Nintendo held a briefing in Japan today, and as expected, the company dropped some details of its first smartphone game.
Nintendo’s game will be called Miitomo, and it’ll be a free-to-play game that tasks you with creating a Mii — an avatar, basically — that’ll communicate with other users. These communications will happen without your knowledge, a move that Nintendo says could help people communicate to others and reveal a side that your friends might not know about you.
Nintendo also says that while Miitomo will be free-to-play, it’ll offer add-ons that you can pay for. Nintendo’s future games will be pay-to-download.
Unfortunately, Miitomo has been delayed and won’t hit virtual shelves by the end of 2015 like originally planned. Instead, it’ll launch in March 2016, which Nintendo says will give it more time to promote and explain Miitomo.
Nintendo went on to touch a bit on its strategy with these smartphone games. The company plans to utilize its properties to point toward its software and hardware offerings, adding that mobile game maker DeNA will help operate the smartphone games while Nintendo will work to guide users toward its hardware. That’s not entirely surprising, as DeNA has more experience on mobile than Nintendo, and Nintendo would probably prefer its mobile games push users toward its home consoles rather than keeping them on mobile.
So what do you think of Nintendo’s first mobile game so far? Will you check it out?