Ninendo CEO and president Satoru Iwata has announced that its partnership with publisher DeNA will see five mobile games released by 2017, the first of which will be out this year. Nintendo and DeNA will also release a cross-platform gaming service for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, as well as Nintendo’s 3DS, Wii U, and its in-development NX console.
Iwata insists that Nintendo’s mobile games will not be ports of previous titles, instead being built from scratch. “If we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result,” Iwata said. “If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.”
“Regarding the number of the titles, you may want to know that we will release approximately five titles by the end of the next fiscal year, which is the end of March 2017,” Iwata continued. “You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business.”
The move marks a big shift in strategy for Nintendo, with the company hoping to maintain a level of success after posting a profit for the first time in four years recently.
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