Looks like Nintendo is finally jumping to both the mobile gaming scene and the Next Gen hardware.
During a press conference in Japan, Nintendo formally announced their partnership with mobile gaming publisher DeNA. The collaboration will see a series of games based from Nintendo’s IPs (Legend of Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc.) being developed for smartphones and tablets, this means that any Nintendo franchise can be used for mobile games and these will be original games and not ported from current or previous Nintendo consoles.
A new membership program that let gamers integrate their games from the 3DS and Wii U with different devices ranging from the PC, tablets and smartphones was also revealed from the announcement, the said service will be replacing the now defunct Club Nintendo service and the new service is expected to release in Spring of 2015.
The talks for the said partnership has started since 2010 according to Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, “We have come to hold a stronger passion and vision for the video games console”, he also believes that mobile games will become as a bridge to push more consumers into buying Nintendo games and consoles.
DeNA is known for their mobile service Mobage and it is one of the popular service in Japan, the company was founded in 1999 and became the largest multi-billion mobile game firm in Japan.
Also during the press conference, Iwata announced that the next generation console of Nintendo is currently in development with the codename “NX”. No details on what console will project NX become, as some speculated that it could be a new handheld console, but Iwata mentioned that more details will be revealed by next year.