The unthinkable has happened, and Nintendo will be making mobile games. We’ve known this for a while, but the exact specifics of that have always been up in the air. So it was nice when some of the air got cleared today, Speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015, DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako talked about just what we can expect from Nintendo’s maiden mobile efforts.
“Nintendo has by far the best gaming IP. DeNA’s expertise is definitely backend,” he said, clarifying that the actual game development would be handled by Nintendo, with DeNA handling the technology and network backend portion of the products.
As for the games themselves? We got to hear a bit more about them.
“I understand some people like RPGs, casual games. That’s why we decided to work together to create five games, hitting on different genre-utilizing IPs. We want to make sure out of those five IP that we can end up attracting hundreds of millions of people.”
He would not, unfortunately, comment on what those IPs would be, but it isn’t necessarily all that difficult to guess. Mario will definitely be a headliner, and going by that callout that he made to ‘RPGs,’ Zelda might be a safe bet too.
Asako also confirmed that the pressure was on for both companies to actually deliver- Nintendo to live up to the promise of its fabled quality on a platform like mobile, and DeNA to demonstrate that a deal with Nintendo was a smart business move in the mobile sector at all.
As for the games themselves? Time will tell if they are actually quality, compelling products like Nintendo’s games usually are, or if they, too, turn out to be soulless F2P money grab schemes.