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Miitomo

During a meeting with investors earlier this week, Nintendo unveiled its very showtime smartphone game. Dubbed "Miitomo," this free-to-play game lets you lot utilise an adorable avatar to collaborate with your friends without investing in Nintendo hardware. This certainly isn't the kind of mobile game many of usa were hoping for, merely can this oddball social game keep this gaming giant relevant in a speedily evolving market?

Unfortunately, we won't exist seeing a Nintendo game on smartphones this year. While nosotros expected Nintendo and DeNA's first release to send at the end of 2015, it is at present officially delayed until March of 2016. Thankfully, we did get an early on wait at what Nintendo has planned for usa. Miitomo, a portmanteau of Nintendo's famous avatars and a Japanese word for "friend," has been confirmed to be a free-to-play feel. Notwithstanding, Nintendo was quick to qualify that some of its other smartphone games will feature a more traditional buy-to-play fiscal model.

Past all accounts, this new game is focused heavily on communicating with your friends while looking at beautiful avatars on your phone. This isn't going to exist the next Puzzle & Dragons or Clash of Clans, but I'll wager that this will do well — especially in Japan. That market has already shown how willing it is to dump money on sticker packs for more traditional messaging clients, so it's no surprise that Nintendo wants in on some of that easy cash. Charge 100 yen for a Mii Mario cap, and picket your pockets grow, right?

While the 3DS was in no mode a failure, it never received the aforementioned kind of attention as the wildly successful original DS platform. Part of that can be attributed to the poor launch, and the attachment to lackluster 3D engineering, but it's clear that the major uptick in smartphone adoption is what's actually hindering Nintendo'due south handheld. We live in a much different world than we did when the DS first launched dorsum in 2004.

Information technology hurts my poor nostalgic center to say this, but this announcement is telling of Nintendo's future on mobile platforms. It seems like information technology's here to make some cold difficult cash off of existing trends — not to motility the medium forward. Take a look at the games that DeNA has released previously, and all of your hopes and dreams will become right out the window. Everything about this seems cold and computing to me, despite the fact that it'south couched in warm and fuzzy linguistic communication almost togetherness.

With the new NX platform effectually the corner, information technology'southward obvious that Nintendo however believes it needs to exist a thespian in the hardware market. So far, these "hit" games on smartphones seem to exist here only to placate uppity investors. I remain unconvinced that Nintendo actually cares about making high-quality iOS and Android games. Merely until we see what the other four titles accept in store, information technology's hard to gauge how heavily Nintendo is actually investing here.

Nintendo too revealed that a brand new business relationship layer called the "Nintendo Account" will necktie your social media accounts, your Nintendo ID, and your smartphone apps together in a single service. You'll be able to move game saves around wirelessly, and this system will also serve as a loyalty program to replace the recently deceased Gild Nintendo. That all sounds similar a big step in the right direction, just all of the hubbub surrounding the smartphone games thoroughly overshadowed this skilful news. Let's just hope that this is the concluding Nintendo service we'll ever have to sign upwardly for.