For years, Nintendo had insisted that it would not take its beloved cast of video game characters, including Mario and Zelda, to the smartphones and tablets that tens of millions of people now use to play games.
But on last week, Nintendo reversed its position on mobile devices, dropping a pledge that had come to seem increasingly detached from the habits of game players.
The company said it had formed a partnership with another Japanese company that specializes in mobile games, DeNA, to develop games based on Nintendo brands for smartphones and tablets. The two companies said they planned to create an online gaming service to be introduced in the fall that will be accessible from mobile devices, PCs and Nintendo's own game systems.
Nintendo promised that it was not abandoning the business of making its own games hardware, saying that it had a new game platform under development. The company's president, Satoru Iwata, said Nintendo would share more details about the product, code-named NX, next year.
Nintendo had long said that it had no plans to move its games to mobile devices, favoring instead its traditional approach of designing games only for its own hardware, including the Wii U console and portable players like the Nintendo 3DS. Its position was somewhat like that of Apple, which believes it can create high-quality products only by controlling devices and the software that runs them.
Even Apple, though, swiftly bowed to the realities of the PC market, creating its iTunes software and service for the dominant Windows computers. Nintendo's aversion to mobile devices, in contrast, came to seem dogmatic and hazardous to the future of the company.
Nintendo's sales and profits suffered badly in recent years as game-playing on smartphones and tablets skyrocketed. Most mobile games are cheaper than Nintendo games, especially the free-to-play games that dominate mobile entertainment.
SundayMonday Business on 03/23/2015