Old Nintendo Workers Talk About Past Mobile Gaming Worries
Nintendo is a big name in the game world now, but years ago, they were really worried by mobile games. People who once worked there said that the bosses were scared about the future of handhelds.
A Meeting Starts Panic
This story is from the "Kit and Krysta Podcast," where ex-Nintendo PR folks Krista Young and Keith Ellis had Shuhei Yoshida, once head of SIE Worldwide Studios, over. Young talked about a time that really scared the Nintendo team.
One time, they saw a video of a small kid playing on an iPad, and everyone at the meeting looked shocked. "It's done for us, the handheld market is dead," they thought.
The Fall of Handhelds
Shuhei Yoshida said that as more people got smartphones, fewer wanted handhelds like Game Boy or PSP.
If you can do everything with one small screen, why carry two?
A Time of Big Competition
Yoshida also talked about when Nintendo and Sony were going head-to-head with handhelds. He gave Nintendo props for sticking with classic controller games and liked remembering the battle between Nintendo DS and PSP. He called it "the best time of handheld gaming."
This peek into the past shows that even big companies get scared when things in the market change.
