Nintendo finally comes to iPhone with the help of DeNA. We cannot wait. For years you have been able to play emulations of Nintendo games on your iPhone thanks to Cydia tweaks. However, Nintendo has finally seen the light. They plan to release five titles on iOS by 2017. These games will not be ports. They will be built from the ground up for the iOS platform. They have hired the right people to develop games tailored for smartphones. Game publisher DeNA is handling the cross-platform gaming service that will be on smartphones, tablets and PCs, Nintendo’s 3DS, Wii U and upcoming NX gaming console.
If we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result. If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.
Regarding the number of the titles, you may want to know that we will release approximately five titles by the end of the next fiscal year, which is the end of March 2017. You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business. ~Iwata