Is Nintendo's expansion to mobile the best shot at getting a new game?

Glowsquid

Mental midget
Diamond City Leader
No joke, this is the first thought I had when hearing of that announcement.

1: Both the previous handheld (D.I.Y) and home console (G&W) installments bombed. Nintendo might not see the series as anymore viable on traditional platforms.

Furthermore, after the first WW launched, Iwata gave it (and Donkey Konga) in an interview as an example of a game that appealed to demographics outside the traditional quote-unquote core audience. Thus, Nintendo may perceive WW as a "casual" franchise, one that would be well suited to gaining converts outside a traditional gaming audienceé

2: The series controls and format are very well suited to mobile platforms. Hell, several popular mobile titles are eerily similar to actual WW microgames.

3:Easy to F2P: Sell microgame packs, sell individual minigames... etc.

So yeah, thoughts?
 
It could work well if nintendo did do that, phones are more popular than 3ds's and wiiu's (at least where i live) although i wouldent want it to be, i kinda like it on nintendo consoles only. But i dunno it could get ware more recognition therefore more popular then nintendo could actually see it as a profitable francise and a good franchise (which it is)
 
It's very likely with almost no real need for any new gimmick. RPGs, rhythm games, and puzzle games usually come to mind too.
 
I'm not sure. On the one hand, WarioWare is literally the perfect Nintendo game for smartphones. Even the art style is kind of mobile like sometimes, and the gameplay is extremely easy to adapt (see WarioWare Touched and DIY for example).

The increased popularity of the series could be a net positive as well. On the other hand... I'm not sure I want to see this. Something just bugs me about Nintendo made mobile games, and even more so the thought of the Wario series becoming seen as a smartphone app/overly casual series.
 
WarioWare would be perfect for mobile, They could even just recycle games from twisted and toucnhed and have a diy option, it could be one of the best warioware games. They also could make fun of microtransactions and freemium games as long as it isn't one, oh god i hope it isn't.
 
Oh yeah, ware is considred casual? Yeah i could see it as casual at first but once you get past level 60…….…

That type of comment can also be made about popular "casual" games like Popcap's stuff, Flappy Bird... In truth, very few popular games that aren't entirely propped up by predatory bussiness models (ex: Farmville) stay 100% easy and mindless.
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Oh yeah, there's another factor I didn't think of: Development size!

The original WW was entirely developed by Nintendo R&D1, and the rest of the series was co-developed with Intelligent Systems - Mega Party Games because it was made on an enormemously rushed schedule, and the rest because R&D1 was heavily downsized after its reorganization as SPD 1. InSys used to operate in the same building as SPD 1, but this changed in 2014, which would've been another spanner in the works... but on mobile, this would not be so bad. Since the "Game as services" model is proportionally more accepted in the mobile marketplace, it would be easy to launch an hypothetical WarioWare: Phoned! with less microgames than a traditional WW and then periodically update it with new microgame packs.

Plus, you know how the original game was eerily prescient of the mobile boom and how Game & Wario's viral marketing made fun of crowdfunding? Well, what if WarioWare: Phoned! had its plot around making fun of the F2P model, race to the bottom pricing and all that savory stuff?
 
I think WarioWare would do really good on mobile. As long as it's featured on the Appstore homepage, it would probably get very high sales. Yes, I said sales. I really hope this would be a paid game, instead of free-but-not-fun-unless-you-exchange-hundreds-of-dollars-to-in-game-money.
 
I think that Warioware could do very well on mobile. So well that Nintendo might just never make another Wario Land game ever again unfortunately.
 
I really hope this would be a paid game, instead of free-but-not-fun-unless-you-exchange-hundreds-of-dollars-to-in-game-money.

Imo it should be a free game with 10 characters/levels and you can buy extra characters/levels with real money. 1 dollar/euros/yen/moneys for 2 packs or 10 dollars/euros/yen/moneys for all characters/levels that are already available for purchase and all of the characters/levels that are going to be made later on.
 
I think that Warioware could do very well on mobile. So well that Nintendo might just never make another Wario Land game ever again unfortunately.

That's a worry, although I also suspect Wario Land could theoretically be made a mobile game series as well. I'd absolutely hate it if that happened, but with the focus on coin collecting and the 'race back to the start' sections, I suspect that could actually happen at some point.
 
Further compouding this, a very succesful game on the Android store is an obvious ripoff of WarioWare Touched. I have no doubt a mobile warioware would do well with some front page exposure.

Deal is, though, would Nintendo and Dena jump into mobile with a C-tier franchise, no matter how well suited to the format it is, or produce some quick and crappy Mario/Zelda spinoffs for the name recognition... Gah.
 
Further compouding this, a very succesful game on the Android store is an obvious ripoff of WarioWare Touched. I have no doubt a mobile warioware would do well with some front page exposure.

Deal is, though, would Nintendo and Dena jump into mobile with a C-tier franchise, no matter how well suited to the format it is, or produce some quick and crappy Mario/Zelda spinoffs for the name recognition... Gah.

There's a flip side there.

Would Nintendo risk the Mario and Zelda IPs on crappy games just for a quick buck?

Wario might be a less risky series to use there, since if it's done badly, pretty much no one but us die hard fans will care (and you can see this from Master of Disguise and WarioWare Snapped in general). If it catches on, then hey, that's good for them too.

On the other hand... Zelda's fanbase would practically murder them if the Zelda series got another bunch of CD-i level disasters on the app store. And if Mario stops being synonymous with 'quality' for many people... well, game over Nintendo. A bad mobile game could hurt it's reputation in the same way bad games hurt Sonic the Hedgehog.
 
Imo it should be a free game with 10 characters/levels and you can buy extra characters/levels with real money. 1 dollar/euros/yen/moneys for 2 packs or 10 dollars/euros/yen/moneys for all characters/levels that are already available for purchase and all of the characters/levels that are going to be made later on.
I agree, I would like that too. The only thing I'd be against is something like: you can play all the micro game packs for free, but if you lose, you use up one of your hearts, and you only get 3 hearts a day. To refill hearts, you'd need to either pay or post about the game on your Facebook. That sort of things is what I wouldn't like.
I'd be fine with your idea, though.
 
Deal is, though, would Nintendo and Dena jump into mobile with a C-tier franchise, no matter how well suited to the format it is, or produce some quick and crappy Mario/Zelda spinoffs for the name recognition... Gah.

Nintendo blaberred some more about their mobile plans for today's investor meeting and they said this:

As we confirmed on March 17, all of our IP can be considered for a smart device game. On the other hand, since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game. Also, if we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result. If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.

Hmm...
 
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