Nintendo might come across as a cool company that makes cool video games, but they are also a publicly traded Japanese conglomerate whose objective is to make money.
Nintendo has been quite successful with its mobile offerings: they have tens of millions of active players across their games (Mario Run, Pokemon Go, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing etc.), but the company is still not satisfied with the profit aspect of those games.
Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima said during a recent investor’s Q&A that mobile games have not reached a “satisfactory profit point”.
For example, Super Mario Run has 20 million monthly active users. While that would be a tremendous success for a mobile games company, Nintendo would like to see the game make more money.
Fire Emblem heroes is another game that would be considered a success by any standard: it made $86 million in two months, offering a great return of investment for Nintendo.
Nevertheless, the company thinks that these games could be even more profitable. But they are still investing in mobile games, as Kimishima pointed out:
“Our goal is to further expand the scale of this business to develop it into one of the pillars of revenue”, he said.
