We All Saw This Coming, Right? – Nintendo is now Mobile

Nintendo has officially tossed their hat into the mobile gaming market. Nintendo confirmed early this morning that they had formed a strategic partnership with mobile gaming company, DeNA. Many of you are probably scratching your head over DeNA. “Who are these guys and why do they get to fondle my beloved Nintendo!?” is what you might be saying at this moment. DeNA (pronounced DNA) is huge in the Japanese mobile gaming market partially because they came up with the idea back in 2010 to launch a social network fueled gaming service for mobile devices. DeNA has also brought many Western properties to the Asian mobile market, such as the Peter Molyneux title Godus and titles based on Marvel Heroes properties.

One of the most exciting parts of this announcement is that cross-platform gameplay may finally be possible on a Nintendo platform. According to the press release there are plans to launch a service near the end of 2015 that will allow users to purchase a game on their tablet, phone, etc. and play that game on a PC, Wii U or wide range of other devices. Finally the dream of the multiplatform Virtual Console may become a reality. I would gladly pay $15/month to access tons of old Nintendo games on all my devices.

What all this means is still kind of up in the air. Nintendo has said that this is not preventing them from developing the successor to their wildly popular 3DS. But, it does make you wonder what the world could be like without Nintendo hardware. I hope that day doesn’t come for quite a while.