NTDOY Nintendo Co Ltd (PK)

OSAKA—Nintendo Co. said Wednesday its next two games for smartphones will be Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem, declining to feature its most popular characters such as Mario the plumber for now.

Nintendo long resisted jumping into the smartphone game industry but switched course last year and teamed up with DeNA Co. to make games for mobile devices. Nintendo has said it plans to release five smartphone games by March 2017.

The first of those five, a smartphone app called Miitomo, was released last month. The social-interaction game has been downloaded by more than 10 million​users globally, according to Nintendo. It is free to download, but users can pay to play a game within the game and purchase clothing for their characters.

Online survey provider SurveyMonkey estimated that the Miitomo app is earning $280,000 a week through in-app purchases.

With the announcement of the new games featuring Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem, Nintendo is dipping further into its stable of characters developed over decades as a maker of console games.

The new mobile games will be released in the coming autumn.​​

Separately, Nintendo's chief executive, Tatsumi Kimishima, said a new videogame console that has been known by the code name NX, would be ​released March next year, without elaborating.​

Shigeru Miyamoto, a Nintendo executive known for creating many of the Kyoto-based company's famous characters, said last year that smartphone games would be Nintendo's new main revenue pillar.

Also Wednesday, Nintendo reported a 61% drop in its annual net profit as the lack of popular new game releases led to sagging sales of its aging hand-held game device.

The Kyoto-based videogame maker said its net profit during the fiscal year ended on March 31 was 16.5 billion yen ($149 million), a steep drop from ¥ 41.8 billion a year earlier. The company had expected a profit of ¥ 17 billion.

Profit fell as sales of its Nintendo 3DS hardware slowed, and as new game titles released during the period weren't able to match the popularity of those released in the previous fiscal year, when it had a bunch of million-hit titles, including Pokemon, Super Smash Bros. and Yo-Kai Watch. Analysts also said the 3DS, which was launched five years ago, is approaching the end of its life cycle.

Because a majority of Nintendo's sales are outside Japan and it has large holdings of dollars and euro, the company is vulnerable to exchange-rate moves. Nintendo said recent gains in the yen hurt its bottom line. Its operating profit, which excludes foreign-currency holdings, stood at ¥ 32.9 billion. Nintendo had expected an operating profit of ¥ 33 billion, compared with ¥ 25 billion a year earlier.

According to a survey of 15 analysts by FactSet, Nintendo was expected to report an operating profit of ¥ 34 billion on revenue of ¥ 506 billion, with a net profit of ¥ 17.4 billion. Nintendo said its revenue during the term was ¥ 504 billion.

Write to Takashi Mochizuki at takashi.mochizuki@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 27, 2016 04:35 ET (08:35 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.