Neil Young, CEO of Ngmoco recently took centre stage at the Game Developers Conference to issue some rather devastating words to both Sony and Nintendo regarding their forthcoming portable games consoles.
“I think they are hurt; I think they’re clearly hurt. I think PSP is done and the new [NGP] is dead on arrival. It’s really difficult to compete with an app store that has hundreds of thousands of applications and a wide range of options where the average price paid is around $1.20 and there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of free applications that are really high quality. So I just don’t think Sony’s going to be able to compete with that.”
“It’s not a PS3 quality experience… And in terms of getting broad adoption, having great processing power is not necessarily a prerequisite for great adoption in the marketplace. You need a range of things and what I think the iPod Touch and iPhone have been able to do is offer people Swiss army knife type functionality for a device that plays games really well.”
“I think Nintendo will likely be competitive. My personal opinion is that the 3D piece of the puzzle is kind of gimmicky. But Nintendo has great franchises and there are tens of millions of people who want to participate in those franchises, so that always helps.”
- Neil Young, CEO of Ngmoco
