When it comes to mobile games, Nintendo has a weird track record. While it's had a hand in some of the most innovative and highest-grossing apps to release on iOS and Android over the past few years, it also released some outright duds which made everyone question if it really knew what it was doing or not.
Partnering with DeNA, a Japanese mobile developer, Nintendo made its mobile phone debut with Miitomo in 2015. It was a weird social app which didn’t feature much in the way of gameplay yet still adopted a freemium pay structure, and it hit with a resounding thud. Though some enjoyed the simple app, it never really saw mainstream success in North American and was de-listed in 2018.
The same could be said of Super Mario Run, Nintendo’s other 2015 mobile outing. It felt in many ways like a small slice of the New Super Mario games adapted four touchscreen devices, but the major stumbling block was that, upon release, the full game cost ten dollars. When compared to a regular first-party Nintendo game, that may sound like a steal, but the big N clearly didn’t seem to understand that asking for a tenner on mobile is sort of the equivalent of charging a hundred dollars for a console game; it’s just way too much. Needless to say, Mario Run was more or less forgotten after a short while.
More recently, we’ve seen Nintendo partner with Cygames to create Dragalia Lost, an RPG dungeon-crawler which was a let down thanks to some fairly egregious gacha mechanics. Beyond that, the most recent failure, Dr. Mario World, relies far too heavily on microtransactions, outright limiting a user’s playtime unless they pony up the cash to buy more energy… or health, or whatever they choose to call it.
This isn’t to say there hasn't been good ones in the past; Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp was a decent time, and Pokémon Go, though not an in-house developed game, was a worldwide phenomenon. With that in mind, what could be next for Nintendo on the mobile front?
We do know that Mario Kart Tour, an adaptation of the famous Mario Kart franchise, will be making its way to mobile devices sometime before the end of the year. That said, while it would be awesome to race friends through the mushroom kingdom online without the prerequisite of owning a Nintendo Switch, but murmurings from those who had a chance to participate in the beta back in May seem to suggest that the final product will be swamped with microtransactions the likes of which we aren’t used to from the generally pro-consumer company.
It may be a daring suggestion, but Nintendo may want to attempt to bring the Legend of Zelda franchise to the mobile market. The release of Cadence of Hyrule suggests that it may have relaxed its tight grip on the property a bit, and it would be interesting to see such a massive franchise condensed into something that would work well given the limitations of the mobile platform.
In fact, we’ve already seen Zelda operate fairly well on the Nintendo DS, and the differences between the platforms are less severe than most would think. Link controlled well enough with the stylus, and it doesn’t seem like much of a leap from there to modern-day smartphones.
Yet, a fully-fledged, story-based experience probably wouldn’t feel right on a platform typically ill-suited for anything that lasts longer than ten minutes at a time, so a neat alternative would be to introduce a sort of Zelda-maker-esque mechanic. Players could create their own simple dungeons, share them, and download levels from other users. It may only end up being a rough approximation of the classic Zelda experience, but it would serve as a compelling and surprisingly deep experience, which is something Nintendo has yet to provide us with on mobile.