Earlier this year, Nintendo announced a partnership with Japanese company DeNA that includes plans to develop and release around five mobile games by March 31, 2017. Aside from simply taking advantage of an extremely lucrative mobile market, Nintendo has stated in the past that they hope to attract people to Nintendo consoles with mobile games. Shigeru Miyamoto took this a step further in a recent Q & A session with investors, stating that their “primary objective,” more important even than making profits, in releasing mobile games is to bolster their dedicated gaming platforms.

“Just as you mentioned, the situation of the smart device application market is that an enormous amount of titles exist and there are several established styles that are popular with users. If we can expand to smart devices what we have been challenging ourselves with on Nintendo’s dedicated game systems by taking advantage of the unique characteristics of smart devices, we believe that Nintendo will be able to create a new style of games and spread them all around the world. “By asking DeNA to support us in as many of the operational aspects as possible, Nintendo would like to focus on “creating new things.” While it is important for us to earn profits from our smart device business alone, our primary objective is to encourage smart device users to be interested in and to play with our dedicated video game systems, and we are focused on this goal.” — Shigeru Miyamoto

Nintendo’s first mobile app, Miitomo, will be free to download with microtransactions, but not every Nintendo-DeNA game will have the same pricing model. We’ll likely have to wait until next year to find out more regarding Nintendo’s plans to attract mobile players to consoles, but integration with the upcoming My Nintendo service will certainly be a factor.

Source: Nintendo

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