smartphone. And if they don’t, they’re getting one soon. Tech in Asia reported yesterday that 60 million Myanmar citizens are soon poised to come online “almost overnight”. It would be amiss of Nintendo not to take advantage of this boom in its own backyard simply because it doesn’t believe it can do it.

Many beloved Nintendo franchises like Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda are simplistic games. They don’t need anything beyond the D-pad and four buttons archetypal of a Nintendo console. For god’s sake, Mario just needs to jump and use the fireball. It’s even easier to transplant such straightforward gameplay into a phone.

Sure, the first iterations might be bad, and some newly-innovated mobile versions may not be what Nintendo has in mind, but they aren’t going to be the first bad games Nintendo has put out. And eventually, given the company’s genius (Miyamoto is still going strong), they’re going to get much better.

However, that being said, Nintendo can still focus on its own hardware. It just has to take note of this:

Offline play

Internet connectivity in emerging Asian nations is shit. I’m saying that plainly and saying it again: it’s horrendous. It’s slow and it drops a lot, and is generally disruptive especially if a console requires an always-online connection. Gamers in emerging nations aren’t going to pick up a console that needs an always-online connection because they’re barely going to get any game time out of it; in fact, they’re probably going to end up destroying it in frustration because they can’t play it.