Apple used to be the underdog everyone loved. Once they became big enough they became the object of their own hate, Big Brother. If anyone has seen the documentary ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley‘ where the famous Steve Jobs Freakout can be seen will know Apple once considered itself a champion against large corporations.
Recently however Apple has been locking people into it’s own technologies. It’s been closing things up and forcing its users to adopt proprietary standards which require paid licensing. It has also been making new devices which prohibit users from installing software from anyone other than Apple (unless you jailbreak and void your warranty, and brick your device with updates).
Apple carelessly stepped foot on another front, the video gaming market with it’s iPhone device. They also stepped on the wrong video game segment – the mobile market. Nintendo has since declared war on Apple as can be seen in a recent press report.
Nintendo is preparing to unleash the full force of its development and marketing artillery against Apple after profits tumbled at the Japanese giant for the first time in six years.
Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, is understood to have told his senior executives recently to regard the battle with Sony as a victory already won and to treat Apple, and its iPhone and iPad devices, as the “enemy of the future” .
Source: Business Week – Rivals are invading its patch, but Nintendo is ready to go to war
As you can see Nintendo doesn’t fuck around. It kicks ass and takes names. Here is a list of competitors that Nintendo has destroyed in the mobile gaming market.
- Atari Lynx
- TurboExpress (Portable TurboGrafx)
- Bitcorp Gamate
- Sega (Sega Gear, Sega Nomad)
- Watara Supervision
- Hartung Game Master
- Tiger Electronics Game.com
- Neo Geo Pocket & Neo Geo Pocket Color
- Bandai WonderSwan & WonderSwan Color
- Gamepark 32
- Nokia N-Gage
- Tapwave Zodiak 1 & 2
- Game King
- Playstation Portable (despite people buying more units due to defects, still has low sales numbers vs DS and it’s proprietary format for movies is dead).
- Gizmondo
- Gamepark Holdings GP2X
It is important to note that Nokia tried what Apple is doing right now on it’s iPhone/iPad for gaming. They were also a major cell phone company delving into gaming. Nintendo beat them into dust without even focusing. Nintendo considers Apple a bigger threat than Sony, which it has declared to have beaten (with it’s DS handhand and the Wii).
I predict that Nintendo will win this war too. Apple will never escape the fragmented smartphone gaming market. They will never get people to drop their vast libraries of games for an iTrap.
