Pokémon Go proves Nintendo must conquer the smartphone

Nintendo has been too stubborn. Their consoles changed the way we played decades ago, but that era has passed away and the latest hardware from this legendary maker has proven one thing other makers have failed to realize: people doesn’t want another device to do what they can do on their smartphones.

It has happened with music players, with cameras and it’s happening with games. Nintendo’s attitude has been a conflicting one: not devoting themselves to the mobile world has been a disappointment for their fans.

They just need a tiny show of affection to follow the firm wherever they want, and Pokémon Go lately (and the weirdly original Miitomo) have shown how true this is:

Shares in Japan’s Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.T) soared again on Monday, bringing market-value gains to $7.5 billion in just two days as investors cheered the runaway success of Pokemon GO – its first long-awaited venture in mobile gaming.

Nintendo, it’s ok to continue pushing on the console world. The future, though, seems to be in the smartphone. Accept it and conquer this world now that you’ve got the chance.

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish. The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.