Since they popularized the category with the Game Boy in 1989 Nintendo has been the king of mobile gaming, selling over 400 million portable gaming systems. Competitors like Sega with it’s Game Gear and Sony with their Playstation portables have never managed to approach Nintendo’s level of success. The Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo’s newest handheld console and the first to be launched in the smartphone era, has sold reasonably well since it's introduction in 2011 — just over 50 million units — but at only half the annual rate of it’s predecessor the Nintendo DS, which moved 20 million units per year over it’s lifetime. These flagging sales numbers combined with Google's 1 billion active Android users and sales of Apple’s iOS devices passing 1 billion in January have had analysts, journalists, and Nintendo fans alike clambering that Nintendo has a smartphone problem.

For years Nintendo’s handheld business was a steady constant for the company amidst tumultuous transitions between home console generations. While Sony floundered in the new mobile landscape with failed efforts like the Xperia Play phone and PlayStation Mobile, Nintendo remained silent, leaving fans to speculate about what Nintendo Mobile might look like. By the time they announced a partnership with DeNA, a Japanese company that focuses on making mobile games for smartphones, the dynamics of the app stores had shifted away from valuing the premium content that Nintendo is known for. This wasn’t a partnership made from a position of power and confidence. A bet on quality in the face of the overwhelming choice and churn of today’s app stores, even by a giant like Nintendo, seems like a fools errand.

Their choice to partner with DeNA, a company who’s portfolio is filled with the kind of run-of-the-mill free-to-play games endemic on mobile today is indicative that any kind of positive outcome from this partnership will be strictly financial for the parties involved. While the deal gives Nintendo a clear path to get their characters and games on to smartphones and in front of the next generation of gamers, it is also a deathblow for those clinging to the hope that Nintendo Mobile would mean innovative, interesting, original games. This is part of why it’s so viscerally unpleasant to watch them sacrifice their beloved characters at the altar of the micro-transaction in service of the bottom line — more so than Nintendo’s other marketing and merchandising efforts over the years.

As Nintendo’s fortunes creep back into the black, partially on the strength and value of the intellectual property they're looking to leverage in the DeNA deal, perhaps the creative voices in Kyoto can postpone or halt the spiritual dilution of the great gaming institution. Or perhaps 'Clash of Kongs' will simply be regarded as a necessary evil while they continue work on their next console — where they will continue to create great games, as they always have. With Nintendo’s stated plan being to release one game by the end 2015 and four more by 2017, they won’t have to wait much longer for the coins to start rolling in.