TOKYO: Japanese games firm DeNA believes Nintendo’s first mobile games have the ability to be as big as mobile hit Candy Crush Saga.
The company, which struck a licensing deal with Nintendo earlier in the week, is working on the first official mobile games based on the latter’s big console and handheld brands.
“The game should attract a huge range of people. We wanted to get a huge audience like Candy Crush like 100 million users. We wanted to create something with that kind of daily active user base,” Shintaro Asako, boss of the DeNA West subsidiary, told VentureBeat.
“For this, I think the solution is not coming out with 10 or 20 games right away. We should pick the right game. We should actually create a Smartphone-specific game that requires day-to-day social interaction. It’s not just porting a Wii U game out to smart phones.”
Neither Nintendo nor DeNA have announced details of which brands they’ll be turning into mobile games, although at their joint press conference announcing the alliance, they said that all Nintendo’s franchises will be “eligible for development and exploration”, while noting that they will not be ports of Wii U or 3DS titles.
Candy Crush Saga is certainly a game to aim at, and not just in terms of its popularity. Players spent $1.33bn on in-app purchases within King’s sweet-swapping mobile puzzler in 2014 alone, according to recent analysis of the company’s financial results by the Guardian.
At the press conference, President Satoru Iwata told journalists of the company’s desire to ensure its mobile games are a safe environment for children in their approach to making money.
