Nintendo is shutting down its first smartphone game Miitomo on May 9, just a little over two years after initial launch
Miitomo wasn't what anybody expected from Nintendo's first smartphone game. Now it's shutting down. — For years, fans and analysts had anticipated Nintendo's move …
Context & Ripple Effects
Miitomo was Nintendo's cautious entry into mobile: announced in late 2015 as a free download with paid character add-ons (first revealed for a March 2016 release), it launched in Japan and then the U.S. within weeks. Early traction looked real — over 2.6M downloads in its first U.S. week and roughly $280K in weekly revenue — but the app never scaled into the franchise-driven hits analysts expected from Nintendo's mobile debut.
The shutdown also fits a pattern: Nintendo had already closed Miiverse, the Wii U-era social network, just months earlier, signaling low tolerance for maintaining social services that underperform. Two years later the company would go further, reconsidering smartphone game development altogether in favor of its own platforms after Animal Crossing's Switch success.
First-order effects
- Miitomo users lose the app and its social features on May 9, ending Nintendo's first direct-to-consumer mobile product barely two years after launch.
- Nintendo writes off the modest revenue stream Miitomo represented — about $280K a week at its early peak per SurveyMonkey Intelligence — and frees the team behind it.
Second-order effects
- With Miitomo gone, Nintendo's mobile lineup tilts toward titles built on established IP rather than original social experiments, raising the bar for what earns continued investment.
- The closure, following the Miiverse shutdown, tells partners and players that Nintendo will retire underperforming connected services quickly rather than subsidize them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Nintendo's center of gravity stays on its own hardware — a trajectory the company made explicit when it later deprioritized smartphone development after Animal Crossing's Switch success.
- Mobile publishers watching Nintendo learn that even a marquee brand cannot sustain a social app without franchise mechanics, pushing licensed mobile efforts toward proven game formats.
The trend: Nintendo is pulling back from standalone mobile experiments toward games anchored to its own platforms and franchises, with fast shutdowns of underperforming services as the enforcement mechanism.