Rumour swirls that Nintendo Software Technology is considering a complete shift to mobile development, moving away from the position that they have long held in exclusively working on Nintendo’s platforms.
Remembered for their work on Wave Race: Blue Storm, 1080° Avalanche, Metroid Prime Hunters and the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series, signs of such impending change were first seen in a job advertisement that had implied that the Redmond-based studio were investigating mobile development.
Nintendo Life has reportedly learned that the posting was made somewhat hastily at the request of studio president Shigeki Yamashiro, who, according to their source, is currently exploring whether it would be worthwhile to see Nintendo Software Technology focus their efforts entirely as a mobile orientated studio.
While they have yet to enter production on any mobile games, that is more in part to the fact that Nintendo Co. Ltd have yet to authorise the proposed new direction. But even internally the idea hasn’t been met particularly positively by the studio’s developers, who applied for their roles on the basis they would be contributing to games made specifically for Nintendo’s own hardware.
Whether their proposal will eventually come to pass remains to be seen, but Nintendo is being cautious in their approach to the volatile mobile market. So far they have only committed to releasing five mobile titles up until March 2017, developed in partnership with DeNA.
