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Nintendo (and other game hardware manufacturers) do not like to have a situation where their titles can appear on other platforms.

Take for instance Call of Duty. If you want the highest performance, you would obviously go the PC route to buy it, considering that Activision/Infinity Ward can make their game look much better with a larger range of specs. The issue becomes now for the console maker (whose console will not last even 2 years before being outdated, and is usually outdated at launch) to secure a platform release. This is why Call of Duty and other multi-platform releases rarely come to low-end consoles such as the Wii and Nintendo DS/3DS, they don’t want to program and optimize for a lower-end product.

To circumvent this, Nintendo and others make sure they can lock in at least 1st party releases to their hardware, such as Nintendo with Super Mario/Pokemon and Microsoft with Halo. Even Microsoft has yet to allow Halo 3 to be released for PC, as they know the drop in console sales isn’t worth it. By switching to Android, Nintendo would have to deal with not only deal with the existing competition that is the PSVita today, but also the plethora of Android manufacturers such as Samsung, Archos, HTC, LG, Motorola, etc. They would rapidly overtake Nintendo’s specs and have their own systems playing their titles better than they can themselves.

Sony has tried licensing their games and game platform, but it’s off to a very unclear start with almost nonexistent support on the more popular phones, as they know they can’t stifle their own franchise by outsourcing the hardware.

27 days ago on Should Nintendo Go Android?

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Whether or not Glass (and other wearable tech will succeed in the future) is entirely dependent on
what people do with it. The current view (and my view as well) is that Glass is nothing more than simply a webcam attached to a small display tethered to the internet. What most fail to realize is that most of our technological triumphs were the result of simple setups that were used creatively.

Take for example the Internet. In the most basic sense, it’s just a number of files hosted on various computers that you can access and interact with. Even so, the benefits of a hyper-connected society has allowed us to advance exponentially. The basic Internet didn’t even allow for large pictures, complex interactive sites, or any dynamic content. Still, it was the object of people’s interest and therefore became the essential part of our life it is today.

The iPhone was like this as well. When it was introduced, it was one of the first more popularized capacitive touch screen phones available, and also introduced a plethora of sensors not found on all phones (accelerometer, etc,). I remember how amazed I was that a touchscreen could be anything more than resistive (I came from a Palm Pilot and a Nintendo DS), and while I didn’t understand the need for orientation sensors, game developers embraced them. Also newly introduced was a popular application store that offered decently priced applications (unlike the unfiltered and disorganized WindowsMobile “store” or the .jar files for other phones) and introduced. for the first time that phones could do more than just calling and texting.

The list continues, with more recent technology being the Wii, Kinect, and (after picking up the trend) PlayStation Move. These simple sensors and hardware are not the cause of the advancement of technology, its what people do with them that makes them have the impact they do today.

There have been some flops (PlayStation Eye, Google Wave, etc.) but I strongly believe that the success of Glass won’t be based on what sensors it has or how “futuristic” its marketed as, but simply what people do with it. They have the chance to make it something more than just a small webcam, and into something of a “Real Life HUD” for connecting the real world to the Internet, one retina at a time.

tl;dr It depends on how developers advance the project Google’s initiated

27 days ago on I'm not convinced Google Glass will succeed 1 recommend