> Sad that I had hoped some exec at Nintendo would veto this approach as "Not Nintendo"

I'm guessing it happened to a point. King with their Candy Crush saga had higher revenue and profits than Blizzard [1] for a while now. The amount of money mobile gaming pulls is insane. It's hard to leave that on the table.

Luckily this didn't spread beyond their mobile apps, unlike other game developers that push to replicate the model on desktop and consoles.

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/84423/king-has-made-more-mone...