The Wii U’s failure forced Nintendo to look elsewhere — into mobile

polygon.com:

Though Nintendo is known for mobile consoles — Game Boy, DS, Nintendo Switch — it’s never really been known as a mobile game developer, i.e., a studio making games for your phone. But that’s not to say that Nintendo hasn’t done so. In fact, you can count the number of Nintendo mobile games on two hands. Since 2016, Nintendo has released eight games that qualify, a strategy that’s tied to the failure of the Wii U.

A successor to the Wii, Nintendo’s Wii U was released in 2012. Though it iterated on a few of the Wii’s features, improved its online functionality and added the unique GamePad controller, the console was hardly a success. Nintendo sold just over 13 million Wii U consoles, making it one of the company’s worst-selling systems. Nintendo underperformed financially because of the Wii U — and its new mobile game strategy was a play to mitigate that failure, according to Bloomberg. Former Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata, who led the company from 2002 until his death in 2015, told Japanese newspaper Nikkei in 2012 that mobile games were “absolutely not” an option.

“If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo,” he said. “Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It’s the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It’s probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones we’d make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid and long term competitive strength.”

But in 2015, Iwata told Time that Nintendo was able to create a strategy that worked for the company: “More specifically, we will not merely port games developed for our dedicated game systems to smart devices just as they are — we will develop brand new software which perfectly matches the play style and control mechanisms of smart devices,” he said.

Iwata continued: “We have come to the stage where we can say that we will be able to develop and operate