Nintendo’s financial results briefing didn’t just shed light on the company’s coffers, but its mobile gaming roadmap.

Following its "unexpected alliance" with DeNA, Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata used the financials furore to announce a target of five smartphone titles to be launched by the end of its next fiscal year – that is, March 2017.

And the first will be launched by the end of 2015. 

“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," Iwata said.

It's a plan

He made pains to acknowledge that Nintendo’s experiences for developing on handheld platforms are very different to the realities of creating games on smartphones.

"All of our IP can be considered for a smart device game. On the other hand, since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game.”

He continued, "Also, 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 concluded that appropriate IPs would have to be “carefully selected".