Over the past several years, we’ve heard from president Satoru Iwata that Nintendo will not embrace making smartphone games while he is the head of the company. It seems as though Iwata has finally relented however, as Nintendo has recently formed a partnership with developer DeNA to make new games for the mobile market.
According to the announcement, you won’t be seeing full-fledged Mario console games on mobile, or any of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS games ported to mobile, but rather an entirely new subset of games. This is most likely a response to investors claiming that mobile is the future and Nintendo not participating in the mobile game market is a failed opportunity.
As we’ve seen from Nintendo’s past announcement of the partnership with GungHo for a 3DS version of Puzzles and Dragons, Nintendo isn’t shy about courting mobile devs when it suits them. As for the partnership with DeNA, Nintendo will take a 10% stake in the company, while DeNA will buy 1.24% of Nintendo. DeNA is responsible for several mobile spinoffs in Japan and according to both comapnies, all of Nintendo’s intellectual property will be eligible for exploring opportunities on mobile.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the announcement is Nintendo’s brief mention of a dedicated game console code-named the NX, which is the first hint at a successor to the Wii U that we’ve seen.
