Nintendo detailed: DS games coming to Wii U, Mario Cart 8 date, health tech

In a recent press briefing, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata shared the company’s latest revenue earnings and gave us an idea at what the future might hold for the somewhat struggling Japanese gaming company.

A lot of things got announced recently. First and foremost, as reported by Wall Street Journal, Nintendo DS games are making their way to the Wii U’s virtual console. This means that certain classic titles to be playable on the Wii U Gamepad.

Nintendo is keeping its games away from the mobile sphere but said that it wants to expand its Nintendo Network ID to smart devices instead to communicate better with its customers. This might include on-demand entertainment and other services.

Nintendo further says that Mario Kart 8 will launch in May this year and that the GamePad’s profile is to be increased. The company wants greater focus on the controller slash tablet device, saying that consumers don’t fully understand the GamePad. It’s not meant to be a Wii peripheral, you know.

One might think that Nintendo would look to lucrative mobile ecosystems to channel its popular software but we won’t see Nintendo games flocking the Play Store anytime soon. Iwata simply stated that it “doesn’t make sense for Nintendo to do business on smartphones.” He did say that Nintendo will start licensing its characters to other companies to better market its existing offering.

Iwata further said that a price cut of the gaming console is not an option but said that the Wii U console “still has a negative impact on Nintendo’s profits, owning mainly to its (price) markdown in the US and Europe and software of software, which has high profit margins, did not grow sufficiently.” Revenue dipped by a rather massive 8% and Iwata acknowledged that it’s mainly due to Nintendo’s hardware woes, like the misunderstood GamePad perhaps.

The Wii U, launched in 2012 and has since then sold 5.9-million units worldwide. With only a few months since launch, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are right on Nintendo’s heals with around 4-million figured sales each.

Furthermore, Nintendo is also going to focus on non-wearable health tech in the future. The WSJ writes, “Nintendo is trying out something completely new: non-wearables to monitor your health.” While it’s still pretty vague as to what that might exactly entail, we’ve seen the Xbox One’s Kinect being praised in this field with innovative heart rate monitoring and muscle tracking capabilities so things might get interesting.