Nintendo, the mobile gaming pioneer, now sees Apple as the immediate threat to its future, not Microsoft. “Do I think that in the near term [Apple] can hurt us more than Microsoft? Absolutely,” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime tells an interviewer.
September was a good month for Apple’s push into mobile gaming. Alongside its claim that the Cupertino, Calif. company held 50 percent of the portable gaming segment, and that the iPod touch was the No. 1 gaming device, Apple opened a gaming center for its lucrative App Store. That, along with a survey finding iOS gamers nearly outnumber Nintendo fans is enough to explain why the DS maker sees Apple as the “enemy of the future.”
“Recent growth in the sales figures of the iPod touch could be an indication that people are increasingly seeing Apple’s devices as a game platform,” said Peter Warman, Managing Director of NewZoo, the company which conducted the survey.
The iPod touch may not be the end of Nintendo’s (or Sony’s) worries, though. Nearly three-quarters of iPad owners spend more than $10 per month on games, versus over half of Nintendo D or PSP users, the survey also found.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
