Nintendo is quite the unique video game maker in the industry right now. The company currently competes with the likes of Sony and Microsoft but has had years of experience dealing with others including Sega and Atari. The video games industry has seen a massive shift in two key areas. The first being that video game publishers are pushing for more games to be sold as “live services,” which enables the fans of the game to continue playing long after a solo story campaign has ended. Another area has been the introduction of in-app purchases, but Nintendo is asking its mobile gaming partners to pull back on pushing microtransactions so hard.
Nintendo has been in the video game industry for decades. Not only do they create their own consoles, but they also make 1st-party titles while also publishing mobile games of their 1st-party properties. But Nintendo has always done things differently. When game publishers like EA or Ubisoft start to see a slowdown in sales the companies end up doing massive layoffs. Nintendo, on the other hand, has actually had multiple executives take a pay cut due to weak hardware sales (such as the Wii U).
The company has been getting into the mobile space as of late, which is not normal for them. They have had some major successes while also dealing with some projects that didn’t meet expectations. Still, instead of following the industry trends, the Japanese video games maker has come out and told its mobile gaming partners to tone down the microtransactions in their games. For comparison, Activision Blizzard is seeing over half of its revenue coming from microtransactions, and games like Epic’s Fortnite is making hundreds of millions in revenue each month right now.
Sadly, these microtransaction methods tend to pray on the weak and exploit people of all ages and Nintendo doesn’t want to be seen in the same light. The company partners with mobile game developers such as DeNA Co, but they are telling them to not integrate microtransactions as deeply and in the same fashion as other companies have. Instead, they have set themselves with a modest goal of ¥100 billion ($895 million) in annual revenue and they are happy with obtaining this goal in a fair and balanced way.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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