In 2015, the late Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata took to a Japanese stage to make an announcement that could conceivably turn the tide of the company’s history. In one of the last major deals that Iwata made before his passing a few months later, the executive announced that Nintendo would be developing software for mobile devices. Nintendo was acquiescing to angry shareholders upset that the Japanese developer was not leveraging their properties in the high-revenue mobile market and, to observers at the time, potentially changing everything we knew about the company.
But that would not be the case. It has been over four years since that announcement was made, three years since Shigeru Miyamoto landed in San Francisco to lend his creations and credibility to Apple’s 2016 keynote, two years since Nintendo overhauled its sales tactics for the mobile market, and its mobile games have not changed the world. They have barely changed the company, which is both a consequence of Nintendo’s own plans for mobile and its lack of experience in the arena. However you look at it, the house that Mario built has failed to make the dent in the mobile game industry that everyone assumed it would.
Source: IGN.com Nintendo's Mobile Game Ventures Never Amounted To Much