Nintendo has outlined its mobile app plans as part of its financial year reports.
Although Nintendo has already confirmed you won’t see Nintendo games coming to mobile, the company will use the smartphone and tablet platform to market its titles.
The company has release a trio of screenshots for a mobile concept as part of its rather disappointing financial results, where Nintendo posted a huge $500 million operating loss.
Before you get too excited, apparently this isn’t even an app. It’s a mobile version of a web portal that will enable more people to get aware of Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS titles.
“This web service will enable more people to easily watch Nintendo’s official videos, view rankings, watch videos that their friends have shared and videos of tournaments in which they have participated”, reads the outline Nintendo provided.
At present the web service is being temporarily called “Mario Kart TV” and will attempt to reach out to customers with Nintendo Network IDs, although you’ll be able to use the service without one.
“We will work on providing this type of service so that players can enjoy video games more and be in contact with them even when they are not in front of a video game system.”
Nintendo has always maintained it would never bring its software to rival hardware, so obviously this is their attempt to tackle mobile in a way that won’t penetrate its software sales.
“We recognise that there are a lot of smartphones and tablets out there, and so what we’re doing is we’re being very smart in how we use these devices as marketing tools for our content,” said Nintendo America President Reggie Fils-Aime back in December.
“We’re also doing a lot of experimentation of what I would call the little experiences you can have on your smartphone and tablet that will drive you back to your Nintendo hardware. It’s largely going to be much more marketing activity-orientated, but we’ve done little things where there’s some element of gameplay – a movement, a shaking, something like that.”
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