After long ignoring, or at least watching quietly with interest, the growing mobile gaming trend, Nintendo has announced plans to release at least five videogames for smartphones by March 2017.
Satoru Iwata CEO of Nintendo Co., Ltd., and CEO of Nintendo of America has announced during the companies latest earnings results meeting that they will release the titles as part of a partnership with DeNA Co., which was announced in March. Nintendo will release new games, but won’t be releasing ports of their original gaming properties – at least not yet.
The first title will be available by the end of this year, but hasn’t yet announced further information about which game, platform, type of game, or which characters will be used. Mr Iwata has said that which games and characters would be used, would be carefully selected.
There had been speculation since the March announcement, that Nintendo would pursue a ‘Freemium’ based model for their game releases, something in line with titles released by DeNA Co. on platforms like Google Play already. Instead of a freemium based model, Mr Iwata has said Nintendo would ‘establish a new successful business approach in the mobile game industry.’
There’s a lot of demand for Nintendo properties on mobile, though possibly more call for ports of existing games to be released than new games – though we’ll have to wait and see what Nintendo and DeNA have in store before we judge.
What new Nintendo games would you like to see released to mobile?
