Macquarie Capital Securities Analyst David Gibson, quoted in this Bloomberg article:
“As users build their Pokemon inventory, spending money becomes needed to store, train, hatch, and battle,” he writes. Gibson pointed out that the most popular Pokemon GO item in Australia is currently $0.99 worth of in-game currency meaning the game’s App Store ranking “is being driven not by big spenders but by a large number of users.”
And:
“We presume that out of every 100 units earned at the App Store, 30 would go to Apple, 30 to [software developer] Niantic, 30 to Pokemon and 10 to Nintendo,” writes Gibson. “Hence, we don’t think Nintendo will earn much directly from the game. However, Nintendo will earn income from its equity-accounted income of owning 33 percent of Pokemon Company.”
Not to mention the boost to Nintendo’s stock price. This is a huge win for Nintendo and proof that they can make money bringing their intellectual property to smartphones. Seems logical to me that we will see a massively multiplayer Zelda port to iOS at some point in the future.
Yeah right. Playing Zelda without a proper gamepad.
Chances of a proper Zelda or Mario game on mobile is almost zero.
If you think about it, Pokemon Go is barely even a game.
Most people are “playing” it for nostalgic reasons, most people won’t even download it if not for the pokemons.
This more or less sums up my thoughts on the Nintendo on mobile financial hype right now:
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2016/07/13/pokemon_go/
He uses Splatoon as an example (cause it’s achieving its numbers on a relatively tiny user base on a system considered a failure), but for a slightly more direct comparison there’s the last two (or four) Pokemon releases:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/26/pokemon-omega-ruby-and-alpha-sapphire-sell-3-million-in-three-days
Go is estimated to be doing $1.6M/day, but Nintendo isn’t a stranger to making over $100M in a few days. Not that Go can’t make a boatload, but until it shows it can sustain its numbers its biggest impact is in mindshare, which I think was the biggest reason they needed to get on mobile in the first place. Their biggest long term risk is if they become irrelevant to future generations.
Another big thing is potential to recapture the Wii audience so to speak, the non traditional gamers. It kinda sounds like Go might be doing that, I’ve been hearing of people’s parents getting into it for example.
As for Zelda, I don’t know if they’d ever go MMO with the IP. They’ve done multiplayer and online (Four Swords, Triforce Heroes)…but doing something “massively” would be a huge leap. But they have done a mostly touch screen only Zelda with Phantom Hourglass, it was pretty good (although I’ve heard less flattering things about Spirit Tracks, but that had nothing to do with the controls afaik).