Nintendo CEO talks about plans for smartphone games, says most will be developed in-house
Exclusive: Nintendo CEO Reveals Plans for Smartphones — It's official: Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda will appear on smartphones and tablets at last—and that's just the start.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two days after Nintendo's partnership with DeNA to bring its games and IP to smartphones, and answers the question that deal left open: who actually builds these games? The CEO's answer — mostly Nintendo's own teams, not outside developers — keeps Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda production under company control even as distribution moves onto phones and tablets.
The commitment set up everything in the related coverage: Kimishima's later plan to ship two-to-three mobile games a year starting in 2017, reported work on Zelda for smartphones following Animal Crossing, and ultimately the 2020 moment when Nintendo reconsidered smartphone development altogether after Animal Crossing's success pulled focus back to its own hardware.
First-order effects
- Nintendo's internal development teams take on smartphone titles alongside console projects, while DeNA's role narrows toward infrastructure and operations rather than game creation.
- Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda become active mobile franchises, putting Nintendo's most protected IP on app-store release schedules for the first time.
Second-order effects
- An in-house pipeline forces a cadence decision — which is exactly what Kimishima formalized with the two-to-three-games-per-year target — turning mobile from a one-off experiment into a managed slate competing for the same studio resources as Nintendo's hardware lineup.
- Rival platform holders and publishers with dormant IP now face pressure to answer whether their own franchises go mobile under internal control or via licensing partners.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through the 2020 pullback, the structural endpoint is mobile as a funnel into Nintendo's own platforms rather than a standalone profit center — the console-to-service flywheel absorbing the phone instead of ceding it to external developers.
The trend: Platform holders are bringing franchise development in-house on smartphones first and retreating to their own ecosystems second, with mobile's role decided by how well it feeds console engagement.