DeNA West boss: We should announce our Nintendo mobile game ‘soon’

Correction: I originally wrote that DeNA’s Shintaro Asako implied a timeline for Nintendo’s announcement, but that is not accurate. I apologize and regret the error.

SAN FRANCISCO — We’ve waited months to find out more about Nintendo’s push into mobile gaming, but we may learn all about it in the near future.

Nintendo will soon announce its first mobile game, according to what DeNA West chief executive officer Shintaro Asako said onstage today at GamesBeat 2015. He didn’t provide any specifics, but he did say something is on the way.

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“Soon, we should be able to announce about the game,” said Asako.

This jives with what Nintendo and DeNA have previously said about releasing the first mobile game. It is supposed to hit Apple and Android devices before the end of this year. As we get deep into October, that doesn’t leave a huge window for the companies to deliver on that promise.

Industry analyst Serkan Toto even recently tweeted that fans should expect “the unexpected” and “soon” when it comes to Nintendo’s first mobile release.

“I can’t say too much about the Nintendo deal,” said Asako. “But it’s a really exciting initiative.”

What Asako could say is what we’ve already heard before. He reiterated that Nintendo and DeNA will release five games between now and March 2017. But he also implied that the partnership between the two companies will continue well beyond that.

“It’s a really long-term initiative,” he said.

Proof of that? When Nintendo and DeNA announced that they were working together, they also revealed that Nintendo acquired a 10 percent stake in DeNA and DeNA, in return, acquired 1.24 percent of Nintendo’s outstanding stock. This intertwines the two entities for the foreseeable future.

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