Nintendo's Plan For Mobile Gets a Little More Detail

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Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
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Nintendo's Plan For Mobile Gets a Little More Detail

What a difference a day makes, huh? Yesterday we didn't have much detail at all around Nintendo's new NX platform, and now we've got word about Nintendo's earliest plans for mobile. These are actually some really interesting plans, too, and may well give Nintendo some much-needed leverage in a rapidly changing gaming market.

After the announcement of the connection between Nintendo and DeNA, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed that the first release for mobile should occur sometime this year. Plus, there will likely be quite a bit more development down the line as completely new IP will be developed for smart devices, as well as for the mobile platform.

Naturally, it's not known as yet just what form that deal will take, and it likely won't be known until at the very least E3, and quite possible not until just ahead of the game's release. Still though, we've known for some time that Nintendo was looking at mobile, and certainly had more than enough IP on hand to make mobile gaming happen. But the odd part here is that Nintendo is still so aggressively looking at new development instead of exploiting the IP that it already has on hand. Why is it so hard for Nintendo to believe that people want to play a round of "Super Mario Brothers 3" on a mobile device, and relive that old childhood glory, particularly the older end of the 18-35 year old spectrum? Most mobile devices could run eight bit Nintendo games with nary an incident, and surely even 16 bit games wouldn't be too much of a challenge. With that being the case, why not open up the storehouses? Nintendo has dozens of games, and many of these either haven't been played in years by some gamers or have never been played at all. This is a great opportunity to get these gamers interested, or back in the fold depending, and why Nintendo hasn't been exploiting this angle all along is beyond me.

Still, Nintendo obviously has a plan for mobile here, and that's a good idea all around. Nintendo needs to get into mobile so as not to lose out in the mobile gaming market altogether; its 3DS line has been its saving grace of late in a lot of ways. But it's got very stiff combination in the form of Android and iOS, and it needs to be ready to work with that growing component, not have to continue to fight against it. Only time will tell just what form Nintendo's efforts ultimately take here, but it's going to make for quite a contest in the end.


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