Recently officially announced for mobile devices, the mobile versions of the Nintendo console hits Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing will be shareware projects.
This was stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal by the CEO of the Japanese giant DeNA Isao Moriyasu (Isao Moriyasu). To designate the model, he used the identical concept of free-to-start, introduced by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who died last year.
According to Gamasutra, official representatives of Nintendo confirmed this information.
It is not known exactly how the new monetization will affect the projects. It all depends on how much Nintendo and DeNA plan to change the DNA of the original series.
This announcement cannot be called unexpected. A year ago, Nintendo talked about plans to launch five mobile shareware products by March 2017. The main intrigue remained (and still remains) on which IP they will be developed.
Released in the USA in February of this year, the fourteenth Fire Emblem sold out in 300 thousand boxes in one weekend. The total number of physical copies of the game sold to date has reached 1.8 million. Animal Crossing Sales: New Leaf, released in 2012, recently reached 10 million copies sold. Both projects were published exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Gamasutra, Gamespot