Iwata: New StreetPass Mii Plaza games have been successful despite lack of promotion

Nintendo recently pushed out four new StreetPass Mii Plaza games to little fanfare. For the most part, advertising was all but non-existent. Only recently did Nintendo prepare a Japanese commercial for one of the releases, Warrior’s Way – several weeks after the new offerings launched.

Despite the lack of promotion, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has reconfirmed that the new StreetPass Mii Plaza games have performed well financially. In just the span of a month, sales of the software reached 400 million yen.

Iwata told Toyo Keizai Online:

With the 3DS, there is the StreetPass Mii Plaza, which you can use to play games with Miis that you meet by walking past other people carrying a 3DS. However, because people were growing tired of playing the same couple games, we have, in fact, brought four new StreetPass Mii Plaza games! Four new games have been added, where you can buy one game for ¥500 or all four games at a discounted price of ¥1500.

One month has passed since we added these new StreetPass Mii Plaza games, and we did not use any type of mass advertising. It was written on our homepage, with information about all the new content included in the update. You are also made aware when you visit the StreetPass Mii Plaza for the first time after the update, but we didn’t use anything like television commercials to advertise.

However, in this state, we have generated a lot of income from our customers. Furthermore, a lot of the people who are playing and enjoying the new games are communicating and advertising through outlets like Twitter. Thanks to this, the circle of customers is growing bigger and bigger, and interestingly, sales were a strong ¥400 million in only a month.