Heeding calls to be flexible and to go with today's changes in mainstream gaming, Nintendo will finally enter into the mobile gaming market.
Nintendo, owner of some of the best-known gaming franchises like "Mario" and "The Legend of Zelda," has been resisting the calls to develop mobile games for years now. It focused its development of games to its proprietary consoles such as the Wii U and 3DS. But now that the console gaming industry is facing stiff competition from phone and tablet games, Nintendo decided to diversify and foray into the mobile gaming industry.
Nintendo announced its partnership with Japanese company DeNA, a publisher of free-to-play mobile games. The two companies will each be putting $18 million to buy into each other's company stocks, and will mean that Nintendo will own 10 percent of DeNA and it will give DeNA a 1.24 percent stake in Nintendo. Also, as part of the agreement, Nintendo content will be made available for DeNA's game development. This means that in the coming weeks, gamers can expect to be treated to Nintendo games on their mobile devices.
"This will allow us to build a bridge between smart devices and gaming consoles," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters. "It doesn't mean smart devices will eat away at gaming consoles, it will create an entirely new type of demand."
There are also rumors that as part of Nintendo's expansion, the company is planning to come out with a new console. At the press conference where it announced the DeNA partnership deal, Nintendo also confirmed that a new proprietary system is in the pipeline, although details are sketchy as of the moment.
According to the audio translation, "Nintendo is currently developing a dedicated games platform with a brand new concept under the development codename NX ... It is too early to elaborate on the details of this project but we hope to share more information with you next year."
