John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Nintendo More Scared of Apple Than of Microsoft

Which company is the greater threat to Nintendo’s gaming business–Apple or Microsoft? According to Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, it’s Apple–at least in the short term. “Do I think that in the near term [Apple] can hurt us more than Microsoft?” Fils-Aime said to Forbes. “Absolutely.”

And it appears Apple already is. According to some statistics trotted out at its annual September music event, Apple’s developed quite a hold on the portable gaming market. The company claims a 50 percent share of the portable gaming market and says the iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined. And that hold will only strengthen with the recent launch of Apple’s Game Center–a new interactive gaming service included in iPhone OS 4–and the proliferation of cheap and increasingly more sophisticated games for the platform (seen Epic Citadel, yet?).

It’s said that Nintendo views Apple as the “enemy of the future.” And it clearly is that. But it’s also very much an enemy of the present and the recent past as well. As Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing, said over a year ago: “People are starting to see what a great gaming device [the iPod touch is]. When you think about the companies that came before us…when you played those other systems, they seemed so cool, but now when you look at them, they don’t stack up against the iPod touch….No Multi-Touch user experience, Games are expensive, No App Store, No iPod, Expensive Games and uncomfortable retail buying experiences.”

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald