At a shareholder meeting today, Nintendo announced a partnership with a Japanese company called DeNA to create mobile games using Nintendo IPs. It begins people. Mario and Link on your smartphone. To quell fears that Nintendo would be abandoning hardware entirely in favour of mobile development, Nintendo also announced that their next system, code named NX, is currently in development and due to be officially revealed next year (with a release in 2017?). This could be a 3DS successor, Wii U successor, or some hybrid portable/console system. We don't know yet. Nintendo Life has compiled a handy guide/faq on everything that we know so far.
Ninty just branching out to the mobile market to grab some of that easy cash, but you will no doubt still need Nintendo hardware to play real first party stuff.
I guess they held out for so long due to the Philips CD-I fiasco, afraid of what it might mean for their brands if they weren't in absolute control of them. And I can see why, as they were abysmal.
No, they held out because they fundamentally don't understand the smartphone/tablet market and have no interest in doing so. That's why they're farming this out to another company, after all.
This has been a Nintendo thing since the Gamecube, maybe N64: Nintendo puts out a handful of games per system that are must-play killer games--and they are usually phenomenal--and then we're talking about their next generation console already. A lack of any real third party support highlights this. I think a lot of people buy Nintendos for Nintendo games, and I really hope they don't lose focus on the style and quality of games that built their house. I'm not trying to present a false dichotomy here; maybe they can excel at both. It was more just an off the cuff remark.
*psst* They already have. *cough*Pokémon Shuffle*cough*. It's ok, but man is it F2P. They want people to buy, buy, buy.
Your worries about Nintendo's future is unfounded, you'll see. Ninty will be fine. Edit: Oh, and also this:
The only problem with that is they would only support it for three years, then they would kill of a major games charactor for no real reason, the just before it ended we would find out it was really a older console like the wii under the hood all this time.
Yea I'm not too thrilled about it either . Amiibo is another thing I'm not too happy with. Another way for them to try to make money with off of people. $13 or so a pop adds up. I'd rather just get other games with that money instead of wasting it on figures.
I see that as a two-part issue. They of course don't understand that particular market, but at the same time, they kept their cards very close because of the previous time they allowed another company to use their properties, and that was only because of a previous agreement that stemmed from developing a Nintendo CD component (What was originally going to be the Playstation until they broke an agreement with Sony and signing with Philips and then cancelling it altogether). The CD-I games were universally panned for using the characters in ways that were very far from their mythos. Nintendo tried to distance themselves from it. They never allowed another company to do that until now, because of that. Doing so now, I could see them doing so somewhat reluctantly and only because the market is so huge.
Ok, maybe that one? I forgot about it, maybe because it's so recent. Isn't that the one with the crossover between Dynasty Warriors? Aside from that though? Has there been anything else?
There's a quite few actually. Capcom handled the Zelda Oracle games. Namco developed Mario Kart GP and GP 2 for the arcades. Sega developed F-Zero Gx. Even the entire Pokemon franchise is developed by a third party studio.