Nintendo's match-three Pokémon puzzle game, Pokémon Shuffle, will grace smartphones and tablets later this year as a freemium app, publisher The Pokémon Company revealed today.
In the downloadable 3DS version, which launched last February, players work by turns to maneuver three (or more) Pokémon into a row, thereby damaging defending versions of the cutesy critters. It's a simple enough concept, but the trick is to make one match trigger another, "chaining" your attacks to initiate devastating combos. Critical reaction to Pokémon Shuffle's base gameplay has been generally positive.
Whether you think Nintendo plus microtransactions equals happy times is another matter. Stages in the game require a "heart" to play, and you start with just five. Run out, and you have two options: wait for half an hour (in real time) for a heart to regenerate, or spend actual cash to buy coins to buy jewels to buy hearts. If that sounds convoluted and maybe even greedy, critics basically agreed---and punished the game for doing as much with lower ratings.
Nintendo had famously steered clear of the mass-mobile market for years, then startled pretty much everyone in March by declaring that its hat was finally in that ring. But Nintendo president Satoru Iwata also said at the time that "Nintendo does not intend to choose payment methods that may hurt Nintendo’s brand image or our IP." The Pokémon franchise is technically managed by subsidiary The Pokémon Company (which Nintendo owns in equal partnership with the developers of the games), but still very much in Nintendo's IP stable.
Microtransactions are the defining aspect of mobile gaming, for better or worse, and examples of both better and worse implementations are everywhere. Assuming the iOS and Android versions of Pokémon Shuffle use the same microtransaction scheme as the 3DS version when they arrive "soon," they may face the same critical backlash.
