Nintendo has officially announced Nintendo Systems, a new joint venture they have launched with DeNA.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Nintendo Systems has shared this message on their official website:
“Nintendo Systems was born in April 2023, led by a team of engineers from Nintendo and DeNA to create a system that facilitates the delivery of Nintendo’s entertainment to our customers.”
Nintendo Systems further describes their role as “development and operation of systems related to the digital part of Nintendo’s business”, and “planning, development and operation of new services”.
What Nintendo Systems is supposed to do exactly isn’t quite clear at the moment. But we can start by talking about what we definitely know Nintendo Systems is not, or is no longer going to be about.
Nintendo’s first venture with mobile company DeNA was in making Nintendo mobile games, using Nintendo’s IP. Among the games Nintendo made with DeNA are Mario Kart Tour, Fire Emblem Heroes, Miitomo, Super Mario Run, and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
Nintendo’s other ventures in mobile gaming include an original property, Dragalia Lost, Pikmin Bloom, Dr Mario World, and of course, Pokemon Go.
Nintendo’s mobile ventures have had varying degrees of success. Even without the access to confidential information, however, it’s well known that these mobile ventures are generally seen as disappointments.
Throughout their time making games with DeNA, Nintendo have reported that their mobile division made revenue, but hardly enough money to take over the company’s efforts. Similarly, other mobile companies demonstrated they were very well capable of competing with Nintendo on mobile, in terms of revenue, popularity, MAUs and other metrics.
The most telling sign of Nintendo’s about face on mobile games is their entry into new ventures. We have already seen Nintendo’s success with their Super Nintendo World theme parks, under Universal Studios’ theme park system. Similarly, we are looking at the pending release of The Super Mario Bros Movie.
Nintendo has definitely signaled a shift away from making new mobile games, in favor of other ways of leveraging their IP. They can still continue their business relationship with DeNA because of the potential of DeNA’s other mobile specialties.
DeNA’s real bread and butter isn’t video games, but Mobage. Mobage is broadly described as a mobile platform. It’s certainly a marketplace for DeNA’s games, but years before that DeNA found success building it as an online shopping portal. DeNA itself got started on online auctions and online shopping before bringing that business to mobile.
So the potential of DeNA’s mobile specialty for Nintendo remains unlimited. They could, for example, build a mobile version of the Switch eShop, or an eShop for the Switch’s successor, that would make buying and managing games easier than on the console itself.
DeNA could also launch a platform for selling Nintendo hardware and merchandise, and expand it from physical Japan or US based stores, to a global enterprise.
And then DeNA could simply take over management of services like Pokemon Bank, and run other similar systems as well. Could DeNA bring Nintendo’s online play systems up to the level that Sony and Microsoft has?
This is the potential of Nintendo’s new venture with DeNA.
