Nintendo's former PR manager Krysta Yang has revealed on the Kit and Krysta Podcast that the rise of mobile gaming is the only time she saw Nintendo show genuine fear.
While the Nintendo Switch is just a couple million sales away from being the most successful piece of hardware Nintendo ever released (it already is when it comes to software sales), it also marked the end of the handheld era as we once knew it. Introducing the hybrid console to the world meant there really was no going back now that we can play massive adventures like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 on the bus (or the toilet, if you're feeling really adventurous).
Kit Ellis, Nintendo of America's former director of social media marketing and original content, and Yang, NOA's former senior manager of creator relations and original content, had former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida as a guest on their podcast.
During the episode, they speak about both companies' history with handheld consoles, and the head-to-head between the PSP and the DS. Yoshida called this era the "one happy generation of portable gaming" due to the rise of smartphones that took out existing markets like portable music players, digital cameras, portable internet devices, and had a go at portable gaming.
In response to this, Yang reveals that the "rise of mobile" was "the one time when we were within the company where we saw genuine fear from the executives at Nintendo." She cites data that children were having their first experience with gaming on phones instead of consoles, and recounts a story where "someone shared this video of this little kid, like three years old, playing games on an iPad, and you saw everyone's face in that meeting was like, 'it's over for us, this is the end of the handheld market.'"
Obviously, the pivot to the Switch gave handhelds a new lease of life due to the console-like experience you can get with them now. But for how dominant Nintendo has always been in the handheld scene, it's interesting to hear there was a genuine fear of being usurped.
