Engadget Link.

Apparently Sony is getting out of the mobile gaming device market. Sony is not planning on making a sequel to the PS Vita. Shuhei Yoshida believes that smartphones have dampened enthusiasm for gaming handhelds. Personally I believe, as the article echoed, that Sony never really tried with the Vita or their portable systems. Unlike Nintendo they never seemed to fully embrace the system and focused solely on their home consoles. But even Nintendo knows that the mobile market is a huge market otherwise they wouldn’t have started making mobile games themselves. In all honesty I think Sony realized they couldn’t compete with Nintendo and Mobile and dropped out of the race, much like Sega did years ago when it made the Game Gear and couldn’t compete with the regular Gameboy. It is sad that Sony is stopping production of it but will be good to have their resources fully focused on current and possibly next gen consoles.

Polygon Link.

Kickstarter just announced that they are becoming a Public Benefit Corporation. What this entails is that they are still a for-profit company but they are under stricter rules in order to provide good basically it ‘falls somewhere on the spectrum between a corporation and a true non-profit.’ “A benefit corporation has a legal responsibility to perform a social good, to provide a benefit to society,” says Kickstarter’s co-founder and CEO Yancey Strickler. The impacts on Kickstarter Campaigns are negligible, basically anything you could have done before on the site you can do now, but it makes one feel better knowing where the profit is going and that the company has a much more public entity.

This article also touches on the fact that they don’t plan to make some form of equity option to the system as it changes the model they work with:

“I think that an equity-driven model of cultural production results in the same world we’ve been stuck in,” Strickler said, “where if a new idea is asked to justify itself by its potential profitability, I think that restricts the amount of innovation and new ideas that come into the world. To me, that is a world of sequels, of less original content, of people not taking chances because when you’re asking an audience to look at it through the filter of ‘is this a good investment or not’ and I think that’s often a poor fit with the world of art and culture.”

Kotaku Link 1, Kotaku Link 2.

Two articles caught my eye as I was reading Kotaku on Monday both about the restructuring of Nintendo after Satoru Iwata’s death. Tatsumi Kimishima, who is had also been the CEO and Chairman of the Board for Nintendo from 2006 to 2013 where he then became Managing Director of Nintendo Co., LTD, as which Kotaku didn’t mention, he is now the President of Nintendo Co., LTD. It’s a good choice now that I know his background. He’s been with the company for years and was there helping it when it was the most successful with the Wii and worked with Pokemon one of Nintendo’s most successful products. I do feel he has a grasp on how to innovate but also how to make money for the company. It is also interesting how the restructuring of the company went as well, rather than have four distinct groups, into two distinct groups, one specifically for hardware and one specifically for hardware. The restructuring also renamed some senior staff members making them seem more like consultants than as senior staff. Shigeru Miyamoto is now the “Creative fellow” and Genyo Takeda is now the “Technology fellow”. Hopefully these changes will be good for the company and make the Nintendo NX a success rather than the lackluster Wii U.