Bryan Ingram February 1st, 2017 - 5:57 PM
Nintendo is beginning to jump onto the mobile gaming scene, telling a group of investors that they are planning on releasing two or three per year starting this year. Reuters was first to back up, saying that it was Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima who told them. Kimishima did not say what the percentage of games that are being made internally or through DeNA, whom Nintendo partnered with to make mobile games in 2015. Kimishima said the following to the investors:
“We would like to utilize smart devices as a platform to reach the maximum number of consumers with our IP. It is a prerequisite that the smart-device business [will] be profitable on its own. We also aim to generate synergy with our dedicated video game systems business to maximize the potential of Nintendo’s overall business strategies.”
It’s possible that the plan to release two or three games per year is a part of Nintendo’s better grasp of time. For over a year, Nintendo announced that they were going to release five games by March 2017, but they did say that the Animal Crossing mobile game was being delayed until April 2017. With that delay, Nintendo was only able to release three games within their self-imposed deadline: Miitomo, Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes, which is set for release next week.
Details about the release of Nintendo’s fifth mobile app by March 2017 have never been revealed. Now that Pokémon, Mario and Fire Emblem now have mobile app games, it’s reasonable to think that Nintendo has plans to release mobile app games for their other franchises, but which franchises will get the mobile apps remains to be seen.
Nintendo has repeatedly said that they are not planning to port already existing games into a mobile app game.
