[Update] Kimishima: Super Mario Run numbers “as expected”, 2-3 mobile games per year from 2017

Update: in another interview (with Sankei), Tatsumi Kimishima talked about Nintendo releasing “more than 3 smartphone games” per year, as opposed to 2-3 from the Kyoto Shimbun interview. He reiterated that monetization and the target markets would depend on the “nature of the games”. In other words, don’t necessarily expect a 10$ premium game released in 150 countries at once for the next mobile game.

Source: Serkan Toto

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Earlier this week, Nintendo announced that Super Mario Run was downloaded over 40 million times in just 4 days: an all-time high for the App Store. And today, Mario’s first outing on mobile topped 50 million downloads… in other words, 10 million additional downloads in roughly two days. At this rate, Super Mario Run may well end up reaching 100 million downloads even before the Android version is released.

In a short interview with the Kyoto Shimbun, Tatsumi Kimishima explained that numbers for Super Mario Run corresponds to what Nintendo was expecting. No doubt the company will share more data on February 1st, during the next meeting with investors.

Kimishima also reconfirmed that Super Mario Run would be released on Android next year, though he didn’t give even the vaguest of release windows.

Super Mario Run is Nintendo’s second game for smart devices, and originally, the company was supposed to release 5 of those before April 2017. There’s the Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing games, releasing in 2017, and a 5th game that will not make it in time before the end of the current Fiscal Year.

But there’s one thing everyone is wondering… what is Nintendo planning to do once the 5 initial games have been released? Naturally, Nintendo isn’t simply going to stop releasing games on smart devices, and Tatsumi Kimishima confirmed just that in that interview with the Kyoto Shimbun.

In fact, he even revealed that Nintendo was planning to release 2 to 3 mobile games each year from 2017. Naturally, he didn’t say what those games would be, or what franchise they would be based on (we don’t even know what the 5th game from the initial line-up is!).

But Kimishima’s statement confirms one important thing: Nintendo’s strategy regarding smart devices hasn’t changed, and the company is focusing on quality over quantity.

Source: Kyoto Shimbun
Via: Serkan Toto