Nintendo Wants Players To Spend Less On Mobile Games

After years of staying off of other platforms, Nintendo has finally started venturing out, starting with mobile. It kicked off with 2016’s “Super Mario Run” and will continue this year with “Mario Kart Tour.” And in an effort to stay in good standing with its fans, Nintendo is now facing blowback from mobile partners.

Via IGN, Nintendo has been asking partners to adjust games so that players don’t have to overspend while gaming. The reason for this is to keep players from viewing Nintendo as “greedy” with a growing number of microtransactions. A Nintendo employee spoke on this to the Wall Street Journal, saying that the company views its mobile presence as more advertising for its main platforms, like the Switch.

This push from Nintendo hasn’t been met with open arms from its partners, though. CyberAgent, the developer behind “Dragalia Lost,” had to adjust the odds of earning rare characters in the game following player complaints. The company even had to cut projected earnings for the first time in over a decade because of the lower profits from the game.

“Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game. If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more,” one CyberAgent employee told the outlet.

While this is a hit for mobile developers, it speaks to the success that Nintendo has experienced since the release of the Switch and its inexperience on other platforms. The Switch has sold extremely well, outpacing the Wii U and already surpassing that system’s lifetime sales.

However, Nintendo has been very protective of its properties and hadn’t ventured outside its own platforms much, if ever. The common feature, seen in mobile games, mostly comes in the form of microtransactions as a primary means for the developers to make money. Case and point, look at all the games released by developer King, the company behind “Candy Crush.”