2. I suppose not, however it is hardly the same and thus you have to put effort into porting from PC or PSbone/PS360 which is never good when you are the underdog.
3. Damned if you do, damned if you don't huh. As much as I would like online to go away then should I be in Nintendo's position I would be damned if I won't. Also I was not kidding when I said I have made and deployed stuff better than Nintendo has there, I don't know what a team of me (or someone better than me as this web lark is not my idea of a good time) costs but it is probably in the realm of rounding error for a company like Nintendo. I know you will have the legacy and embedded nonsense to deal with and the lack of flexibility that comes with being a big company but we have seen ideas that I would have dismissed as conception go live so eh.
4. Indy is nice. However when we have the likes of Square working with Tri-Ace, EA and Ubisoft doing what they do, Sony and MS playing it how they play it. Equally several of those offer nice things like mocap, servers worth speaking of, orchestras and all that where Nintendo seem to be funding, a basic toolkit (if what is said and the leaked things are anything to go by) and the notion of it being an honour to work with them.
5. Probably best to unpack things then.
I started with a chance to get in on a potential big audience mega cheaply? What with Android in the world?
To be a dev for Sony or MS you need some serious backing, funds or maybe a really good demo. Nintendo do still have an admirable install base but reckon they can either charge like they did back in the day/these last few generations. In times past it has been shown that if you have a built in audience then that is a selling point (see also all those people making facebook games which did well for a while despite not being great games). As Android has the install base, a bigger one even, and the cost of getting on the platform is tiny and maybe even nothing for an awful lot of people (you can use your own phone/tablet and a PC which you already have, once you want to release it is a $25 USD registration fee (
https://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/start.html ).
Beyond that you mentioned Nintendo IP still selling consoles. We could debate how many of those might have been fence sitters or just waiting but I won't, instead I had to wonder if they sold larger numbers as a third party on the other consoles if that would be better still for them. I don't know what the margins are on the Wii U and what relative to that they might lose for being a third party but it is probably not amazing and a full price game for a console you already have (or maybe even the PC) is a far more palatable thing than a whole new one or two game console for a lot of people.
I would agree that Nintendo could do without Android, would like to see it though.
Edit. On the hacking discussion that happened in the meantime. Time was the xbox was a genuinely lovely media player and emulation machine (the wii slightly less so but it was cheap so hey), the GBA and DS were genuinely some of the best handheld devices on the market. To a raspberry pi blows the first lot out of the water and every TV for years has had VGA and/or HDMI just like my graphics card, back when getting stuff onto your TV was really hard. Not to mention the status of TV and film these days for the masses -- I have not watched TV properly for about 13 years at this point and nowadays with the streaming services there are many less technically inclined than I which do not do over the air/be here at this time to watch TV.
I like hacking things for the sake of hacking things but the incentive that you will end
Source (main interview with Reggie himself)
