It wasn’t long ago that both Europe and Japan received a StreetPass Mii Plaza update, bringing with it a new layout and a fresh batch of four games to play—for a price, of course.
The mini games in StreetPass Mii Plaza cost £4.49 each, or are available in a combo pack for £13.49—and while there are plenty of opinions as to whether monetizing StreetPass was the right thing to do, the games have been extremely popular.
At the recent investor Q&A for Nintendo, the consensus on the addition was that the games are entertaining and their introduction was a success. Satoru Iwata was asked about the games and their similarity to other mini-game collections, and had this to say about it:
“Previously we had a puzzle-piece collecting game and a very simple RPG game called “Find Mii” on offer, but after two years on the market, we knew that those who had experienced every aspect of these two games wanted something new. In a way, we have until now been trying to create an environment in users can experience the StreetPass feature, so our objective was to create something that was simple and easy to understand. But we feel that the next step for us to take is to create games that are deeper, and we have actually been working on them for quite some time. You also mentioned “Wii Motion: Play,” a product we released when we first developed Wii Remote Plus. This controller was bundled with the software, and we offered it at a competitive price point. At the time, we had various software developers vie with each other to design products that took advantage of Wii Remote Plus: it was a competition of games. And we put what they created into one package. At the time, Wii was not ready for the kind of model in which one sold add-on content separately (after a software title’s initial release). To add to this, digital distribution was not as active so we decided not to adopt this model at the time.
But we now have the environment where we can do such things, and as we considered what we could do with Nintendo 3DS, we felt that it might be interesting to expand StreetPass Mii Plaza by adopting a similar (competition-style) model that we took in the past, and I’m happy to say that the new StreetPass games are the product of our year-long preparations. As you pointed out, we only started distributing those new games a week ago, but already more than two hundred thousand consumers had purchased at least one out of those four games by last Sunday. We employed no mass-media advertising so we think we are off to a good start. I think that products like these ones will provide new business opportunities for Nintendo in the future. I take it that you are very satisfied with our new games, and we feel that if our consumers determine that the price of a particular game that we offer matches the content that it offers, then there will be more people who try our new propositions.”
It’s quite an impressive statistic—200,000 3DS owners and then some, buying mini-games that weren’t even advertised on launch—especially considering that it’s not available yet in North America. It’s possible we may see more of this flavour of mini-game DLC in the future, which could be great news for certain games like Nintendo Land.