By the end of this year, you’ll be able to play a Nintendo game on your iPhone.
Wading into a market its always been wary of, Nintendo is finally going to start producing smartphone games.
The first one should be out by the end of 2015, and the company says it plans to make a total of five by March of 2017.
“You may think it is a small number,” said Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata during an earnings call, “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.”
“Even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game. Also, if we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result.”
Translation: Nintendo’s not just going to throw a bunch of games against the wall and see what sticks. And it’s not just going to port already existing titles because they might such when played on a smartphone.
Nintendo is taking this venture slow, and that’s no surprise considering how long it took them to even begin making games for the smartphone.
Nintendo is also taking its massively popular characters to the real world. Nintendo and Universal Parks & Resorts just announced the creation of “spectacular, dedicated experiences based on Nintendo’s wildly popular games, characters and worlds” to Universal theme parks.
