Nintendo hasn't changed its take on the nature of smartphone games, despite DeNA deal

For years Nintendo ignored, dismissed and outright insulted video games on smartphones, but then in 2013 the company announced it was tinkering with the idea of using the devices as a sort of marketing vehicle. But the company still said it wouldn't move its games to that platform.

Earlier this year, Nintendo announced plans to create new games for smart devices by partnering with mobile game maker DeNA.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon last week that despite the recent news, the company hasn't changed its opinion on the nature of gaming on smart devices.

In 2010, Fils-Aime told me that Apple wasn't having an impact on Nintendo and that the data he saw shows that gamers don't seem to stick to a single title on phones and tablets.

"Clearly," he said at the time, "it doesn't look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.

"If our games represent a range between snacks of entertainment and full meals depending on the type of game, (Apple's) aren't even a mouthful, in terms of the gaming experience you get."

Last week, Fils-Aime reiterated Nintendo's plans to create games and applications for smart devices.

"We're going to do it in a partnership with DeNA," he said. "DeNA has technical knowledge that we're leveraging. They have a rapid iteration process to drive improvement in the content that we're going to leverage, but Nintendo is going to create the content.

"We've announced that Mr. Kono, from Mario Kart fame, is going to be our lead developer on this. And so from that standpoint things haven't changed. It's our IP, we're going to leverage it and we do believe done properly it's going to drive a positive experience with the IP and drive people back to our core video system business whether it's handheld or console."