Nintendo will release five mobile games until 2017

Nintendo will release its first smartphone game at the end of this year, with more to follow. By March 2017, the group has set itself the target of releasing approximately five new titles specifically for smart devices, i.e. smartphones and tablets.

That said Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata on Friday in Japan during the presentation of the annual results. Iwata himself says in his speech that “it may seem like a small number”, but that “the goal is to make a success of every title that comes out.”

Nintendo has a large portfolio of popular characters, games and titles. The company says it is approaching the mobile game market with caution and that it does not want to jeopardize its portfolio by just porting games. Iwata says that each game is designed for a specific device, its own game system. In none of those systems would the playing style resemble that of a ‘smart device’ and the revenue models would also be completely different.

To streamline the new plans, Nintendo announced on March 17 a partnership with Japanese company DeNA to bring parts of Nintendo’s existing portfolio to the “smart device” market. Nintendo thinks that if people have good experiences with some of the company’s games on a device other than a console, they may then switch to the game systems specially developed by Nintendo.

The CEO does not describe exactly which systems the company classifies as ‘smart devices’ in his speech, although one of the slides from the presentation points out that not only smartphones, but also tablets and PCs belong to this category.