First off, in DeNA’s Q1 financial report, the company mentions that it’s “currently making announcement plans”, which indicates that we’ll probably be hearing soon about the collaboration titles with Nintendo. As stated before, the first mobile game will arrive later this year and there should be around five titles available for smart devices by March 2017.
Additionally, DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako further commented on DeNA’s partnership with Nintendo, while at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015.
He said:
“The Nintendo deal is a huge, huge deal. Nintendo has the best IP, and IP that’s perfect matched to smartphones”.
Asako then spoke about how talks with Nintendo began several years ago, and they originally had hoped that Nintendo would be interested in releasing games on Mobage, their own mobile selling platform.
“It took us 5 or 6 years to convince them. We wanted to convince them to release games on Mobage [DeNA’s browser platform]. They didn’t like it. Five years later, the industry has changed. The market has changed. Nintendo wanted to attract a lot of people who they don’t reach today, including China and emerging countries.”
Asako later stated that he his confident in what the Nintendo and DeNA partnership could bring to the table, and that it is important for mobile games to be easy to find.
“I think our games might change the way people play mobile games.”
“Successful mobile games needs to be discoverable. I’m convinced there will be hundreds of millions of people who will want to play free-to-start Nintendo games.”
Finally, Asako added that few games are able to obtain success in the west, China and Japan, which are worth roughly $5 billion as mobile gaming markets.
You might also like to take a look at the corresponding part of the panel held at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015.