Nintendo announced Friday that it is joining the mobile gaming craze with plans to release its first game for smartphones later this year.
The Japanese game developer won't stop there, as it added that it will release four more mobile titles in 2017, according to Engadget. Releasing five mobile games in two years doesn't sound like a lot, but Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said it's the right strategy for his company.
"When we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all," Iwata said.
Nintendo said it has several challenges to deal with while entering the mobile game market, such as fans of its Wii U platform getting use to smartphone touchscreens as replacements for game controls, FOX21News reported. The company said the unpredictability of the market could also make success difficult to achieve, so it will have to be careful about picking characters and franchises for the games.
"The odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game," Nintendo said. "If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all."
Top mobile titles Nintendo will have to contend with include "Angry Birds," Jungle Run," "Candy Crush" and "Subway Surfers."
Nintendo said it will have its first mobile game available to smartphone users by the end of this year, and the rest will be available by March 2017, The Next Web reported. Other details, such as what characters will appear in the games, have yet to be revealed.
The announcement follows two months after Nintendo revealed it was working with mobile game developer DeNA on a new membership service that will let people play games on mobile devices as well as the Wii U and 3DS. While the company didn't say which games would be available in the service or how much membership will cost, it did say that it will make the service available to gamers this fall.
