Nintendo, DeNA “currently making announcement plans” for debut mobile title
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 17 Comments
It shouldn’t be too long now before Nintendo and DeNA announce their first mobile title. In DeNA’s Q1 financial report, the company mentioned that it’s “currently making announcement plans”. This indicates that we’ll be hearing soon.
Nintendo’s first mobile game will arrive later this year. By March 2017, there should be roughly five titles available for smart devices.
DeNA: Partnership with Nintendo could “change the market”, Big N has best IPs
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 8 Comments
DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako has shared a few more words about the company’s partnership with Nintendo.
“I think this is potentially an opportunity for us to completely change the market. Nintendo has by far the best gaming IP,” Asako told PocketGamer. Asako added that “DeNA’s expertise is definitely backend.”
Nintendo will be handling the bulk of its mobile game development, but DeNA is pitching in on the technical end. DeNA will also be responsible for Nintendo’s new membership service, which opens this fall.
More: DeNA, interview, Shintaro Asako
Reggie: Nintendo’s mobile games can offer “a positive experience”, drive people back to core systems
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Mobile, News | 7 Comments
Back in 2010, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime made some comments about mobile gaming in which he told Polygon that, on these devices, people don’t seem to stick to a single title.
Here’s what he said at the time:
“Clearly, it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads. If our games represent a range between snacks of entertainment and full meals depending on the type of game, (Apple’s) aren’t even a mouthful, in terms of the gaming experience you get.”
Polygon spoke with Reggie at E3 2015 last week and said that Nintendo hasn’t changed its opinion on the nature of gaming on smart devices. He also believes that mobile gaming can offer “a positive experience” while driving people back to the Big N’s core systems.
“We’re going to do it in a partnership with DeNA. DeNA has technical knowledge that we’re leveraging. They have a rapid iteration process to drive improvement in the content that we’re going to leverage, but Nintendo is going to create the content. We’ve announced that Mr. Kono, from Mario Kart fame, is going to be our lead developer on this. And so from that standpoint things haven’t changed. It’s our IP, we’re going to leverage it and we do believe done properly it’s going to drive a positive experience with the IP and drive people back to our core video system business whether it’s handheld or console.”
More: DeNA, interview, Reggie Fils-Aime
Nintendo’s NX platform could potentially use Android based OS
Posted on 8 years ago by Dennis Gagliardotto(@LyonHart_) in Rumors, Switch | 81 Comments
Though we don’t have 100% confirmation on this, an article from Nikkei discussing NX, Nintendo’s next platform that was announced during their DeNA conference, states an insider says the OS for NX will be Android based. The reason behind this being because of third party support dwindling for the Wii U, they want to be able to have a more open and accessible platform for developers to create content that can be used on not only NX, but smartphones and tablets as well. This would allow a huge range of flexibility from third parties, and also implementing new features with cross play and performance we probably have yet to see in gaming. Whatever NX ends up being, it sounds like it could be pretty scary, for better or for worse.
Iwata on Nintendo’s new membership service, decision to replace Club Nintendo
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 15 Comments
For many years, Nintendo used Club Nintendo as its primary membership service. That’s finally coming to an end this year, and DeNA is being brought in to come up with something brand new.
During last week’s financial results briefing, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata offered up a lengthy explanation as to why the company is finally doing away with Club Nintendo. Read on below to check out what was shared.
So far, Nintendo has built its official website, started the Club Nintendo membership service, made its dedicated video game systems network compatible, started Miiverse and has constructed other online services one at a time. When we constructed each one of them, we were trying to create a certain solution to achieve a certain goal or to address to a certain issue. In other words, we did not have an overall vision as to what the final and comprehensive format should be like and, as a result, we cannot say each of these services was connected to one another in an ideal way. Also, when we were designing them, we did not have the idea of building a bridge between smart devices and dedicated video game systems and, at least five years ago, we could not foresee that smart devices would have increased in significance to be the dominant window through which consumers connect with one another and society. When we look at Nintendo’s current network services from this perspective and others, they look like patchwork. They are not ideally designed for user convenience, and when we try to improve one, we have to modify not only the portion directly related to that service but also other seemingly unrelated components, so it cannot be done easily. In other words, we have many ideas that we would like to realize but we have not been able to execute them as smoothly as we had hoped.
More: DeNA, Satoru Iwata, top
DeNA wants Nintendo mobile games to bring in over $25 million per month
Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 8 Comments
Reuters recently had the opportunity to speak with DeNA chief executive Isao Moriyasu. During the interview, Moriyasu stated that the company hopes to bring in over 3 billion yen ($25.02 million) a month from its new mobile partnership with Nintendo.
He said:
“We want to create games that will be played by hundreds of millions of people. We want to create multiple hit games rather than aiming to succeed with just one powerful IP element. We haven’t talked to Nintendo about targets, but at DeNA, our best-selling game brought in 3 billion yen a month, and we want to surpass that.”
There’s another interesting portion from Reuters’ report as well. The site claims – based on what analysts have said – that “Nintendo will likely earn around 70 percent” from its partnership with DeNA.
More: DeNA, Isao Moriyasu, top
Nintendo and DeNA presentation – translated Q&A now live
Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Mobile, News, Switch | 1 Comment
Nintendo held a presentation with DeNA last week to announce a partnership between the two companies. Towards the end, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata and DeNA president Isao Moriyasu fielded questions from attendees. The entire Q&A is now live, and you can find it right here.
I won’t be breaking down the Q&A into various excerpts per usual, as we covered it quite a bit last week (in both video and summary form). There also isn’t a whole lot of information that we haven’t already covered. Still, it might be worth a read for some of you!
More: DeNA, Isao Moriyasu, Satoru Iwata
DeNA on the need to begin its Nintendo partnership with the right game, Big N’s IP strength, not too late with mobile, more
Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 8 Comments
GamesBeat spoke with DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako following Nintendo and DeNA’s business and capital alliance announcement today. Topics included how talks between the two sides evolved, the need to kick off its partnership with the right game, the strength of Nintendo’s IPs, how it’s not too late for the company to enter the mobile market, and plenty more.
We’ve rounded up Asako’s various comments below. Be sure to check out GamesBeat’s full post here.
More: DeNA, interview, Shintaro Asako, top
Nintendo and DeNA business and capital alliance announcement – full presentation
Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Videos | 1 Comment
Final comments from Iwata on Nintendo’s alliance with DeNA
Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments
Generally speaking, an alliance is an approach that aims to realize certain objectives by leveraging the strengths of the other party in areas where each company could not easily succeed by itself. In that sense, there is a large significance in these two companies with different strengths working together, and so that we can review this business alliance in the medium to long term, we decided to make the capital alliance as well.
Lastly, allow me to add some final comments to express my aspirations for this alliance.
Many content providers who are succeeding on smart devices are depending on single hit titles. One of my goals here is, now that we are challenging ourselves with this endeavor by making use of Nintendo IP, to produce multiple hit titles at an early stage after we start releasing our software on smart devices.
Also, until now, when we said, “platform,” it meant a specific video game platform. Now that we are going to release games on smart devices and make use of globally widespread PCs and smart devices for our new membership service, we would like to offer more consumers with software that is suited to their tastes. In other words, we are challenging ourselves to redefine what “Nintendo platforms” mean.
With this collaboration with DeNA, a partner with different strengths, we aim to achieve this goal as soon as possible.
