You AND ‘Mii’
NINTENDO’S NEW MOBILE APP MIITOMO IS PART VIDEO GAME, PART SOCIAL NETWORK.
“Why don’t you like baseball?”
If Bill Trinen, Nintendo Co. Ltd.’ s senior product marketing manager, was surprised by my question, he didn’t show it.
“Baseball just goes on for ever and ever and ever,” he said. “With a soccer, I know for a fact that a game is going to end in 90 minutes, whereas a baseball game can go on and on.”
The fact that I asked this question to a major executive for the most famous Japanese video- game company in a phone interview right off the bat might seem surprising. But we’d already broken the ice on the topic of baseball when we interacted earlier in Miitomo, Nintendo’s first smartphone app — and its first major step beyond i ts own bespoke hardware.
The first thing you might notice about Miitomo, released Thursday in Japan and l ater t his month in North America, is that it isn’t a game. Nintendo likes the term “social communication tool.”
Most people will likely just call it a social network.
That’s a big surprise from Nintendo — a company that’s known as more conservative compared to its major gaming console rivals Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp., and has resisted repeated calls from shareholders to move its games from their own devices to smartphones.
But a social network is the smallest of Nintendo’s aims. This is Nintendo moving beyond its own hardware, and beyond being simply a video-game maker. The company wants its characters, its brand and its presence absolutely everywhere. Nintendo as we know it is over.
And that starts with Mi- itomo( pronounced MEtomo).
When you boot up the smartphone a pp for the first time, you create a “Mii” avatar to represent yourself ( you can also import one if you’ve already created it on a Wii U or 3DS). Miitomo then starts searching for friends — through Facebook or shareable QR codes — and populates a feed with your acquaintances’ Miis.
After you build your Mii and add some friends, Miitomo starts asking quest i ons. They range f r om simple to complex — “what were you doing a few minutes ago?” or “what’s your most recent purchase?”— and are the heart of the app. After you answer a few questions your answers are shared with your friends.
This is the key difference between Miitomo and other social networks: Miitomo encourages you on to share small details about yourself that you wouldn’t think to share otherwise, and then giving you game- l i ke rewards for doing so.
You can comment on your friends’ answers and completing the loop of answering and commenting on questions earns you in- game coins that can be used on a minigame ( think Plinko from the Price- is-Right) or to buy clothing items for your Mii avatar.
“It facilitates communication between friends and it facilitates you learning things between your friends that might not come up in general conversation or that people might not normally post on a typical social network,” Trinen said, which helps explain our interaction over baseball. “So the Miitomo itself elicits these types of responses, but then it’s the conversations that get spurred by this digital interaction that I think become the true fun of Miitomo.”
It works s urprisingly well. Not only did I discover Trinen’s (wrong) opinions about baseball, I had a conversation about Deadpool with Nintendo president and CEO Reggie Fils- Aimé and I let them know about how much I was looking forward to Wrestlemania.
For Nintendo observers, Miitomo will likely come as a surprise. The company has long resisted moving away from its own hardware and has also resisted “free to play” business models for mobile games where the revenue i s based around giving away the app for free and then charging “micro transactions” for benefits or content inside the game.
Fans of the company have long been worried that the “F2P” model — which can be designed in an exploitative way, similar to a slot machine — would overwhelm the strong core design that’s t he heart of Nintendo’s brand.
Miitomo likely won’t answer that question. The transactions in the app mostly revolve around the clothes you can put on your avatar, and it isn’t really a game to begin with. The answers to t hose questions will likely come with Nintendo’s later apps, which the company promises will be completely different from Miitomo and some of which will hew closer to more traditional Nintendo games with Nintendo’s recognizable characters.
“Miitomo is the first of about five smart device apps that we’re hoping to launch over the next year or so,” Trinen said.
Miitomo’s launch underscores how Nintendo is moving away from being just a gaming company, and shifting toward an aim to become a global brand that makes not only games but many other things.
“( A) key thing is that, for us, the mobile initiative is itself a part of a larger plan that we have, which is really to expand the reach of Nintendo characters, Nintendo franchises and Nintendo IP,” Trinen said.
MIITOMO IS THE FIRST OF ABOUT FIVE SMART DEVICE APPS THAT WE’RE HOPING TO LAUNCH OVER THE NEXT YEAR.