Does Nintendo Need An Appstore? [Industry]

I’m sure the majority of you DSi owners are sitting there thinking “Nintendo does have an Appstore… The Dsi Ware & Wii Ware?” Well that may be true but your looking at the smaller picture. Nintendo hasn’t exactly been the leader in the online space with the digital downloads and it doesn’t look like theirs going to have any sudden change either. Apples Appstore is huge with so much variety of applications its hard to say “There’s not an app for that” As majority of us will know Nintendo’s digital download threat is the Appstore.

How I myself understands why the Appstore is so popular is because well, The Appstore isn’t targeted at a specific market in general other than the avid user. The Appstore is building up every day due to the availability of being able to create an application in hours. The resources are already there for designers and publishes to create games more easier and quicker compared to the Wii Ware/ DSi Ware store. 

How Nintendo could provide their own would be to make another store called the “App Channel.” As you would of guessed it Nintendo would get poked a bit by apple but hey! its where the moneys at.

Apples service for designers and developers to create such applications is amazing. We have already seen major company’s following in the independent developers foot steps with the tools to create game ports of their titles. Even though the tools don’t just specify for games only but other applications like social networking, music, entertainment etc. 
Even though the SDK Kit carry’s a price tag that is the only flaw to apples application money making scheme.

With Nintendo it would be hard on how Nintendo would provide a designing Kit to the market due to the fact they are probably to worried of to many fake Mario games would be produced and developed. This is where Nintendo stand strong on knowing who develops their titles for their Wii Ware and DSi Ware. If people decided to no longer develop on the Appstore then the Appstore would be nothing, even though this wouldn’t be the case but it would still be an option.

In a way Nintendo has become better off in knowing what is being created for their gamers and users, we have all seen our fair share of ridiculously bad applications which makes you wonder why they are on the store.  It’s hard to say that the DS’s touch screen stands apart from the iPhone/iTouch/iPad’s screens. The only difference is obviously the fact of duel screens. Both the DS and iPhone both have built in microphones and online capabilities. It would be hard for Nintendo to market any applications to compete against apples touch screen team, but the Wii would still stand strong. Application developers could go crazy in developing for the Wii due to having the ability of motion sensing. It wouldn’t be good however if a developer didn’t want to use motion controls and it would just be like any other WiiWare title.

Iwata put on his boots and admitted Apple could be a threat in the future, this is due to Nintendo’s upcoming attack the 3Ds with an Appstore rumoured that developers would go pretty crazy for. 

We will have to wait around E3 to see if Iwata and the gang confirm an application type store for the 3DS. It would be nice to see an Appstore. Nintendo would have to definitely keep the star rating system in or something else to keep the rubbish away.

Well… What do you think? leave your comments below.