Social gaming, and Facebook in particular, were hot topics at Game Developers Conference last week. As Ashley Davis said after attending a social gaming presentation, there were a lot of people getting involved in Facebook gaming that you wouldn’t expect to see in that arena.
Given Nintendo’s own admittance that they make “great content for more casual players”, you’d think that they WOULD be a company considering expanding to Facebook. In an interview with Industry Gamers, Reggie does, in fact, admit that he’s intrigued by the social gaming space, and that he finds micro-transactions to be ‘very interesting’, but he says Nintendo has no interest in putting their franchises on Facebook. The problem Nintendo has with putting games on Facebook is that Nintendo doesn’t own Facebook.
It’s an interesting problem for a first party developer — Nintendo would almost assuredly do extremely well on Facebook, but as the maker of both a console and a handheld device, they also have to give people incentives to buy their hardware. If people can access their games on another ‘platform’, they might not bother to buy the next Wii or DS.
What do you think? Would it be more profitable overall for Nintendo to expand out to Facebook, or are they doing the right thing (businesswise, at least) by sticking with their own hardware. What about the concept of Facebook as a gaming platform? I have to admit I’d never thought of it that way before, but given how popular casual gaming has become there, I may have to rethink my definition of platform.
Nintendo Has ‘Absolutely No Interest’ in Facebook Gaming [Industry Gamers via The Escapist]
