Nintendo is still on course to make a profit for its fiscal 2016, but it may need a boost from smartphone players to reach some of its goals.
Nintendo plans to announce more details about its first mobile game at a secondary press conference as part of its quarterly financial reporting, according to Wall Street Journal. The publisher is working hand-in-hand with DeNA, a proliferate Japanese mobile-gaming company, on a handful of smartphone and tablet games. It plans to have the first one out before the end of 2015, and it will put a total of five on the market by March 2017.
“We will provide updates on our project with DeNA tomorrow,” Nintendo chief executive officer Tatsumi Kimishima said.
At this point, we don’t know much about any of Nintendo’s mobile projects. It has previously said that it will develop the game parts and DeNA is building the back-end live operations. It has also said that it will use its brands — like Mario, Zelda, and more — on mobile, but it won’t port existing console controller games to touchscreen devices.
While we don’t know what to expect, we do know that Nintendo could benefit if its smartphone apps catch on. The company saw a slight bump from Super Mario Maker last quarter, but it’s going to need something to have an even stronger holiday quarter to meet its earning target of $404 million in operating income by the end of its fiscal year.
We’ll likely get the first idea of whether Nintendo’s mobile games will provide that boost or not tomorrow when they share more details.