Nintendo on quality vs. quantity for 3DS eShop vs. App Store, unique ideas
No matter how much it may sell, analysts will still call gloom and doom upon the 3DS. At the end of the day, these people feel that the portable can’t compete with mobile devices.
iOS is often one platform often brought up in 3DS comparisons. Both are portable. Both offer an array of digital content. But whereas tons of games may be available on the App Store, Nintendo of America’s sales VP Scott Moffitt sees the 3DS eShop as an area of higher-quality.
“With software, as with most things, there’s a distinct difference between quantity and quality. The website 148apps.biz recently calculated that there are currently 139,000 different games actively available on the [Apple] app store. One hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Huge number. That number is way too big to wrap your head around, so I try to think about it this way. If I wanted to spend just fifteen minutes sampling each one of those games, I’d be at it non-stop for four years. That’s a ton of caffeine. Obviously there are good games available for mobile platforms. But the point is, the Nintendo 3DS has a record of quality that’s hard to challenge.”
Moffitt added: “Nowhere else in portable gaming is high quality found so frequently.”
Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen weighed in on Moffitt’s statistics, who commented on the interactivity of 3DS eShop titles, how it would be difficult to offer similar control precision on mobile devices, and made note of how Nintendo is pushing unique ideas.
“There’s a few things. One is, what is the interactive experience? The stuff you’re seeing on the 3DS eShop, it’s all kind of… unique ideas. Anything from Sakura Samurai, which is a game I’m a huge fan of that came out over a year ago on the eShop, and is kind of one of those examples of some of the early unique content from independent developers to something like Dillon’s Rolling Western, or Mario & Donkey Kong. And in each of those games, they each have a tremendous amount of depth, just in terms of the volume of gameplay, but they all also have really great precision controls that are really hard to do on other mobile devices. But really, the content that we’re looking at, it’s all about, ‘what are the unique ideas that really leverage the hardware?’ And that, to me, is why you would want to come and play games on the 3DS. They’re gonna be unique experiences, they’re gonna be things you can’t play elsewhere, and [they’re] gonna have a whole lot of content.”
