I hope they really hammer the game with paid microtransactions. There are probably a lot of whales on mobile devices that once played Nintendo systems. You need to drain those people for $150-$200 a piece.

If you are going to go down the dark path of mobile, go in deep Nintendo. DEEP.

What are you?  A Nintendo shareholder?

I guess this pretty much confirms that both are going to be terrible games laden with energy bars & "pay $.99 to move an extra turn" and "pay $1.99 to ressurect this party member"-style micro transactions. Animal Crossing will probably be just like Miitomo.

So the pressing questions:

Will it be better or worse than Amiibo Festival?  (I'm betting more casual.)

Will it cost more or less?  (Guess that depends. How many people here have finished the first three sets of Amiibo cards?)

Ha ha! Time to get those gacha rolls ready!

Not necessarily. Look at what they did with Pokémon Picross: free to start, but once you paid $30 it was free forever.

I have seen a few free games that pull off a somewhat reasonable balance between microtransactioning you to death and being a fun game.

Stronghold Kingdoms is probably one of the best examples of doing a free MMO right. You either buy perk card packs to help your industry or buy premium coins that allow you to queue up research and build orders. So you pay to not have to constantly sit on the screen micromanaging everything.

Marvel Avengers Alliance 2, Marvel Future Fight, and Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes (surprisingly done by EA) are all fun games that give you plenty to do without charging you an arm and a leg to participate. I was competitive in the top tier of my server for Galaxy of Heroes and I never paid a dime. Granted, they offered bonus packs for the "whales", but they balanced that with generous options for free-to-play folks as well.

If EA can pull off a fun free-to-start app with options for reasonable in-app purchases next other whale packages, I have no doubt that Nintendo can do the same and even excel at it.


It would be cool to see the app be a "Fire Emblem All-Stars" title where you can recruit any heroes from past games. It would also be nice if they brought back the GBA art style and made the entire game sprite-based. It would be less graphics intense on phones and allow them to differentiate the app from the main line FE titles.