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Nintendo's First Free-to-Play Mobile Game Is Not a Game

Nintendo's first mobile game is called "Miitomo," and it's not a video game at all in any traditional sense.

Nintendo finally unveiled its first free-to-play mobile game on Wednesday night, and it's probably not what you expected. It's not a greedy, match-3 game in the style of Candy Crush Saga, only with The Legend of Zelda rupees, or a Clash of Clans clone, but with Animal Crossing towns. It's something much…weirder.

Nintendo's first mobile game is called Miitomo, and it's not a video game at all in any traditional sense. Nintendo is calling it a communication application. It lets you create a cute digital version of yourself called a Mii, just like you can do on a Wii and Wii U. Players can then use the avatar to communicate with other players, but it's not clear how. All Nintendo said is that the Miitomo will encourage players who usually don't like to communicate online to communicate with Miitomo, and that it will interact with home consoles as well.

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Of course, Miimoto will let players buy all kinds of accessories for their Miis, which is how Nintendo will actually make money off this thing.

Overall, Nintendo is still pretty cryptic about Miitomo, but it did share some other interesting details about its future smartphone plans.

For example, it revealed that while Miitomo is free-to-play, that some of Nintendo's smartphone games will be pay to download. That's good news! The more Nintendo can charge upfront for a game, the less the design of that game needs bend to the will of free-to-play monetization methods that make you play to progress.

Nintendo also announced that Miitomo will come out in March 2016, not by the end of 2015, as it initially announced.

Miimoto is the first of five smartphone games Nintendo is working on with DeNA, the Japanese mobile gaming giant known for "gacha," slot machine-like free-to-play monetization mechanics that are so aggressive, the Japanese government had to step in and regulate them in 2012. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo said during the presentation that DeNA will simply "operate" the games, suggesting Nintendo will be in charge of design. That's good news given DeNA's track record with free-to-play games, and it also makes sense given that the company operates so many mobile games, and a social network for mobile games called Mobage.

Image: Wario64/Twitter

The weirdest thing about Miitomo is that it's Nintendo's first game on smartphones, and the company isn't coming out of the gate swinging with a Mario-branded game, which would be more recognizable, and more likely to be a big, money-making hit. For now, it looks like Nintendo is being careful, but it needs a money maker like that. The company released a quarterly earnings report yesterday that showed sales of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS are slowing down (they've been on the market since 2012 and 2011 respectively), and they're far behind sales of the previous generation of consoles, the Wii and Nintendo DS.