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Nintendo's experiment with sleep tracking devices is over before it ever got started.Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima told investors this week that the company will not release its sleep-tracking device Quality of Life (QOL) by March 2016, as was announced nearly two years ago. Kimishima didn't give any specific reason why Nintendo was pulling the plug on the device beyond saying he didn't have the "conviction" that it could be turned into an actual product.What's most telling about Kimishima's announcement was that he wasn't responding to an investor question demanding a status update on the project. Rather, Kimishima offered the news almost as an aside—a kind of, "Remember that QOL thing? Yeah, about that…"Dr. Serkan Toto, a Japanese video game industry analyst, put it succinctly on Twitter when he said "nobody cares" about the project. That's not too surprising: What people do care about is Nintendo's upcoming mobile apps, the first of which, a communications app called Miitomo, should hit app stores before the end of March.QOL was announced in October 2014 by then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. The idea was to create a device that would track users' sleep patterns in an attempt to improve their sleep quality. "Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualize in more objective ways," said Iwata at the time. "At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualize them, there would be great potential for many people."Had Nintendo gone ahead and released the QOL device it would have been stumbling into an immensely crowded space in which the company had no real experience. Gartner, a research firm, said earlier this week that wearables (including sleep-tracking devices) are expected to reach nearly $29 billion in sales in 2016. And CES in January was overrun with all sorts of fitness-tracking devices from companies like Fitbit and Withings that have the ability to monitor sleep patterns.Focusing on Nintendo's core strengths—console games—while trying to establish a foothold in mobile is probably the right decision for 2016.
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