4 ms·

Why can't a company just do what makes them money already? Why do they have to "admit" that X is "too big to ignore"? Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile

Why can't a company just do what makes them money already? Why do they have to "admit" that X is "too big to ignore"? Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch which is just a return to their bread and butter (albeit with a physically mobile twist), I wonder how much of the "pivots" are driven by over eager MBA new grads who are just chasing headlines from equally delusional gaming media writers, and these two classes somehow feedback into each other, leading to ill ventures by companies that waste money and time eventually.

colinmhayes 4y ago
They are. But their job is to make as much money as they can, not to be content with the amount they’re making now.
hnuser52395 4y ago
Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search). For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing. If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities. Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand. Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Or you end up like Nintendo, who isn't going anywhere any time soon. The problem for Kodak and Dropbox is that they made easily replicated products; whereas every great video game is unique in its own right.
- dasil003 4y ago
  Yeah, well I wouldn't have canceled by Dropbox subscription if they hadn't been so eager to turn it into some broad all-encompassing enterprise app. I get that they have an audience, and the stakeholders have every inventive to try to leverage that attention into perpetual growth to stroke their own egos (and satisfy Wall Street), but this is why we can't have nice things. Dropbox was plenty big enough to just be really good at file syncing in a platform agnostic way, this was literally better than Apple (despite Steve Jobs arrogant prognostication about "that's not a company that's a feature"), Microsoft or Google can ever achieve, because they always have the VP over their head making sure it serves their larger world-dominance agenda. This is the same reason Twitter had to measure itself against Facebook instead of recognizing that it had unique value as a protocol which Facebook never could have achieved regardless of DAUs or ad revenue numbers. The fact that "market rate" for software engineers is established by advertising/big data monopolies and everything of slightly lesser scale is deemed a failure is one of the saddest realities of our modern economy. The wonders we could have if the Berkeley tech hippies vision has been 20% closer to reality are truly astounding. As software engineers we live with an embarrassment of financial opportunity, juxtaposed against a dearth of technological vision and value delivered to the people.
acover 4y ago
What's profitable today isn't typically profitable in the future. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P500 is 18 years. The companies that survive long term often reinvent themselves repeatedly. https://www.scrum.org/resources/how-predict-lifespan-company-one-simple-measure https://www.scrum.org/resources/how-predict-lifespan-company...
dgunay 4y ago
They may not have made as much as the Switch + its total game sales, but as individual games Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokemon Go have done pretty darn well (hundreds of millions of USD in microtransactions each). https://sensortower.com/blog/nintendo-revenue-one-billion https://sensortower.com/blog/nintendo-revenue-one-billion Granted, I would not personally consider them amazing works of art as games but they are financially bringing in a good amount of profit for Nintendo.
AlexandrB 4y ago
That narrative about Nintendo's forays into mobile misses Fire Emblem Heroes which is a cash cow that has generated $1B[1] so far and Pokemon Go. Unfortunately, I think we'll see more mobile titles from Nintendo in the future. [1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/fire-emblem-heroes-has-generated-nearly-usd1-billion-in-revenue-after-five-years https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/fire-emblem-heroes...
wilsonnb3 4y ago
> Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch They made almost 10 billion in revenue between Pokémon go, Mario kart tour, animal crossing pocket camp, and fire emblem heroes. Hardly a doomed venture.
Ferret7446 4y ago
You may not be aware of just how much money the mobile market is worth. Nintendo's entire annual revenue for recent years is around 12-15 billion. The single mobile game Genshin Impact made 2 billion in one year. Tencent, which owns a lot of mobile games, has an annual revenue of around 30 billion. Also remember that this is revenue, not profit. Would you work 40 hours a week for $100k or 5 hours a week for $200k?
- noobermin 4y ago
  And bill gates is worth more then 100B, I should just go and be bill gates #2? The mobile space is swamped with people trying to be the next fate or the next genshin or the next etc etc. Again, as I said in another comment, it's fine to get your feet wet and diversify, but just because one (1) company can make it big with anime girls doesn't mean you will or that it's a sure bet. If anything, the gacha space is way to saturated at this point and the whales by their nature of being whales, there just aren't that many to go around. My argument really isn't Sony should ignore mobile but their small footprint isn't the crime for shareholders that game media people like OP make it out to be.

