Nintendo to Release Five Smartphone Games by 2017

 

On March 17, 2015, it was announced that Nintendo had partnered with DeNa with the purpose of expanding into the mobile market, as well as to develop an “online membership service that is accessible from smart devices, PC and Nintendo systems.” Now, Nintendo has released it’s financial results briefing where, among other things, it goes into more detail about this recent partnership.

Regarding this subject, we announced our business alliance with DeNA on March 17. Each of our companies offers unique strengths, and we are confident that when combined, the synergies will enable us to compete strongly in the smart device space.

According to Nintendo’s briefing, the companies are planning to release the first mobile game before the end of this calendar year, having already made several organizational and personnel changes in order to easily adapt into this new market. They consider all Nintendo IP as viable for the smartphone devices, but make a note on the fact that entering a highly competitive market may result in low odds of success if “consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game.” Due to this, and the fact that they aim to “achieve a significant result”, Nintendo mentions they are going to carefully select the appropriate IP and titles to be released on smartphones.

Regarding the number of titles, Nintendo plans on having released five mobile titles by the end of March 2017, taking time to carefully develop each game and to “thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases.”

We will strive to expand this business into global markets at a steady pace so that eventually we will entertain hundreds of millions of people all around the world. We are aiming to make this one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure.

Nintendo has confirmed it will not be showcasing any mobile games at next month’s E3. According to Satoru Iwata, this is due to that fact that they realise E3 is an event for “dedicated gaming systems”.

You can read the whole report here.