The world's been screaming at Nintendo to make mobile phone games for years, and now it's announced a plan to do just that suddenly no one's quite so excited about it.
The reason for the sudden lack of enthusiasm is the name of the partner the gaming giant has chosen for its first wave of mobile titles: freemium specialist DeNA.
DeNA is the brain behind such pay-to-win mobile classics as Cupcake Carnival and Military Masters, "free" games entirely assembled around today's proven in-app purchase framework.
That some classic Nintendo franchises may soon be filled with refueling breaks, the need to buy more coins to continue and paid content packs is filling the gaming world with dread, with the hardcore element fearing this move to mobile ticks the Nintendo death clock one minute closer to SEGA o'clock.
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The good news was supposed to be that Nintendo said it won't be porting existing titles to mobile, although many took this rather badly because it suggests that DeNA's collection of outsourced developers may be left tackling some of the gaming world's favourite franchises.
Over on IGN, the thoroughbred gamers were of mixed opinion. Reader LaughatJimmy thinks Nintendo's products will be deluged by clones within seconds of launching and therefore invisible to today's kids anyway, suggesting: "Thanks to the rampant copyright violating going on on the Google Play store, Nintendo is going to have to compete against a ton of crappy mobile games already starring Mario and the gang."
Coltaine22 is, we think, being ironic in his comment, enthusing: "I love this news. Nobody wants to play good games any more, those days are over. I want a simplistic touch control game, that costs thousands of dollars to enjoy. This is the future and about time Nintendo jumped on board."
If he's not being ironic then he's in for the £69 in-app purchase treat of a lifetime.
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On The Guardian, reader Randy Marshole isn't about to download anything that may come of this, posting: "Pay to play crap like Bejewelled rip off Candy Crush, no thanks."
Commenter Shuggah has some proper experience with DeNA products, though, explaining how they tend to work with: "I played one of their phone games, thankfully briefly, on a recommendation. I quickly realised that to get anywhere would cost literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds spent buying add on 'card' packs. Given that these are basically a lottery (one good card in every ?? thousand) they should be brought under gambling regulations."
NicholasLovell has seen this sort of thing happen a few times before in the gaming world, typing tiredly: "Whatever they do, expect Nintendo fans to be up in arms about it. I expect they'll say it's ruining their childhood."
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Android Authority used the news to overstep its remit and state confidently that this means Nintendo's dead as a hardware maker, to which commenter Otzi replied with the direct: "Absolutely ridiculous. The problem always was whether Nintendo will lose its advantage as a hardware manufacturer, by allowing their AAA titles onto other platforms. This is not the case here. From a long-time Nintendo fan, this is not a sell-out, nor a negative move. They have been cornered by investors to diversify their IP, and this is the best move."
Reader Jay555 seems to have got his hands on some secret internal documentation, as he knows exactly what's going to happen. He breached the terms of his NDA to post: "Just ignore them and pretend they don't exist. They're not going to be real Nintendo games anyways. They'll be cheap stupid IAP mobile games that happen to feature Nintendo characters."
So somewhere inside Nintendo is a PowerPoint file saying Cheap Stupid Mobile Games + Mario = Money.
Commenter Peter says we're seeing things change for the better, suggesting: "The Japanese games industry is doing just fine - it's going through CHANGES, and it's currently ADAPTING to the new reality. It's not bad news, it's good news - it means they move forward and don't try holding to the past model of gaming."
Get used to paying £69.99 for your extra lives.
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More sound business advice was offered over on The Register, where reader Crow From Below gave his five-step plan to making enormous amounts of money. This amounts to: "1) Take the original Mario game, 2) Change nothing, 3) Port to mobiles, 4) Charge 99p, 5) Profit."
Basic Chimp Theory replied with the tired air of a lapsed gamer struggling to get off level one of Sonic 2 on his phone nowadays, saying: "...this already exists with emulators and the touchscreen crontrols are always awful. Borderline unplayable. Definitely unenjoyable. I want to be excited about this news but the last decade has removed the will required."
Crow From Below, though, is already on board the touchscreen revolution, whizzing about the mobile Minecraft interface with the speed and surety of a seven-year-old digital native. He says emulators have put people off playing the classics on mobile, pointing out: "The emulators are illegal at worst and not built with touch screen in mind at best.
"When you get a company that knows how to build a game then touchscreen works very well, but emulators are a problem because they are usually just ports of the PC version of the emulators, so rarely work on phones in the way they were intended."
Nintendo invented 3D console controls. Perhaps it could make a touchscreen interface that doesn't make everyone over the age of 26 want to frisbee their devices out of a window after 30 seconds of play?
