How Often Nintendo Plans To Release Mobile Games Following Super Mario Run

Nintendo has been goaded incessantly by analysts, shareholders, investors, and advertisers to embrace mobile gaming. They have. After doing so, those same groups are now curious how often Nintendo plans on releasing mobile games following Super Mario Run.

According to Greenbot's translation of an interview Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima had with Kyoto NP, the Big N' plans on releasing only a few new mobile games. In fact, they only have plans on producing two or three mobile titles a year.

This pattern will actually hold true for 2017 and beyond, according to the report. Nintendo won't be making mobile gaming a huge priority. In fact, they have plans on releasing Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing at some point for mobile devices. Kimishima didn't clarify if those would be the two games that they will most definitely release in 2017, but they mentioned before that Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing would be making their way to mobile devices at some point.

Given how close to the chest Nintendo plays their business strategies, they also didn't clarify if the new games would be spin-offs based on the popular franchises or if they would be continuations of the games as canonical sequels.

In the case of Super Mario Run, they decided to focus on a small spin-off title where players only have one button to contend with when playing the game.

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, they wanted a game that did the opposite of what a lot of other newer Super Mario games have accomplished in regards to becoming more and more complex with each new entry. The purpose of Super Mario Run was to make it as simple as possible while keeping it as fun as possible. The idea was that the gameplay was going to be so simple that you could play it with one hand. They demonstrated this point during a quick showcase of the game on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

While Nintendo didn't develop Pokemon Go, they still kept a hand in the project, ensuring that it was something widely different from what you get on the Nintendo 3DS or the Wii U, separating it greatly from games like Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon.

Even before that, Nintendo's original title for mobile devices, Miitomo, was a wildly different social experience from the typical games they've released. The pattern here is basically that Nintendo seems to only want to release specialized apps on mobile devices instead of just churning out their popular brands on smartphones and tablets. It's a smart move, because Nintendo is extremely protective of their brands, very similar to the likes of Disney, which is why the two are oftentimes compared to one another.

Given that Super Mario Run has reportedly managed 50 million downloads, and despite some pushback from shareholders about the game not being free-to-play, it still managed to become a top app on the iTunes App Store and will launch soon on Android devices. If the revenue proves beneficial for Nintendo, it makes us wonder if they'll stick with the buy-once model, switch to free-to-play for their next games, or experiment with something new. Time will tell.