TOKYO: Nintendo has released it first mobile games Mario and Zelda which are hoped to hit the market 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 DAU [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 smartphones.”
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.
King ended 2014 with 356 million monthly unique users and 149 million daily unique users of all its games, Candy Crush included. Key to that game’s financial success has been its use of the “freemium” model of in-app purchases for virtual items and currency, though.
While Nintendo has been experimenting with this model in 3DS games like Steel Diver: Sub Wars and Pokemon Shuffle, the company appears sensitive to the potential controversy around adopting the model too aggressively on mobile.
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.
In his VentureBeat interview, DeNA’s Asako stressed his company’s ambitions for its Nintendo partnership to be a long-term success, noting that the two companies had been in talks of one form or another since 2010.
“They need to be straight at what they really wanted to get at. We’re not doing this just for this year or next year — we really want to be a leading player… Some people say, ‘Why did it take so long?’ When you look at the mobile gaming market, I don’t think it’s too late to do this kind of partnership.”
