Nintendo has been critical towards mobile gaming for some time now. Then, earlier this year, the company announced plans to create mobile content with mobile game maker DeNA. Despite this, Nintendo has said that their standpoint on mobile games has not changed.
In 2010, Reggie Fils-Aime told Kotaku that Apple was not having an impact on Nintendo, and that data showed that gamers do not stick to a single title on phones and tablets. He states: “Clearly, it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.”
“If our games represent a range between snacks of entertainment and full meals depending on the type of game, (Apple’s) aren’t even a mouthful, in terms of the gaming experience you get.”
Now, Fils-Aime has told Polygon that despite the recent news on the partnership with DeNA, Nintendo has not changed its opinion on the mobile platform.
“We’re going to do it in a partnership with DeNA. DeNA has technical knowledge that we’re leveraging. They have a rapid iteration process to drive involvement in the content that we’re going to leverage, but Nintendo is going to create the content.”
“We’ve announced that Mr. Kono, from Mario Kart fame, is going to be our lead developer on this. And so from that standpoint things haven’t changed. It’s our IP, we’re going to leverage it and we do believe done properly it’s going to drive a positive experience with the IP and drive people back to our core video system business whether it’s handheld or console.”