Miitomo

» see miitomo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2016 i was in my early thirties in ankara, working on computer vision. nintendo's first phone app wanted me to build a cartoon version of myself and answer icebreaker questions about my favorite food. i was not the audience, and neither, it turned out, were most of the ten million people who downloaded it.

miitomo launched in japan on march 17 2016 and worldwide on march 31. it was nintendo's real debut on smartphones, the first product of a partnership with the mobile company dena, and the company had a lot riding on whether it could exist outside its own consoles at all. the app used mii avatars, the same simplified cartoon faces from the wii era, and wrapped them in a light social loop. your mii would ask you a question, then carry your answer over to your friends' miis. you learned small facts about people you knew by having a cartoon relay them.

the launch numbers were enormous. three million users in the first day worldwide, then over ten million within about a month. it went to the top of the us app store. then it emptied out. a survey by may 2016 found only about a quarter of the people who had downloaded miitomo were still opening it regularly. the novelty was the whole product, and novelty does not renew.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

miitomo was not really a game. it was a question-and-answer machine dressed as a social app. it fed you prompts and surfaced your friends' answers to the same prompts through your mii's conversations. there was a dress-up economy on top, coins you earned by answering and spent on outfits for your avatar. there was a photo mode called miifoto that let you pose your mii with captions, which produced most of the screenshots that spread on twitter in those first weeks.

~ the fall ~

the trouble was retention. miitomo gave you a reason to open it once and not much reason to open it on day thirty. it had no competitive hook and no habit to build. nintendo learned what it needed from the experiment, which was less about mii avatars and more about how to run a live phone service with a payment system, and it moved that knowledge into fire emblem heroes and animal crossing pocket camp, both built to keep people coming back.

~ the day it died ~

nintendo announced the end in january 2018 and shut the servers down on may 9 2018, a little over two years after launch. when the servers went off, the miis and the answers went with them, because it was all server-side. it was nintendo's first phone app and one of its shortest-lived. the company did not treat it as a failure so much as tuition, the price of learning how to ship on a platform it had spent a decade refusing to touch.

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