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Discussion Where is Tomodachi Life?

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Tomodachi Life released on June 6 2014 in North America and Europe for the Nintendo 3DS. It ended up selling around 6,7 million copies, making it the 10th best selling 3DS game.

Sooo....Where is it? Why hasn't Nintendo done anything with it? For some reason they ported Miitopia of all games over Tomodachi Life. Why??? I don't even think a million copies of that were sold on the 3DS. Why would they port that instead of Tomodachi Life? It just doesn't make any sense.

Please share your thoughts on why Nintendo continues to blindly sit on this goldmine!
 
Miitopia did reach 1 million on 3DS. It was also a successor to Find Mii/StreetPass Quest developed by EPD 4, not EPD 7 where the Tomodachi/Miitomo leads went. Kawamoto probably pushed for the port as he's the General Director for the Switch. Also, didn't Tomodachi Life use a lot of the 3DS features like the camera and mic? Probably not worth bringing over to Switch with those type of cuts.

To answer the question, at least two of the Tomodachi leads' last known credits were on Miitomo. EPD 7 were also apparently involved with Dr. Mario World, though I don't know if that was ever exactly confirmed or if there was just staff crossover. Toru Minegishi being listed as EPD 7 in the Splatoon 3 Ask the Dev interview makes me think the group will appear sooner than later. Tomodachi is their biggest series, but Rhythm Heaven or another mobile game are among other possibilities.
 
Miitopia is more structured and thus can command a higher price than a more freeform, open game like Tomodachi Life. It also has a lot less going on which has the potential for controversy which will hurt the company's brand, one way or the other, similar to the harm caused by the same sex marriage issue. I think the JRPG structure also reduces the sort of parasocial weirdness with the potential for cyberbullying and abuse which is somewhat unavoidable with the concept of making a game about player created characters living human-like lives. I suspect any future entries will be more like The Sims, focusing more on gameplay features and not making a big deal about the idea of putting your friends and family in wacky situations in order to reduce the potential for abuse and misinterpretation of the game's content.
 
They’ve run into that one issue: Nintendo only has so many developers/studios. Miitopia was offloaded to Grezzo and they did, frankly, an excellent job. Why Miitopia over Tomodachi Life? My guess is it didn’t make it’s budget back on 3DS so they poured a little bit more development money in and hoped it eventually would make it back on Switch. TBH it probably did!

Tomodachi Life, however, can’t get a direct port. Most of that game is weird, low-res 2D art assets that’d need complete redos. It’d basically need a sequel. Which it could get!

But also, there’s the shadow that looms over the previous Tomodachi Life: every Mii was forced to be straight and that got them a lot of flack. Nintendo even apologized for it. Now this COULD be easily solved by including a selection during the character creation process.

However, if Nintendo is one thing above literally all else, it’s controversy avoidant. And unfortunately for us, if Nintendo were to ship a game in 2024 that was rated E for Everyone (therefore buyable by children) that allowed players to choose partner preferences for characters, you and I both know there are idiot dipshit scumbags who would accuse Nintendo of “grooming” or some other garbage. It’d be nice if Nintendo were to have a backbone about this, but this is the same company that tried to hide a Pride-themed eShop sale under a rainbow “Hidden Gems” banner, so I have my doubts.

And it’s a shame: not only do I actively want a new Tomodachi Life, I also think that a Tomodachi Life game on a console with a “take video and put it on social media button” would be viral gold. Tomodachi Life was the perpetual sitcom generator I never knew I needed in my life, and I’d do just about anything to get a new one on Switch.
 
We saw the team work on Miitomo, and then at least some worked on Dr. Mario World. Takahashi has been absent from anything else, so the odds are that they are working on something Tomo related, but there may be some challenges as far handling certain social aspects with the expectations of their entire audience. Basically, it may be one of those either the games gets worked on for a long time and eventually releases,... or never.

Look at Nintendo Sports. That IP has been all over the place with schedule setbacks but it managed to succeed this generation.
 
Miitopia got a release late in the 3DS life which probably limited the selling potential of the game and probably didn't do well enough for a brand new entry so it got a remaster on Switch instead.

On the other hand Tomodachi Life release during the prime of the 3DS and use some 3DS functions not present in the Switch (mic & camera) so making a remaster doesn't make much sense. Given how successful the 3DS release was Nintendo is probably working on a new entry.
 
After Nintendo poured billions of dollars in R&D on queer relationship tech, they came to a dead end and have since quietly cancelled Tomodachi Life 2.
 
Derachi said:
They’ve run into that one issue: Nintendo only has so many developers/studios. Miitopia was offloaded to Grezzo and they did, frankly, an excellent job. Why Miitopia over Tomodachi Life? My guess is it didn’t make it’s budget back on 3DS so they poured a little bit more development money in and hoped it eventually would make it back on Switch. TBH it probably did!

Tomodachi Life, however, can’t get a direct port. Most of that game is weird, low-res 2D art assets that’d need complete redos. It’d basically need a sequel. Which it could get!

But also, there’s the shadow that looms over the previous Tomodachi Life: every Mii was forced to be straight and that got them a lot of flack. Nintendo even apologized for it. Now this COULD be easily solved by including a selection during the character creation process.

