Apple News
Nintendo will release five games for iOS by March 2017
Nintendo had announced earlier this year that it will be developing games for iOS devices features featuring Mario and its other popular characters. The company has partnered with DeNA to develop games from the ground up for iOS devices instead of porting its existing games to deliver a better playing experience.
Regarding the number of the titles, you may want to know that we will release approximately five titles by the end of the next fiscal year, which is the end of March 2017. You may think it is a small number, 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 company says since the smartphone gaming scene is already quite competitive, the odds of success goes further down “if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game.” Plus, porting its already existing games to iOS devices will not “match the play styles” of touchscreen devices, which will ultimately lead to a subpar experience.
As we confirmed on March 17, all of our IP can be considered for a smart device game. On the other hand, since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, 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. 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.