Nintendo is finally preparing to make its mobile game debut and has announced that it will be releasing a total of five mobile games by March 2017.
The news comes shortly after Nintendo announced its partnership with DeNA, a company that owns and operates a number of mobile game developers. This partnership answered hopes by many that Nintendo would enter the mobile world.
"You may think it is a small number," said Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, referring to the fact that Nintendo will only be releasing five games, "but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business."
The first game is scheduled to be released later this year.
It's important to note that Nintendo will not simply be releasing its existing games to mobile, so don't expect to see Super Mario Bros. on your smartphone anytime soon. This is largely because of the fact that playing a game made for one system might be a totally different experience on another gaming system. This begs the question: what should we expect to see from Nintendo on mobile?
It is highly likely that we should expect Nintendo to incorporate their beloved characters into mobile games from the company. These will include the likes of Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong and maybe even Pokémon.
DeNA is also working with Nintendo on a gaming network that will bring together Nintendo's consoles, including the in-development NX console, as well as PCs, smartphones, tablets and so on. Currently, Nintendo games are tied to the console or device that they operate on, however, this might soon change with DeNA's involvement.
What this means is that we might see Nintendo games playable on a variety of devices, or at least versions of them, making it easier to play with friends no matter what platform they are using. The network will be subscription-based.
"While we will announce the details of this integrated membership service at a later date, I can share with you at a high level the idea is that the consumer can access multiple devices using one common ID," continued Iwata. "With this new membership, we are planning to deploy services that will make playing Nintendo games with their game pals more fun regardless of which platform they are accessing."
Of course, it's also possible that Nintendo will simply treat its mobile games as a way to push traffic to its consoles.
