Something that's a bit of a drowned out story is that Konami is getting some big money on the Switch via Momotaro Dentetsu: Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban! (a railroad based board game), close to two and a half million in sales and dominating the Japanese charts for over two and half months now.
The reason why I think that's significant is that I could see Konami doing what Capcom is now, with a lot of the AAA games being geared towards the Xbox, PS5, and PC markets while also having certain games technically multiplatform but geared towards the Switch audience. Why not have a series of smaller scale Castlevania titles harkening back to the GBA and DS series that would fit perfectly for a handheld system?
Maybe even something like that as well with its Hudson Soft properties, perhaps doing a continuation of Bomberman 64 down the road. Granted its just speculation, but Bomberman R was exclusive to Nintendo for over a year, so Konami clearly saw some value in the system's market potential, even early on.
Oh yeah, that franchise. I legit forgot about that, but that's practically a Japanese tradition at this point and even more Japanese-specific than DQ ever was (which saw NA releases under Dragon Warrior - it's why an ABC reporter in 1988 confused Dragon Quest as a different series entirely from Dragon Warrior).
It's worth noting that most Japanese / Western corps - not just Konami, although they're the most notable example - are already outsourcing the IP for mobile games elsewhere. One reason for this is because those corps generally lack the staff that have expertise in mobile development - it's why Nintendo teamed up with CyGames for Dragalia for example, and why Tencent are having their mobile studios develop a ****ton of games from Japanese / Western devs (Pokemon Unite and CoD Mobile as two examples). They're not the only corp that these companies license to (far from, there's a lot of 'em), but Tencent's by far the most notable.
Another reason is that the demographic interested in hardcore mobile games is huge - I'm not just talking China, but Japan, India and SEA* also have really huge chunks of people who are interested in hardcore mobile games (incl. gacha, of course). "Hardcore mobile games" feels like such a weird term given my personal preconceptions... buuuut, that's very much a legit thing in East Asia (incl. Japan) so gotta roll with it. And I wouldn't be surprised if that grows in importance even here, despite opposition to its gacha / microtransaction trappings being a global thing.
*(Wouldn't be surprised if South Korea also has this.)
They clearly know their IPs have value, is just that developing new entries for their big series would require a lot of resources. And they have been gaining a lot of money from pachinkos and other things. Also smaller IPs such as Momotaro Denmetsu have been incredibly beneficial in Japan. So I guess it's understandable in a way.
If I was Konami and I was doing good with low investment in my IPs, why would I change that?
With one caveat: Konami did legit license the Castlevania IP to a mobile studio who straight up made a Castlevania clone in order to convert it into an official game:
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... Well, that's one way to take care of any cloning.
I do wanna draw a major contrast with
DmC: Pinnacle of Combat, another mobile game licensed out by Capcom to Yunchang Studios. Not only are Capcom more actively involved to ensure the mobile game's quality, but
Yunchang seem to be a dev studio that cares a lot about the game's quality.
Which in turn highlights that regardless of nationality, the mobile sphere is shovelware-prone because the stores are largely unregulated and just as there are a lot of studios who are very concious of their efforts, there are also a lot of studios where the quick buck is priority #1.
So I have a question for you guys: What two characters do you think would please the greatest amount of people if they were revealed as the last two characters? As in, most of the Smash fanbase would be rejoicing and people would be happy or at least okay with them even if they weren't the characters they wanted. I would say Crash and Dante but I really don't know to be honest. What do you all think? (and what two characters would make YOU the most happy, no matter how far-fetched or unrealistic?)
I do think Crash and Dante are pretty good contenders, although characters like Phoenix have a surprisingly wide reach themselves. A LoL character have that rare global reach Steve has but is historically not associated with Nintendo, which is why I'm hesitant on naming that (although it could be in the conversation too). Sora, Chief, Kratos and Lara Croft are also possible contenders IMHO. And if other "second third parties" are on the cards, I'd add Chun-Li and Eggman since those are two of the very few such characters with a truly global reach themselves.
Edit: The two in my sig are amongst my most wanted, but I have a lot of 'em and some like KOS-MOS are likely not getting in.