First Nintendo Smartphone Games Will Be Free
All the smartphone games DeNA is now developing with Nintendo will be free to download, DeNA said, suggesting the joint project’s first few games will rely on revenue from in-app microtransactions.
“Games currently in the pipeline are all free to play,” said DeNA Chief Executive Isao Moriyasu said at an earnings briefing Wednesday. The smartphone-game and platform provider announced that April-September net profit was up 50% from a year earlier, to ¥16.2 billion ($132 million).
DeNA and Nintendo, which reached their smartphone-games agreement earlier this year, plan to release five titles by March 2017. Mr. Moriyasu declined to say how many of the five are currently in development.
Nintendo long resisted making its famous game characters available for smartphone apps—costing it as that sector of the videogame market took off—while DeNA has suffered in overseas game markets, especially the U.S., from its lack of blockbuster titles.
The first release from the joint project, Nintendo said last month, will be “Miitomo,” an entertainment app built around communication functions. Both companies’ share prices fell substantially afterward—partly, analysts said, because the announcement also pushed back the launch to March from the initial goal of by year-end, and partly because “Miitomo” doesn’t seem to qualify as a game. Analysts and fans described it is a WeChat -like conversation tool, using Nintendo’s Mii avatar franchise.
Mr. Moriyasu shied away Wednesday from clearly calling “Miitomo” a game, but repeatedly said its rich entertainment features, which will continue to be added to via updates after the official product launch, make it more than just a chat or communication tool.
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