Games

Nintendo Discusses Mobile

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9 February 2017

By Alex Khalil

In an interview with Time, Tatsumi Kimishima, Nintendo’s president, spoke about the company’s strategy for mobile.

Nintendo, over the last few months, have released three rather successful mobile games, for the first time in the company’s history. Kimishima has said that Nintendo has three goals for its mobile business.

The first is to get Nintendo IPs and characters to more people, thanks to mobile.

“This is a great tool for us to push our IP to a large number of people,”

“This is a great way to introduce them to our franchises and characters, and thereby bring them back to Nintendo’s dedicated hardware as well as introduce them to Nintendo’s expanded software library.”

Their second goal is money, obviously.

“We’d like mobile to be a pillar in and of itself – a business pillar that is profitable.”

Finally, their third goal is to bring other popular Nintendo IPs to the mobile fold.

“In the same way it worked for Pokémon, is to use games on mobile devices to increase the sales of other games we develop with the same characters. This is synergy, right? In this way we hope customers will purchase other related goods and services, too.”

They even talked about their mobile game Super Mario Run, with everyone’s favourite plumber. Kimishima said they have had 78 million downloads, and they are hoping that more than 10% of those playing the game will be paid users, as the game includes micro transactions, to purchase boosts and coins.

Their newest mobile game, Fire Emblem Heroes, surpassed $5m and Nintendo hopes to use their other games to test monetisation.

Moving on from their mobile efforts, Kimishima talked about the Switch, which releases very soon. In the interview, he confirmed that the Switch would not have backward compatibility, which makes sense really, given that the console will not have a disc slot.

“Switch is not backward compatible with games designed for other systems, and is not currently compatible with controllers designed for other systems.”

There will however be an eShop on launch for the console, so there could be some stuff on there.

The full interview can be found here.

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