colinmhayes 4y ago

They are. But their job is to make as much money as they can, not to be content with the amount they’re making now.

hnuser52395 4y ago

Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search). For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing. If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.

noobermin 4y ago
Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities. Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand. Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.
dleslie 4y ago
Or you end up like Nintendo, who isn't going anywhere any time soon. The problem for Kodak and Dropbox is that they made easily replicated products; whereas every great video game is unique in its own right.
dasil003 4y ago
Yeah, well I wouldn't have canceled by Dropbox subscription if they hadn't been so eager to turn it into some broad all-encompassing enterprise app. I get that they have an audience, and the stakeholders have every inventive to try to leverage that attention into perpetual growth to stroke their own egos (and satisfy Wall Street), but this is why we can't have nice things. Dropbox was plenty big enough to just be really good at file syncing in a platform agnostic way, this was literally better than Apple (despite Steve Jobs arrogant prognostication about "that's not a company that's a feature"), Microsoft or Google can ever achieve, because they always have the VP over their head making sure it serves their larger world-dominance agenda. This is the same reason Twitter had to measure itself against Facebook instead of recognizing that it had unique value as a protocol which Facebook never could have achieved regardless of DAUs or ad revenue numbers. The fact that "market rate" for software engineers is established by advertising/big data monopolies and everything of slightly lesser scale is deemed a failure is one of the saddest realities of our modern economy. The wonders we could have if the Berkeley tech hippies vision has been 20% closer to reality are truly astounding. As software engineers we live with an embarrassment of financial opportunity, juxtaposed against a dearth of technological vision and value delivered to the people.

acover 4y ago

What's profitable today isn't typically profitable in the future. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P500 is 18 years. The companies that survive long term often reinvent themselves repeatedly. https://www.scrum.org/resources/how-predict-lifespan-company-one-simple-measure https://www.scrum.org/resources/how-predict-lifespan-company...

dgunay 4y ago

They may not have made as much as the Switch + its total game sales, but as individual games Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokemon Go have done pretty darn well (hundreds of millions of USD in microtransactions each). https://sensortower.com/blog/nintendo-revenue-one-billion https://sensortower.com/blog/nintendo-revenue-one-billion Granted, I would not personally consider them amazing works of art as games but they are financially bringing in a good amount of profit for Nintendo.

AlexandrB 4y ago

That narrative about Nintendo's forays into mobile misses Fire Emblem Heroes which is a cash cow that has generated $1B[1] so far and Pokemon Go. Unfortunately, I think we'll see more mobile titles from Nintendo in the future. [1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/fire-emblem-heroes-has-generated-nearly-usd1-billion-in-revenue-after-five-years https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/fire-emblem-heroes...

wilsonnb3 4y ago

> Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch They made almost 10 billion in revenue between Pokémon go, Mario kart tour, animal crossing pocket camp, and fire emblem heroes. Hardly a doomed venture.

Ferret7446 4y ago

You may not be aware of just how much money the mobile market is worth. Nintendo's entire annual revenue for recent years is around 12-15 billion. The single mobile game Genshin Impact made 2 billion in one year. Tencent, which owns a lot of mobile games, has an annual revenue of around 30 billion. Also remember that this is revenue, not profit. Would you work 40 hours a week for $100k or 5 hours a week for $200k?

noobermin 4y ago
And bill gates is worth more then 100B, I should just go and be bill gates #2? The mobile space is swamped with people trying to be the next fate or the next genshin or the next etc etc. Again, as I said in another comment, it's fine to get your feet wet and diversify, but just because one (1) company can make it big with anime girls doesn't mean you will or that it's a sure bet. If anything, the gacha space is way to saturated at this point and the whales by their nature of being whales, there just aren't that many to go around. My argument really isn't Sony should ignore mobile but their small footprint isn't the crime for shareholders that game media people like OP make it out to be.