Nintendo's first smartphone game will sell clothes as in-app purchases

We’ve all heard that Nintendo is teaming up with DeNA to release a handful of mobile games, the first of which has already been announced. While the game, called Miitomo, has yet to launch, a small amount of details have been trickling in over the weeks regarding the game’s premise. We know it will be a free-to-play title, and we know it’s not really a game at all – it’s more of a communication tool using Nintendo’s Mii characters. That may not be the best news in the world if you’ve been waiting for a legitimate port of Super Mario 64 or Yoshi’s Island for mobile devices, but hey, we still don’t know all the details yet. Recently, the president of DeNA, Isao Moriyasu, sat down with The Wall Street Journal to answer some questions about the upcoming title and the partnership with Nintendo.

When asked how Miitomo will be different from other social networking or messaging services, Moriyasu told The Wall Street Journal:

Miitomo places more emphasis on entertainment. The process of discovering new aspects of your friends via Miis can be quite fun. One distinct aspect of Miitomo is how you can configure your Mii to have it look very similar to yourself. Communicating with friends who actually look like your friends in real life is a distinctly different feeling from text-based communication. We’re thinking of linking the game with users’ Facebook friend lists. I think it could be fun connecting with friends people don’t often communicate with.

Obviously Nintendo and DeNA are in this for the money, though, which raises the question as to how the two companies will be able to monetize such an application. “Communication will be central to the game”, Moriyasu explains, “but I think various elements could be added on— like mini-games users can play with their friends. As for monetizing, there are various possibilities, but at first we plan on selling clothes users can buy for their Miis.” 

Moriyasu also says that the title will have a “distinct Nintendo feel” that will give users a “certain comfort and nostalgia.”

Miitomo is set to launch sometime in 2016, though we still haven’t heard word of an exact release date.