After reporting its first annual profit in four years, Japanese video game maker Nintendo has announced its plans to roll out five smartphone exclusive games by 2017.
Nintendo CEO and President Satoru Iwata told a group of investors that the first game is scheduled to come out sometime later this year and the rest four more games will follow by 2017 end.
“You may think it is a small number,” said Iwata to investors.
“We will start the service for the first game application by the end of this calendar year. Internally at Nintendo, we have executed several organizational and personnel changes in order to properly operate the smart device business, and we will make further changes before the first release.”
Nintendo had announced its collaboration with Japanese game publisher DeNA back in March. The two companies each invested $181 million into one another, and agreed to co-develop games for the mobile market.
The video game maker has already confirmed that it won’t be porting existing titles to phones and will instead focus on games that better fit smartphones as a platform.
“Even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game,” Iwata said.
“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. If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.”
Iwata also reiterated that together Nintendo and DeNA would work to create an “integrated membership service” that is meant to establish “a bridge between smart devices and dedicated game systems.” Devices that will utilize this service include smartphones, PCs, the Nintendo 3DS, and the upcoming NX console.
Recently, Nintendo also announced that it has teamed up with Universal Parks & Resorts to bring spectacular, dedicated experiences based on Nintendo’s wildly popular games, characters and worlds to the Universal theme parks.
