Nintendo will conduct a major restructuring of its development teams in February, the Nikkei newspaper reported today: The maker of Wii U and Nintendo 3DS will integrate its home console and handheld gaming development teams into a single organization.
"With more people using their smartphones and tablets for entertainment via the Internet, including games and videos, Nintendo aims to come up with next-generation game systems that will turn heads," reported Nikkei, as translated by IGN.
Maybe this story seems a little boring on the surface: So what, some guys are gonna shuffle their desks around and get new managers? But as Nikkei points out, you have to go back nine years to find a structural change on this scale in Nintendo's history. This wasn't a decision to be taken lightly.
So why now? Now that the 3DS and Wii U are on shelves, it's time for Nintendo's engineers to start brainstorming and prototyping what the company's next gaming hardware will be. And by the time Nintendo's ready to release it, it's almost inevitable that the lines between "portable" and "home" game consoles will be quite blurred -- or perhaps gone altogether. The idea of having one division that works on portable game hardware and another one that makes machines for the home, and limited interaction between those two machines, will not make sense in the near future. It doesn't even make that much sense now.
If you own a smartphone and a tablet, you know that there are roughly three types of games: ones you play on your phone, ones you play on your tablet, and ones you play across both devices. We use the same App Store for all of those, and sometimes we play a game on iPhone during the day and pick it up on iPad in the evening. Even though iPad is portable, it's more likely to be played in the home for longer gameplay sessions. One recent study showed that tablet activity spiked in the evenings, versus smartphones which were used all day. And yet something like iPad would be more likely to be considered a portable device than a home game console, if we had to assign it to one category.
The very nature of the devices that people use to play games in the home and outside it are changing, becoming more similar in form factor, sharing software. The easy, lazy solution is to say that Nintendo should make iPhone games, or develop a smartphone, or a tablet. But this would make it a follower, and just one of many players in a crowded market. Nintendo's decades of innovative, out-of-left-field products indicate that it can create an entirely new gaming experience that is compelling enough to keep Nintendo popular even in a world where smartphone, tablet and PC gaming grows stronger.
But that gaming experience, whatever it ends up being, won't be something that can be easily pigeonholed into the "portable" or "console" categories.
In the short term, it's certainly possible that we will see some integration of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS come out of this mixing of the two teams. Right now, Nintendo 3DS is selling very well in Japan while Wii U is having a tougher time getting started. Combining the two distinct products into a more cohesive experience might help Wii U play off the greater success of its little brother.
However, Nintendo wouldn't make such a big move for short-term gains. It has its eye on a few years from now, when it won't just be a good idea to have a single development team working on integrated game playing devices -- it'll be mandatory.
