On Wednesday, Japanese tech company, Nintendo, announced that it expects to earn over 36% higher profits in FY 2017, buoyed by the new mobile apps and games that it plans to launch this year. While the company is yet to launch any of the mobile games it had promised earlier, it hasn’t been an entirely disappointing time for its fans over the past few weeks. That’s because last month, Nintendo launched its first-ever mobile application called Miitomo, which is based on the company’s ‘Mii’ characters and is currently available on both Android and iOS. Reports of the app doing extremely well have been circulating for a while now, the company has now officially announced exactly how successful it has been thus far with Miitomo.
According to a tweet by Nintendo of America, (@NintendoAmerica), the app already has as many as ten million users worldwide, which is phenomenal for a weeks-old app whichever way one looks at it. The app had been downloaded over 1.5 million times in the US within the first week of its availability in the country, but got into a bit of trouble earlier this month when some reports seemed to suggest that it might be secretly mining user data. Either way, the company has also revealed that over twenty million ‘Miifotos’ have already been saved by people using the app. For those wondering what Miifotos are, they’re wackily named thumbnail images that are used as in-game avatars and can be shared on social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
According to the company’s President, Mr. Tatsumi Kimishima, the company plans to launch two of its promised four mobile games “by this autumn”, which means there will be at least two new games to look forward to from the Japanese video game giant by the end of this year. It is worth noting here that last year itself, the company had announced plans to release as many as four mobile games, but did not originally announce which titles will eventually end up on mobiles. However, latest reports seem to indicate that ‘Fire Emblem’ and ‘Animal Crossing’ are set to be those two apps, and going by the captive audience it has already started to garner with Miitomo, Nintendo may well have something very special on its hands going forward.