The Homa Files

Excerpted from Washington Post, “Nintendo, Biting Back at iTunes”, by Mike Musgrove, April 5, 2009

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Open up the latest portable game gadget from Nintendo, the DSi, and you’ll be able to log onto a new online store carrying a small catalogue of software titles. If you see one that grabs your interest, you can buy and download it to your device on the spot, with prices starting at $2.

This type of purchase probably doesn’t seem exotic any more, thanks largely to Apple. Apple’s App Store, which offers software for its iPhone and iPod Touch, has had 800 million downloads since it opened last summer. Now, other mobile gadgets like Nintendo’s DSi are quickly creating their own retail outlets on the Web.

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Some see Apple’s online software store as having hit close to home for Nintendo, which has long dominated the mobile gaming market. The most popular category in Apple’s software store, after all, is entertainment-related software.

DSiWare is “basically a direct response to iTunes . . . Apple definitely came up and bit these guys on the rear end, and this is Nintendo striking back.”

In terms of downloadable content, Apple’s store offers almost 7,000 games. Nintendo’s DSi store launches today with five titles, not including a free Web browser that DSi users can download to their device.

Nintendo says the company has adopted a different strategy than the competition. Just about anybody who pays a fee and passes an inspection by Apple reviewers can sell his software on the iTunes store, but that’s not how Nintendo has approached this market. The roster of titles Nintendo approves for sale on the DSi store will be “more like the content you’ll find at a film festival”, as opposed to its competitors’ catalogues, which are “more akin to YouTube.”

Edit by DAF

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Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/04/AR2009040400098_pf.html 

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