This came as good news for the Japanese tech giant that had been holding onto its policy for only console games.
Nintendo recently announced that the first mobile game it ever launched managed to draw over one million users within the span of three days that followed its initial release.
The first mobile gaming experience offered by Nintendo was in the form of its “Miitomo” app.
The Miitomo mobile game is an interactive experience that makes it possible for users to be able to design their own Mii avatars. It released this app in order to be able to position itself to better compete with its rivals. Through the use of this mobile app, smartphone users are able to change the outfit worn by their avatar through in-app purchases. They can also use their avatars to interact with those that have been created by friends or other mobile application users.
Within the mobile game, the avatars also interact with the user him/herself and share the answer with friends.
For example, the avatar may ask one of the players of the mobile games what they did over the weekend or “What is your favorite food?” When the player answers, it is shared with the other characters selected by that player.
The game app was originally launched in Japan on a Thursday and by the following Saturday it had already broken the one million user mark, according to a company spokesperson. At the time of the writing of this article, she had also said that there weren’t any updated figures to release. That said, following a national holiday on the weekend of the achievement of the first million users, the stock markets opened on the Tuesday to send Nintendo’s shares upward by a striking 8.18 percent.
The official Twitter account for the mobile game stated that Nintendo had been quite surprised with the number of players who were instantly attracted to the app. As Sony and Microsoft continued to outpace Nintendo’s sales in terms of consoles and related games, the three giants have now moved into the app sphere for mobile devices where they are competing with thousands of other developers with cheap and even entirely free games.
Mobile games have become a very powerful force in the overall game industry. Many developers have begun to focus on the mobile space because of its lucrative nature. Consumers have shown that they are willing to spend considerable amounts of money on these games and publishers and developers are interested in taking advantage of this. Some companies that had focused on traditional console games have now begun to devote their attention and resources to the mobile space.