Is Nintendo Smart to Ditch Smartphones?

Contrary to popular belief, Super Mario and Angry Birds are not the same. Last week, Nintendo made it crystal clear that it does not have

to develop for the Apple

iPhone or Google

Android platforms. This news came as a shock to some. “If Nintendo was forward-looking, they'd put content on iOS and Android,” one colleague remarked. He is not alone in that line of thinking. But that belief is flawed for a variety of reasons:

Nintendo hates conformity. Even now, when online gaming and online downloads have proven to be a vital part of the industry, the company refuses to launch a full-fledged app store for the Nintendo Wii or Nintendo 3DS. Instead, the company continues to stand by its inferior eShop and Wii Shop Channel services. eShop is slow, cumbersome, and inefficient. Its updates are a snore, its presentation is a bore, and its download system – where users are defined by their hardware, not by an actual account – is prohibitive to the company's growth. Yet Nintendo, with its stick-in-the-mud behavior, has managed to prevail in the video game industry. It has produced more handheld hits than any other game company in the world, including the newcomers in the iOS realm. Angry Birds may have sold 100 million units, but it did so at $0.99 per download. Nintendo, meanwhile, celebrated 2010 by selling

of Donkey Kong Country Returns, 6.15 million copies of Super Mario Galaxy 2, 6.58 million copies of NEW Super Mario Bros. Wii, and 10.21 million copies of Wii Sports Resort – all at fifty bucks a pop. The differences between a $0.99 iOS game and a $50 Nintendo game are enormous. Consumers are fully aware of this difference. That is why they continue to buy Nintendo games and Nintendo systems. While you will hear reports that the Nintendo 3DS' poor sales are a sign of things to come for traditional game machines, the truth is that the system came to market without a single decent piece of software. Nobody wants to spend $250 on a useless device, and another $40 on games they don't want to play. That is why the Nintendo 3DS is currently failing. Consumers will, however, spend $0.99 on absolute crap. Why? “It's only a buck,” is a common response people give when explaining their iPhone purchases. That's a hard statement to argue with; no one cares about a dollar here and a dollar there. But why would Nintendo wish to downgrade itself to a business model that is based on the whims of bored iPhone or Android users? Why shouldn't the company continue to sell millions of high-end games to consumers with very high expectations? That would be like asking Apple to develop its software for Windows, Window Phone 7, Android, and Linux. Just as Nintendo makes money at every step in the retail space (first you buy Nintendo machines, then you buy Nintendo games, Nintendo controllers, and anything else the company can sell you), Apple profits not by selling consumers one item, but by selling us

. It is in Apple's best interest to ensure that when you want to access iOS, you must do so by using an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or some other Apple-manufactured product. Similarly, it is in Nintendo's best interest to ensure that when we want to play the latest Mario and Zelda games, we buy a Nintendo system.