Nintendo and DeNA Partner Up for Mobile Development

DeNA (Pronouced like "DNA") is a Japanese company that I hadn't heard of until this morning. Apparently though they are the owner of Mobage a very popular cellphone/mobile gaming platform in Japan. They are so popular infact that Nintendo, a company known for staying away from the mobile market and safe-gaurding its IP's, has actually decided to team up with them to bring who knows what to mobile-phones.

Of course the question on my and ever other Nintendo gamer's mind is "What does this even mean?" and if I may be so blunt in providing my answer to that question now I'd say it's time to get very excited. While the full details have not been disclosed as of yet we do know that any Nintendo IP could be featured in a Mobile game. This kind of licensing could end up lending itself very well to minigame centric properties like Wario-Ware or NES/Famicom Remix but I also see Mario Kart (using smart phone's now standard gyrpscope) and perhaps even straight ports of mobile orriented/compatible games as strong possibilities. As far as the second category goes RPG's of the retro era would lend themselves well to this format as we've already seen through the countless unauthorized emulators that exist for smart-devices. For those of you who like myself havn't entered the smart-phone age yet and won't likely be able to play these titles right-away I think the last point is of the most importance. Iwata said during the annoucment that working on these smart-phone projects has only increased their devotion to the home console market going so far as to annouce the consoles code name "NX". What this means for us is that not only can you expect great console expiriences but also what I expect to be an amiibo sized level of extra income that they'll be grabbing from pirates and unlicensed software developers going into those expiriences.