Nintendo joins the 21st century and announces plans to develop mobile games
Massive gaming news this morning – Nintendo has made a dramatic U-turn and has today announced that it will soon be developing games for mobile devices in partnership with Japanese app developer DeNA (pronounced like “DNA”).
The new deal between the companies sees Nintendo acquire 10% of DeNA, and DeNA will take a 1.24% shareholding in Nintendo. Perhaps most importantly for gamers, the one important thing about the deal is that it won’t be about porting games from other Nintendo platforms – all titles will be new games, optimised for mobile devices.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, given Nintendo’s history crafting titles for the particular quirks of a given platform – like adapting games for motion controls on Wii or touchscreen on the DS.
But the new mobile titles will be using Nintendo’s legendary intellectual properties – the likes of Mario, Zelda and Pokemon no doubt – which is why this could be so lucrative.
Unfortunately no details on specific games have been announced just yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
