Nintendo has announced, alongside their plans for a new concept for their next hardware system, the company is also developing games for smartphones, tablets, and PC.
Teaming up with Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA, Nintendo says the games will feature Nintendo’s IP, including their characters.
Even more interesting is the company’s reveal for plans of a “new core system” that will function across all of the mentioned devices utilizing a single membership service. Only new games will be released on the service, as Wii U and 3DS ports were ruled out by Nintendo, but the system will also operate across the newly announced NX hardware.
CEO and president Saturo Iwata has previously stated his opposition to moving Nintendo’s games and characters to mobile platforms, but now has stated the company is attempting to challenge itself.
“Also, until now, when we said, ‘platform,’ it meant a specific video game platform,” Iwata said. “Now that we are going to release games on smart devices and make use of globally widespread PCs and smart devices for our new membership service, we would like to offer more consumers with software that is suited to their tastes. In other words, we are challenging ourselves to redefine what ‘Nintendo platforms’ mean.”
Iwata addressed the reasoning behind the big plans during a Q&A.
“… with the spread of smart devices, we have increasingly heard a variety of opinions on the future of the dedicated video game system business, and in particular relatively pessimistic ones,” Iwata said today. “We lost the balance of revenue and expenses as the era of the super strong yen occurred during the transition periods from Nintendo DS to Nintendo 3DS and from Wii to Wii U, and we were not able to make these platform transitions as smoothly as we had expected.”
The announcement lists fall 2015 as targeted launch for the new service, which reportedly is replacing Club Nintendo after it was announced to be shutting down this summer.
How do you feel about this? Excited to play Nintendo games across devices? Sad to see Nintendo headed for phones and tablets? Let us know below!