Should Nintendo Be Worried?

If you've been keeping up with news lately and you're in tune with gaming financial reports then you know that at the moment Nintendo isn't doing too well this year. Yes this is the same Nintendo that just a few short years ago we were all joking about saying that the Wii and DS were basically printing money for them. And to be fair Nintendo was riding quite high on the success of both machines. The Wii made motion control in gaming a hot commodity and opened up gaming to a lot of people who otherwise would not have been interested in it. Meanwhile the DS was still performing quite well, basically making up a majority of the handheld gaming market as Sony's PSP could just never find a foothold.

Gamers still love you, Link.

Nintendo has always faced certain challenges though. While their in house, first party developed titles are always big sellers(Mario, the Legend of Zelda, etc.); they never really have the support they need from third party developers. The Wii was no different. This is why the system has seen ports of major titles only rarely. When these ports do show up on the system they are vastly inferior to their 360/PS3 counterparts. With Sony and Microsoft now bridging the motion gaming gap with the Move and Kinect respectively, Nintendo no longer had the motion gaming gimmick as their stand out feature. When you take that away, you're left with a less than stellar gaming library mostly made up of shovel ware and ill received ports of popular games. 

Naturally Nintendo combats their competition through innovation. This year saw the release of their 3-D capable handheld, the 3DS, along with the announcement of their next console, the Wii-U. Normally Nintendo banks on the sales of their handhelds and for good reason. Usually new iterations of the DS fly right off the shelves but sales of the 3DS have been lagging. With the rise of gaming on smartphones, Nintendo is actually facing competition from an unlikely source. Quite frankly it's more conventional to have your little time wasters and mobile gaming in an all in one device rather than a dedicated handheld. And so iOS and Android devices are now cutting into Nintendo's mobile gaming market share.