Nintendo’s very first smartphone app is not anything that people were expecting when they were asking Nintendo to put software on phones. In fact, it’s barely a game at all- it seems more to be a smartphone translation of Nintendo’s popular Mii Plaza and StreetPass concepts on the 3DS to a smartphone environment.
Still, it’s going to be treated as a pretty big deal- it’s Nintendo’s first bit of software released for hardware other than their own, and it is also tied to the launch of their My Nintendo initiative. And so, if you were looking forward to its launch, you now have a concrete date to mark on your calendar- Miitomo is set to launch on March 17, for Android and iOS devices via Google Play and the App Store, in North America, the UK, Ireland, France and other European countries as well as Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, with rollouts in other countries planned for the future.
Will it take off? Who can say? It will be interesting to see how Nintendo does in an environment they don’t and can’t completely control, however.