Nintendo's mobile gaming endeavors are starting to slow down, as the company shifts its focus to꧅wards its highly successful console business and away from the smartphone market, where it has failed to gain traction.
There was a lot of pressure for Nintendo to break into the mobile market during the Nintendo Wii U era, at a time when pundits claimed that the failure of the system to find an audience spelled the end of the company's attempts to break into the console market. This led to the release of games like Super Mario Run and Miitomo, both of which underperformed at the market.
Pokémon Go is owned by several entities and Nintendo is only partly linked to its success. The outlier among these titles is Fire Emblem Heroes, which continues to pull in millions of dollars around the world. This is surprising when you consider that Nintendo was planning on killing the series if Fire Emblem Awakening underperformed on the 3DS, but the fans have been turning out in droves for the recent Fire Emblem games. Highly-anticipated games like Mario Kart Tour were criticized for their lack of features at lau🅘nch, leading to interest drying up over time.
It seems that Nintendo is moving away from the mobile market thanks to the runaway success of the Switch. According to , Nintendo had always intended for the mobile games to appease investors and to promote the games that were being released on consoles, where they would claim all of the profits. The Switch is seeing amazing sales, with games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Ring-Fit Adventure shipping millions of units as people look for ways to occupy the🎐ir time during the lockdown, so the mobile games are no longer needed. There will still be Nintendo mobile games released in the future, but these will come out at a slower rate than initially promised.
Nintendo has had trouble maximizing the profits of its mobile games, as it isn't willing to go too far into the freemium/gacha model. There have been reports in the past of Nintendo butting heads with mobile developer DeNA, as they want to avoid players spending too much money on their games. Nintendo wants to maintain its 🐼reputation as a family-friendly system, and if it falls too deeply into the gacha/loot crate hole, then it could lose a chunk of its audience for its console market.
The demise of the Nintendo mobile market will be music to the ears of many Nintendo fans, as the games were usually a letdown, either in terms of gameplay or their monetization practices. The runaway success of the Nintendo Switch may have spared us from a horrible The Legend of Zelda title with touchscreen controls that bring us back to the days of The Phantom Hourglass. The mobile games won't be going away entirely, but Nintendo's focus will be on its console games, ꧅where it belongs.
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