Some people may remember the name iQue, being the company that Nintendo founded as a joint venture in order to bring Nintendo games into China long before the Tencent partnership. They’ve since been around making helping localize games into Simplified Chinese and bringing over consoles like the 3DS into China, but it seems that they might be moving into game development themselves. [Thanks, Resetera!]
Since July 2017, iQue’s classification has been changed from Sales Agency to development, localization, and testing. While iQue is continuing with its localization process, it’s possible they are headed into game development. This is supported by its website, where in job listings it says that they are hiring to develop games for Nintendo-related platforms.
That said, it could be possible that iQue might only be helping with the grunt work, while Nintendo continues to focus the main parts of development in Japan. However, with the new deal with Tencent, this could be one of the reasons why iQue has been shifted towards being its own game studio. If so, this would make iQue Nintendo’s first joint partnership game studio within China.
