DeNA Spent 5 Years Trying to Partner With Nintendo for Mobile Games
The mobile industry giant, DeNA, has been trying to get Nintendo to join the smartphone gaming market for the past 5 years. Now, they hope to reach over 100 million users in this exciting joint venture.
In an interview with GamesBeat, DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako spoke about the superpower partnership between his company and Nintendo in order to introduce its IPs to the mobile gaming market. During this talk, Asako revealed two very interesting pieces of information. The first would be that DeNA intends to use this tag team alliance to become the top mobile gaming company in the world, hoping to rise above the success King has had with Candy Crush Saga, Machine Zone with Game of War and Supercell with Clash of Clans. It is reported that the smartphone gaming market is going to be worth $30 billion by the end of the year and will rise another $10 billion over the next two. The other interesting detail Asako revealed is that his company has been in talks with Nintendo for the past 5 years in trying to get it to open its doors to the mobile gaming industry.
Here's what Asako had to say about Mario's huge potential to top the smartphone gaming market:
I’ve wanted to create something globally successful, not only for kids, but for mid-aged people and beyond. 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. 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. But actually properly design a smartphone game. I think with the strong IPs they have, and their strong game operation expertise we have, I don’t think we’re dreaming [about reaching] 100 million DAU. And by having that we can do — we wanted to get there. I think that King has that network today. With Nintendo, there’s a huge possibility of that.
The world has been begging Nintendo for years to bring its IPs and games over to the mobile format. Just two years ago, Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata claimed that we would never see his company join the mobile industry. Now, it looks like Nintendo could no longer stay in its archaic mindset where it blatantly ignored the changes of the times, and decided to finally enter the smartphone gaming market. With all the success mobile gaming has had over the past decade, it still took quite a lot of convincing to get Nintendo to join.
“Internally, we had a lot of strategic meetings,” Asako added. “The one big solution was always that there’s a giant IP holder in the market that hasn’t stepped into the smartphone environment. Really, the reason they were convinced that they wanted to work with us was that we were so determined to work with them that we have really been talking to them since 2010. Yes, we were talking to them for a long, long time. Finally, Nintendo became ready to do this. And we were ready the whole time.”
Here's to hoping Nintendo and DeNA's first mobile game is an amazing one, which is expected to launch sometime this year.