Hold on to Your Toad Hats: Nintendo to Produce Mobile Games

Nintendo has announced a partnership with Japanese mobile development company DeNA to create Nintendo games for mobile devices.  Previously, Nintendo has been averse to the mobile market, keeping its IP strictly on its own hardware.  According to Iwata,

Nintendo’s strength lies in, or our consumers see the most value in and are willing to pay money for, Nintendo IP, such as our software and characters, and we have been creating and nurturing them together with the history of home video game entertainment.

In order to flexibly deal with the developments of the Internet and social media as well as the changes in the people’s lifestyles, we will start strategic endeavors so that Nintendo can maximize the value of our IP that we have used primarily for our own dedicated game platforms.

Iwata says he doesn't know which Nintendo IP will be used in this new mobile venture, but they aren't ruling out anything.  However, Iwata does sound like he wants to remain focused on a few titles, rather than producing their whole catalog of games: "games on smart devices require ever-evolving services rather than just being a finished product.... People’s attention would only be dispersed if we simply increased the number of the titles we simultaneously released, and we could not expect to expand our business. Accordingly, we will narrow down the titles for development and operation to some extent."

DeNA will also be working with Nintendo to develop a new membership service to replace the now defunct Club Nintendo.  

You can read the press release in full here.