DeNA prioritizing Nintendo apps, about 100 people working on Mario/Fire Emblem/Animal Crossing

It’s today that DeNa held its usual meeting with investors, about its financial results for the first half of the current Fiscal Year. As usual, Serkan Toto attended the meeting, and shared the juiciest tidbits on Twitter.

He reports that DeNA considers the joint development of games/apps for Nintendo its “highest priority”, and it’s for that reason they’re going to reallocate resources to that (their partnership is most likely continuing way beyond 2017). No doubt this must all be a pretty lucrative venture for DeNA, or they wouldn’t double down on it.

Right now, the company has about 100 employees working on Super Mario Run and the Fire Emblem / Animal Crossing mobile games. It was explained that more could be added as needed. Speaking of Super Mario Run, Nintendo is still planning on releasing it before the end of the year (on iOS). It looks like DeNA had to cooperate very closely with Nintendo on this one (client and server-side).

Reminder: last month, the same Serkan Toto reported that DeNA was actually developing Super Mario Run, and that Nintendo was simply taking care of Quality Assurance (the game itself it still designed and directed by Nintendo, though).

About the Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing, it looks like their business model isn’t set in stone yet, but Free 2 Play was hinted at. Finally, about the Nintendo Switch, DeNA confirmed they were not working on games for it: they are simply partners.

Super Mario Run (iOS) will be released in December. The Android version will follow later down the line.

Source: Serkan Toto