What The Friday: Pokemon on iOS?
…the Pokemon team plans to release an official iOS app in Japan. The app will be called Pokemon Say Tap? BW, and rather than a full Pokemon game, the app will be a rhythm title, where Pokemon cards appear on the screen and you have to tap them to a certain beat.
Reports TUAW. It should be noted that Pokemon Say Tap? BW will make its way to Android too, although due to fragmentation it is slated to only work on four Android devices as of this writing, according to the original source.
As another aside, Pokemon Say Tap? BW will be released only in Japanese markets, at least initially.
This is odd because, for the greater part of its lifetime, Nintendo has avoided playing in its competitors’ sandboxes. With that in mind, I wager that Pokemon Say Tap? BW will be a promotional campaign in disguise, and will serve its purpose well. Even then, however, promotional campaigns in a competitors’ domain is foreign to Nintendo, but it knows its strategies more than I do.
What should happen, is for Nintendo to partner with Apple and get its library of console games onto the Mac App Store, because both Apple and Nintendo could make a fortune off of that. But only if those two can play nicely together.
Hat tip to TUAW & Pokemon.co.jp