Nintendo smartphone pivot?!

Nintendo partners with DeNA

Taking Nintendo intellectual property and characters to smartphones

Nintendo was founded on September 23, 1889 by Fujasiro Yamauchi in Kyoto for the production of handmade “hanafuda” cards. Nintendo Headquarters are still located in Kyoto (you can see the Nintendo headquarters building from the Kyoto railway station).

The Chinese characters used to write Nintendo’s original Japanese company name in Japanese mean something like “leave the responsibility to heaven or to god”.

Nintendo has been through many pivots during its more than 100 years history, and Nintendo can afford to take its time to do things right, and it did when smartphones started disrupting industry sector after industry sector, and did not stop disrupting the games industry.

Nintendo has a home advantage – the epicenter of the global games industry is in Japan, and not surprisingly, Japan is by far the world’s No. 1 biggest smartphone games market by cash income (other markets are bigger in terms of free downloads, but Japan is No. 1 globally in terms of cash revenues). So Japanese game companies have a big home advantage.

The No. 1 company ranked by gross revenues of the combined total iPhone + Android app market is also a Japanese company.

Yesterday, March 18, 2015, Nintendo announced to join forces with DeNA to jointly develop smartphone games including subscription based game services as a platform to leverage Nintendo’s iconic intellectual properties and characters.

Do you understand the big picture of Japan’s games industries, which drive the global game market? Make sure you do – and read our report:

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