Nintendo to Release Five Mobile Titles by 2017

The House of Mario is expecting to launch approximately five mobile games by 2017, and they could feature any of Nintendo's numerous IPs.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced a bunch of new details about his company's upcoming mobile games initiative, Polygon reports. Nintendo and DeNA Games plan to launch around five smartphone games by March 2017. Iwata claims that both companies are right on schedule as they originally planned, with the first game planning to debut by the end of 2015. While Iwata said that any Nintendo IP is possible, the company is very careful on who will get to star in their first few mobile games. Five mobile games launching in two years sounds like underwhelming (Scott Cawthon made three excellent Five Nights at Freddy's titles by himself in just 7-8 months); but Nintendo will continue providing ongoing support and new features for the games after they launch.

"Since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, even with highly popular IPs, 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."

Nintendo is putting the producer of the Mario Kart series in charge of their mobile games (most likely Hideki Konno, who has been directing, managing and producing games at Nintendo for the past 28 years). Iwata also mentioned that smartphone games are a way to expand on Nintendo's popularity and to help draw more fans to their consoles; they might even be planning some sort of console-mobile connectivity.

"We will deploy our game business on smart devices not because we think that the dedicated game system business will wane, but because doing so will encourage a greater number of people to associate with Nintendo IP, to become familiar with the charms of video games and, eventually, to explore more premium experiences on our dedicated game systems," Iwata added. "To realize this, we need to create a bridge between the two platforms."