Nintendo’s end of the year financial briefing didn’t have a lot of meaty information about upcoming Nintendo products and instead focused on the performance of both the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U over the course of 2014. Iwata apologized for postponing the meeting due to illness and stated that the meeting would only discuss the brief details of performance, while upcoming products such as the Quality of Life platform would be discussed in the next financial briefing.
While we will further our endeavors to increase our Nintendo 3DS and Wii U businesses in the next fiscal year, we intend to simultaneously challenge ourselves with new endeavors which include our plan to take advantage of smart devices, more aggressive use of Nintendo’s character IP and our new QOL improvement platform business.
The most interesting thing about this statement is that Iwata acknowledges that Nintendo will begin taking advantage of smartphones. Previously Iwata has been resistant to discussing smartphone gaming with investors and we still believe that Iwata doesn’t want to embrace the platform with traditional games. However, with the partnership between Nintendo and the Puzzle & Dragons developer, it’s likely that we could see Nintendo IP’s leased to mobile developers.
It should also be mentioned that Nintendo is putting out their own apps, with the most recent being a Pokemon launcher for Android. The app is Japan-only right now, but licensed themes from Nintendo would certainly generate quite a bit of income considering how much Android users like to customize their phones.
