The Wii U has been struggling at retail, leading to underperformance and losses in Nintendo's financial reports. They have a plan, however, to turn it all around with smartphone apps.
In a new report, sources close to Nintendo have told The Japan Times that Nintendo is offering conversion software to developers so they can bring their smartphone games to the Wii U. Nintendo believes that this will help spark sales with consumers, which will in turn increase the amount of popular games developed for the console.
The source also supposedly says that Nintendo is "developing new software" on its own, but it's not clear if this means Nintendo is making full retail titles, or working on smaller, smartphone-like apps for the Wii U themselves. Given how obvious it is that they're making regular software, the context of these claims seem to suggest the latter.
This is only a rumor for now, but I fail to see how adding existing smartphone apps would do much, if anything, for the Wii U. Instead it serves as further evidence that Nintendo is becoming desperate and disconnected from what consumers are really looking for out of a Nintendo product. Now, if Nintendo considered porting some of their games to smartphones, then they'd be on to something.
