To conclude the financial results briefing for fiscal year ended March 2018, Nintendo shared performance updates on its current smartphone games and plans for what’s to come.
Here’s more from company president Tatsumi Kimishima:
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp was released in October of last year, and many people have played the game since then, especially adult women. Moving forward, we will make updates to add game content and continue to hold weekly events. Television commercials will air in Japan as well. We intend to continue to improve the service in ways that make the game more fun for consumers, all the while considering how this title contributes to revenue.
The number of Super Mario Run downloads continues to grow, despite the fact that it was released over a year ago now. This title is maintaining a base of approximately 20 million monthly active users. And as one of our evergreen titles for smart devices, we will continue to look to it as a way to maximize the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP across an expanding number of consumers worldwide.
Fire Emblem Heroes became available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Thailand, and Singapore as of November of last year, and this February marked the one-year anniversary of the application’s release. We have been able to keep our active users while expanding the user base, and sales have continued to grow without slowing. One might expect the Fire Emblem series to be most popular within Japan, but for Fire Emblem Heroes the share of overseas sales is steadily growing. Moving forward, we will work to continually expand on measures designed to excite consumers.
For the smart-device business, we will continue the services for existing applications while also releasing new applications in order to increase Nintendo’s presence in this business. The efforts we have made to date have yielded certain responses to our goal of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP. Even so, we have not reached a satisfactory profit point yet, so our goal is to further expand the scale of this business to develop it into one of the pillars of revenue.
Today, we announced the partnership with Cygames for a new gaming application for smart devices, aiming to bring to life the shared vision of a new gaming experience with worldwide appeal. As a result of this partnership, Nintendo will release Dragalia Lost, an all-new original gaming application, in the summer of 2018, starting with Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. With the support of Nintendo’s group companies, it will launch in North America and Europe as well. The game was designed by Cygames and co-developed with Nintendo. Both companies will jointly operate the game. More information about the game content will be announced on the website today (* not in English). For the purpose of facilitating the partnership, Nintendo will obtain approximately 5 percent of Cygames’s issued stocks mainly through a third party allocation of its treasury stock.
In addition to the titles already described for the smartdevice business, we also plan to release Mario Kart Tour as a Mario Kart application for smart devices during this fiscal year (April 2018 – March 2019). We will work to continuously expand our business through these titles.
