
The Rise and Fall of Nintendo’s Miitomo: Why Downloads Don’t Matter - garry
https://www.surveymonkey.com/business/intelligence/rise-fall-nintendos-miitomo-downloads-dont-matter/
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minimaxir
Comparing Miitomo with Candy Crush Saga/Clash Royale is comparing apples to
oranges in the strictest sense of the term. As a result, the data
visualizations are very misleading. All three games are _very_ different
genres and it would be expected to have different usage patterns.

I realize this post is simply marketing for SurveyMonkey's product, but it
seems like the numbers/analyses are _highly arbitrary_ and do not entice me to
look at the product. At the least, the focus on only-metrics-SurveyMonkey-can-
provide limits the quality of the analysis because it doesn't incorporate
rankings and revenue which is relevant. (Miitomo hit #1 Free App Overall on
launch and hit the death spiral in a week:
[https://imgur.com/a/SXnze](https://imgur.com/a/SXnze))

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rwallan
Thanks for the comment - I'm part of the team here at SMI and did a little
work on this post.

We look at engagement and churn because they're largely independent of genre,
or if you're even a game, for that matter - those metrics are used to evaluate
to SaaS companies, websites, even service businesses. This is because those
metrics a proxy for whether your customers want what you're selling.

Certain categories of apps (and subcategories of games) have different
averages for engagement and retention, but overall more is better for both.
Candy Crush and Miitomo are similar in that they're light, broad-appeal social
games (compared to Clash, a harder core game). Yet the metrics of the King
games are more similar to each other than Candy Crush and Miitomo are.

App store rank is mostly a function of download velocity. Downloads tell you
nothing about the forward prospects of a game. Miitomo fell in the rankings as
the initial attention wore off, but if users were sticking around it could
have been the start of a new powerhouse franchise.

Revenue isn't related to downloads as only people who use your app have the
opportunity to give you money. This the reason we look at active users.

We looked at revenue internally, but it's not a particularly interesting
story. Most games settle at a level of revenue-per-active-user and don't move
all that much over time. So revenue is dependent on your active users.

Definitely open to any other feedback if you think there's something else we
should look at: intelligence AT surveymonkey

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in_cahoots
It sounds like you're only referring to the peak when you talk about
downloads. If you superimposed the three games you'd see that Miitomo fell off
much more rapidly than the other two; to me that says as much as all of the
rest of your post.

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alanfalcon
The problem is compounded because while I've been logging on daily and
participating, as my friends slowly drop off there's less for me to do and
fewer people to interact with and much less incentive for me to come back the
next day.

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xlm1717
It should have had the ability to add friends over SMS from day one. I
downloaded it on day one and my sister did too. However, since I have Android
and she has iOS, the methods it launched with to add friends didn't work. If I
could have added my sister as a friend, I probably would've been more
interested in continuing to play miitomo.

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Fej
I think Nintendo expects their games to do well since they're Nintendo. Maybe
they're figuring out the hard way that mobile isn't the same.

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alanfalcon
I think if it were actually a game things might be different. Miitomo is just
a social toy with a strange mini game that can be played to win clothing.

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xufi
Speaking of that, This reminds me of the WII Mi persona that you had when you
were asked to make when you started oup your Wii. What happened to that.

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CM30
Huh? If you mean Miis, they've been in tons of games since the Wii era,
feature in Miitomo and can also be created on the 3DS and Wii U.

Most Nintendo systems (and a few games) also let you choose a specific Mii to
represent yourself.

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xufi
I see. I didn't know that. I havent really played with them since they were
introduced .

