Japanese consumer electronics and software publisher Nintendo announced their earnings for the last fiscal year yesterday, and as part of the announcement took the opportunity to speak about their mobile offerings.
Their first foray into mobile, the release of the social focused Miitomo app, has been a resounding success for the company with now 10 million users registered. Taking this as a good sign, the company is moving forward, announcing that they will be releasing two new apps this spring, based on the Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing franchises.
Fire Emblem is a role playing strategy game, which has spanned a number of platforms across 15 titles in the series. Nintendo intends to improve upon the role-playing components of Fire Emblem a benefit for the mobile offering. Animal Crossing will also be improved for mobile, but with a more cross platform focus, with Nintendo intending to integrate elements of the games into the console based games to create an experience where players will benefit from playing both editions.
Both the titles will be ‘pure game applications’ as opposed to the Miitomo experience, something Nintendo fans have been waiting on for some time, though Nintendo has been resistant to launch their titles on mobile until recently.
Nintendo does intend to release more mobile titles, with the company saying they have ‘aims to have multiple types of apps that appeal to different audiences and different groups of players’. But at this stage they haven’t announced which titles they will release.
We do however know a little about one Nintendo game about to launch, Pokémon GO, which Nintendo has partnered with former Google owned company Niantic Labs to create. Niantic Labs created the hit location based game Ingress, and the Pokémon GO game is based on this same model. The game, entered field trials in Australia this week – and initial reports of the game are good.
Nintendo will launch Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing in the Spring, which we take to mean in the Autumn of next year here in the Southern Hemisphere.
