10 Recent Truths About Gaming We've Just Learned

Nintendo has been one of the biggest players in the video game development and console market since the earliest days of the industry, so it wasn't entirely unusual when it decided to try out the mobile gaming market, though it was contradictory to Nintendo's previously established doctrine.

In 2014, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said, "The smartphone market is probably more competitive than the console business," Iwata told Bloomberg. "We have had a console business for 30 years, and I don't think we can just transfer that over onto a smartphone model." Regardless, Nintendo plowed ahead with nothing but it's insanely valuable name recognition and huge library of games and characters to choose from.

There is a lot of competition in the mobile market, so many in the industry were skeptical that Nintendo could enter so late in the game and make much of a profit. As it happens, by the end of 2019, Nintendo had raked in more than $1 billion from its app sales alone.

That revenue stems from only six games the company developed going into 2020. All-told, there had been 452 million downloads of Nintendo's smartphone apps on iOS and Android since launch, with Fire Emblem Heroes taking the majority of that money, with $656 million, followed by Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp's $131 million haul).