Speculation has been swirling ever since Nintendo Co Ltd announced that it would start developing mobile games through a partnership with DeNA Co Ltd, and now the Japanese game maker has finally announced that five new games will be coming to smartphones by March 2017.

“You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said during an investor meeting.

He added, “We will strive to expand this business into global markets at a steady pace so that eventually we will entertain hundreds of millions of people all around the world. We are aiming to make this one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure.”

While Nintendo’s home console sales have been weak, especially compared to the runaway success of the Wii, the company’s handheld games have continued to perform well. Nintendo revealed yesterday that it had just had its first profitable year since 2011, thanks largely to stellar sales of Nintendo 3DS hardware and games.

New territory for Nintendo

This news bodes well for the future of mobile games from the company, but the transition to smartphone gaming will take Nintendo out of its comfort zone.

With very few exceptions, Nintendo has almost never released its first-party titles on systems not developed by the company, and unless they have a surprise Nintendo phone announcement, that is all going to change as the company moves into smartphone games.

Iwata admits that Nintendo will have to take a different approach to mobile games than it has for its other platforms.

“If we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result,” Iwata said.

“If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.”