There's a common fallacy that happens frequently when Silicon Valley technologists start talking about Nintendo, and that is the idea that "their hardware can never compete with the ubiquity of mobile platforms, they should just become a software company and port their games to iOS and Android!" The success of Pokémon Go, and this new Mario game as well, is showing that Nintendo is taking a different strategy: they'r…
I remember in the 90's, SGI and Nintendo shared a multiple of projects, hosted at the expansion offices at Oracle. The goal? Port Netscape to the N64, and so on.
Nintendo are all over the place. Of course they have an iOS team already, duh. They worked with Creative Labs already, to develop competing frameworks to iOS, even before iOS 1.0 was released.
All these things got cancelled/re-structured, and Nintendo still have a strong, forward-deployed, developer mentality.
So, its not that they are not, actually, operating as a development group in our industry. Its just that they haven't "surfaced", yet, because their strategic deployment of co-development teams and integrated efforts doesn't, necessarily, mean that a product will bubble to the surface.