In the wake of Nintendo's full-year financials earlier this week, we may not know very much more about its upcoming console, the NX, but one thing was hinted at very strongly; after years of trying to pretend that the smart devices revolution wasn't happening, the company is now pivoting to a stance that puts such devices at the heart of everything it does. New CEO Tatsumi Kimishima, who took on the role last September, isn't turning Nintendo into a smartphone game company, as some analysts have - shortsightedly - demanded, but their calls haven't fallen on deaf ears either; the company's vision of the future now sees mobile games not as being its only business, but as being a pillar of the company which supports, and is supported by, all its other businesses.
To put this in blunt terms; if, as seems apparent, the NX is designed to fit within a smartphone-centric strategy, then the NX is going to have serious trouble gaining traction in the kids' market - at least in Japan. Reading about Nintendo online or watching the noise made by its vocal fans, it's easy to forget that Nintendo's most consistent and loyal consumers aren't westerners in their twenties and thirties with deep wallets and deeper wells of childhood nostalgia; they're Japanese children and families. Though this market is in slow decline (demographics alone have seen to that), it's Japanese kids whose enduring affection for Nintendo's properties, generation after generation, have kept the company's consoles afloat in its home market - especially its handheld consoles, which owe much of their evergreen success to schoolyard hits Pokemon and, more recently, Yokai Watch. Much of Nintendo's value in this market comes not just from being loved by kids, but from being trusted by parents; the firm's Japanese marketing, both for 3DS and for Wii U, is a masterclass in the tricky balancing act of simultaneously making products look appealing to children, and safe to parents.
Thus, if there's one social factor that's truly played in Nintendo's favour in recent years, it's the resistance of Japanese parents to giving their children smartphones. Smart devices are increasingly common among even fairly young children in other markets, but in Japan, it's very rare for children to carry one - many schools actually ban them entirely. Special phones for children are a pretty big market; they often carry a GPS device that can be remotely tracked by a parent, and have an extremely limited set of functionality, with no capacity to install apps. Teenagers often have a smartphone, but children of primary school age carry a "dumb", child-focused phone - and of course, lacking a phone that can play games, they also carry a Nintendo handheld console. Without detracting for one second from the quality of games like Pokemon or Yokai Watch, it's this aspect of Japanese child-raising society, more than anything else, that has allowed those franchises to thrive in this market while kids elsewhere got hooked on smartphone games.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-04-29-smart-device-pivot-could-cost-nintendo-at-home