“Games now in the pipeline are all free to play…” Speaking during a recent earnings briefing, DeNA Chief Executive Isao Moriyasu explained that the first batch of Nintendo smartphone games will rely on microtransactions for revenue generation. The smartphone-game and platform provider announced that April-September net profit was up 50%…
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Fir instance, the mobile game development studio’s financial reports were shared online where it has been revealed that they are planning to launched at least five mobile video games together by March 2017. When Nintendo CEO Kimishima took stage at last month’s press conference and Miitomo was presented to everyone, it was suggested that while this first game would be a free-to-play game, that subsequent releases would not be. Interestingly enough, Nintendo was hesitant to actually refer to Miitomo as a game today, instead calling it a communication-based app. This could be from the multitude of opinions out there about Miitomo, many of which don’t consider it to even be close to a game, including us.
In what is likely to be disappointing news for a few gamers and brilliant news for all investors, it appears that Nintendo’s forthcoming mobile titles will all be “free to play”, meaning that they will all contain a few form of micropayments.
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In the gaming community, free-to-play is broadly viewed unfavourably because of the theoretical ability of companies to rinse players of their cash if they want to be able to play the game to its fullest extent. Since they’re essentially dipping a toe in the mobile games market, this would be the safest way to do so.
