Nintendo will leverage smartphones for awareness with apps, possibly games

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has today told an investor and analyst meeting today that company will use smart devices (phones and tablets) to reach out to customers.

A small group of developers at the company has already been put to work.

Iwata says Nintendo will have to come up with something ‘truly valuable’ to get people’s attention. To this end Iwata has put no restrictions on this development team and they can create whatever they want – even possible games. “I have not given any restrictions to the development team, even not ruling out the possibility of making games or using our game characters.” Iwata told the room.

However, don’t get any ideas, Nintendo isn’t shifting or expanding into full scale development and even went as far as to say “if you report that we will release Mario on smart devices, it would be a completely misleading statement. It is our intention to release some application on smart devices this year that is capable of attracting consumer attention and communicating the value of our entertainment offerings, so I would encourage you to see how our approach yields results”.

Nintendo will continue to put effort and time into making it’s services available on smartphone such as Miiverse and the eShop.

Earlier this week the Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported that it believed Nintendo were going to make ‘free mini-games’ for smart phones – Nintendo quickly denied it. Perhaps they weren’t too far off?

Source: Nintendo IR