Analyzing the free-to-play monetization of Miitomo: what does it mean for Animal Crossing on mobile?

9 years ago Justin 4 Comments

With the recent announcement of the upcoming Animal Crossing mobile game using the free-to-play model (or free-to-start in Nintendo-speak), we thought we’d take a deep dive into the monetization of Nintendo’s previously released Miitomo app to see what we can expect.

While Miitomo is a very different app from what an Animal Crossing game on mobile will likely be, we think that it’s worth a look at as many of the same principles of value are likely to cross over into all of Nintendo’s free-to-play mobile apps.

Let’s start by taking a look at how Miitomo’s currency is distributed both freely through gameplay as well as with purchases using real-world money. Although Miitomo technically has three currencies, only one can be directly purchased, so we’ll focus on that one for the most part — coins.

Coins can currently be obtained regularly through three primary methods: Daily bonus rewards, activity rewards, and in-app purchases. There are also rewards for adding friends, but these are one-time rewards that cannot be renewed later, so we’ll leave them out here.

There are 25 daily bonuses available every month which are earned simply just from opening the app each day. When everything is added up, we can earn a maximum of 6,500 free coins from the daily bonus rewards, assuming we play for at least 25 days of the month. We can also earn 5 Game Tickets through this, but we’ll get to that later.

On the activity rewards side of things, we can earn nominal amounts of free coins through three main activities including answering new questions, listening to our friend’s questions, and commenting on our friend’s questions. However these coins are capped out at a maximum of about 200 coins per day, meaning that in a 30 day month we can earn as much as 6,000 free coins through playing Miitomo’s main activities.

Finally, we come to the in-app purchases in Miitomo where coins can be purchased using real-world money. This is where our analysis gets interesting because we can correlate the free coins data we just collected into an actual real-world value. The in-app purchases vary by country and currency, but the base rate is a simple 1000 coins per US dollar in the United States. There are also bonus coins available through larger packages as seen below.

Before we add everything up though, let’s come back to the Game Tickets mentioned earlier. Game Tickets are another currency given away through daily bonus rewards and other means, but they are only used for playing the Miitomo Drop game. However, 500 coins can also be spent to play a round of Miitomo Drop, so we can easily designate a game ticket’s value to 500 coins.

Taking the daily bonus rewards, activity rewards, and converting game tickets to coin value, we end up with a total of 15,000 coins given by Nintendo every month by simply just playing the game every day. And going back to the in-app purchases, that works out to about $15 US dollars per month. There are one-time coin and game ticket rewards through a couple other methods like adding friends or leveling, but those aren’t consistently renewable every month on a regular basis we can count on.

We now know about how much dollar value we can expect to get for free in a month from Miitomo, but let’s see what we actually get in-game with that — both in terms of using free coins or putting down hard cash. For starters, a play in the Miitomo Drop game is 500 coins without use of game tickets, so that can be easily converted to 50 US cents per round.

The other major expense in Miitomo, clothes in the Miitomo Shop, is a little harder to pinpoint though. Prices vary a lot but a full outfit set ranges between about 3000 to 7000 coins depending on what items are included. Using our in-app purchase rate earlier, this makes a complete outfit set cost between $3 and $7 typically.

Based on this, we can assume a free player will end up with about 2 to 4 outfits per month depending on which they choose, as well as some free Miitomo Drop plays. And therefore to obtain that amount of content through in-app purchases, it’ll cost around $15 US dollars.

While the specifics of everything here won’t be identical in the Animal Crossing mobile game, we’re able to get a general sense of what to expect in terms of both how currency is distributed (about half and half between activity in the game or daily bonuses), the amount of value that a 100% free player can receive every month (about $15 US dollars or so), and what a player can expect to pay in either time or real-world money for in-game items.

There’s no doubt that Nintendo goes through similar calculations we just used when determining pricing of a free-to-play game, so we can reasonably expect Animal Crossing on mobile to have a similar structure in some ways. Let us know in the comments what you think of Miitomo’s free-to-play model and what you’re expecting from Animal Crossing’s pricing on mobile!

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Speculation