Nintendo agrees to bring its characters to smartphones
After years of refusing to license its characters to phones, Nintendo announced a development partnership with DeNA. The last major holdout had accepted smartphones as a legitimate place for its franchises.
Entry 140 of 164 in the record
What happened
The company's position had been consistent and public: its games belonged on its own hardware, where the experience and the business could both be controlled. That stance looked increasingly costly as phones absorbed the casual audience which had made the DS and Wii extraordinary successes, and as the Wii U failed commercially. The announced arrangement paired Nintendo's characters with a Japanese mobile developer's expertise in operating live services, with cross-holdings between the two companies and a shared online account system that would connect phones to dedicated consoles.
Careful boundaries were drawn. Executives said mobile releases would be built for phones rather than ported, would not simply replicate console games, and were partly intended to remind a huge audience that the characters existed. The applications that followed took varied approaches to monetization, including a one-time unlock price in one case, subscription-like passes in others and conventional in-app purchases elsewhere. Results ranged from a genuine hit to quiet discontinuations, but the strategic effect was not really about revenue from any single release. Nintendo's characters were now visible to people who owned no game hardware at all.
The world at the time
Smartphone games were already the industry's largest segment by revenue, driven by free-to-play design and in-app purchases. Nintendo was in a difficult stretch: the Wii U had not sold, the 3DS was past its peak, and the company had posted operating losses. Investors had spent years publicly demanding exactly this decision.
Historical significance
The most committed defender of dedicated game hardware conceded that phones were unavoidable. Treating mobile releases as promotion for consoles rather than as replacements gave other traditional publishers a template for entering the largest audience in gaming without abandoning their own platforms.
What it changed
A run of mobile titles followed, including a well-known augmented reality collaboration released the next year that reached an audience far beyond gaming. The account system introduced here became the backbone of the company's later online services. Phone releases settled into a supporting role, keeping characters familiar to people who would later buy a hybrid console.
Sources consulted
- Business and capital alliance with DeNA
- Nintendo relents and heads for smartphones
- Reporting on Nintendo mobile strategy and results
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction