King 5 News (Seattle, WA) recently sat down with President of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime and gathered information pertaining to Nintendo’s response to the smart device market. During the interview, when asked by King 5 News why Nintendo is not developing for smart devices, Reggie acknowledged that they had to be smart about how they approached this market, leading him to reveal Nintendo actually is experimenting with such devices, but perhaps not in the way that one would expect.

Instead of developing software on smart devices as an official development platform, Nintendo has opted to develop software with the goal of pointing consumers back to their own products.

Nintendo of America president/chief operating officer Reginald \”Reggie\” Fils-Aime: “It’s a topic that comes up all the time. It’s a debate that’s constantly had. We recognize that there are a lot of smartphones and tablets out there, and so what we’re doing is we’re being very smart in how we use these devices as marketing tools for our content.

“We’re also doing a lot of experimentation of what I would call the little experiences you can have on your smartphone and tablet that will drive you back to your Nintendo hardware. It’s largely going to be much more marketing activity-oriented, but we’ve done little things where there’s some element of gameplay – a movement, a shaking, something like that.”

To be a little more specific, the software is designed to function as a sort of demo where the user must purchase the corresponding Nintendo device to play the full version of the game.

Fils-Aime: “We believe our games are best played and best enjoyed on our devices and so the full game play will only be on Nintendo devices.”

While Sony or Microsoft probably won\’t be able to advertise their home console games on smart devices (as, unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the Wii U can offer exclusively touch-based games without additional hardware), Nintendo could potentially benefit from this practices. If designed right, this could bode very well for the company, seeing as their primary problem stemmed from the fact that they waited an entire year to properly market the Wii U system. Don\’t forget to express your thoughts below.