Frisky Mongoose

In an interview with GamesBeat, Nintendo’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Cammie Dunaway had quite a bit to say when questioned about her thoughts on the competition from Apple’s iPhone App Store.

When questioned on whether or not Apple was a competitor to Nintendo’s handheld strategy, she had this to say:

“As for Apple, it is interesting that for all of the talk of competition from Apple last year, here in the U.S. we had our best year ever, selling 11.2 million units.”

Nintendo does not appear to be afraid of any possible competition stemming from the iPhone App store. The competition would stem from the comparison of pricing and distribution model. With an iPhone, games cost mainly $.99 to $9.99 and can be downloaded from anywhere where there’s a cell phone connection. DS or DSiware games range from $4.99 to $39.99 depending on if it’s a physical game or DSiware game. As Dunaway pointed out, they really have no reason to be afraid when they continue to pull in record sales year after year.

Also in the interview, Dunaway pointed out that Nintendo has no plans to have a Mario application or official page on Facebook for now, stating:

“I think we will continue to save Mario for our own platforms. It’s one of the secret weapons we have. Mario and Zelda are intellectual property that is important to us and will only be seen on Nintendo platforms.”

I suppose she is correct, Nintendo certainly doesn’t need Facebook to promote or sell Mario games as they continue to also have record sales. However, I personally think it would be nice to at least have a fan page where fans can express their thoughts about recent Mario games and share experiences with the games.

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