However, if Nintendo is one thing above literally all else, it’s controversy avoidant. And unfortunately for us, if Nintendo were to ship a game in 2024 that was rated E for Everyone (therefore buyable by children) that allowed players to choose partner preferences for characters, you and I both know there are idiot dipshit scumbags who would accuse Nintendo of “grooming” or some other garbage. It’d be nice if Nintendo were to have a backbone about this, but this is the same company that tried to hide a Pride-themed eShop sale under a rainbow “Hidden Gems” banner, so I have my doubts.

And it’s a shame: not only do I actively want a new Tomodachi Life, I also think that a Tomodachi Life game on a console with a “take video and put it on social media button” would be viral gold. Tomodachi Life was the perpetual sitcom generator I never knew I needed in my life, and I’d do just about anything to get a new one on Switch.
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Support for same-sex marriage is at all-time high now, the vast majority of Americans support it, and support is even higher among younger demographics. So I don't think including it would be a stopping-factor. I think at worst maybe it would stop the game's release in certain countries, like what happened with FF16.
 
MrBones said:
Support for same-sex marriage is at all-time high now, the vast majority of Americans support it, and support is even higher among younger demographics. So I don't think including it would be a stopping-factor. I think at worst maybe it would stop the game's release in certain countries, like what happened with FF16.
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Face value: yeah you’d think it wouldn’t stop them. But again: Nintendo does not want to be in any headlines, sensational or otherwise, about being a negative influence on children. Remember how Swapnote completely disappeared after like, one headline?

Don’t get me wrong: I wish Nintendo would get over it and just do it because, again, I think Tomodachi Life on a console with a ”screenshot/video button” would be viral social media gold. Not only do I want it, it’s a guaranteed marketing/sales success.
 
Derachi said:
Face value: yeah you’d think it wouldn’t stop them. But again: Nintendo does not want to be in any headlines, sensational or otherwise, about being a negative influence on children. Remember how Swapnote completely disappeared after like, one headline?

Don’t get me wrong: I wish Nintendo would get over it and just do it because, again, I think Tomodachi Life on a console with a ”screenshot/video button” would be viral social media gold. Not only do I want it, it’s a guaranteed marketing/sales success.
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Nintendo put a full on gender fluid/nonbinary main character in the xenoblade 3 dlc and not only that, had one of the leads explicitly describe 'something in between male and female", and that it "makes sense to me", as something completely normal, to ward off the chuds (whether it worked is up in the air).

Plus they've had queer relationships in the fire emblem games, and Miitopia did away with any and all limits on relationships between characters regardless of gender.
I don't think Nintendo are concerned about this nearly as much as you think they might be.

The only reason tomodachi life is AWOL is that there aren't enough internal developers to make everything Nintendo might want to and something had to give.
 
Linkstrikesback said:
Nintendo put a full on gender fluid main character in the xenoblade 3 dlc and not only that, had one of the leads explicitly describe 'something in between male and female", and that it "makes sense to me", as something completely normal, to ward off the chuds (whether it worked is up in the air).

Plus they've had queer relationships in the fire emblem games, and Miitopia did away with any and all limits on relationships between characters regardless of gender.
I don't think Nintendo are concerned about this nearly as much as you think they might be.

The only reason tomodachi life is AWOL is that there aren't enough internal developers to make everything Nintendo might want to and something had to give.
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Xenoblade and Fire Emblem are, IIRC, T for Teen, and my suspicion is based around Nintendo not wanting stupid sensationalist headlines about them being a negative force for children. Miitopia, rated E, getting rid of those limits, though, I had not known and I will say that does change my opinion! Thanks for letting me know about that.

Then yeah, it definitely comes down to lack of developers. I do think another one will happen eventually, they just need a team dedicated to doing it.
 
I also suspect that a lot of the appeal of the game as it was is no longer very appealing now due to modern AI.

On the one hand, LLMs are pretty capable of making compelling writing similar to many of Tomodachi Life's potential scenarios with public figures. I'm not sure the quirky, template based situational comedy lands in the same way now because of that, it might feel too stunted and limited compared to what can easily be found elsewhere. If I want to know what the Hulk and Ronald McDonald's wedding would be like, I would probably go to ChatGPT first. On the other hand, even Tomodachi Life's super limited portrayals of player generated characters might be interpreted as too evocative of deepfakes at a time when many feel personal privacy is harder to achieve than ever.
 
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I mean the answer is far more simple than most here realized, sakamoto was too busy with dread
 
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Derachi said:
However, if Nintendo is one thing above literally all else, it’s controversy avoidant. And unfortunately for us, if Nintendo were to ship a game in 2024 that was rated E for Everyone (therefore buyable by children) that allowed players to choose partner preferences for characters, you and I both know there are idiot dipshit scumbags who would accuse Nintendo of “grooming” or some other garbage. It’d be nice if Nintendo were to have a backbone about this, but this is the same company that tried to hide a Pride-themed eShop sale under a rainbow “Hidden Gems” banner, so I have my doubts.
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They’ve already made queer relationships between Miis a thing in Miitopia (even at the cost of the game being rated 18+ in Russia because of it), so I doubt that’s the reason we haven’t gotten a new Tomodachi Life yet. Of course, Miitopia’s relationships aren’t as prominent to the game as relationships are in Tomodachi Life, so I could see there being some hesitation and uncertainty on how exactly to implement it (especially with the whole baby feature), but I don’t think that alone has been stopping us from getting a new Tomodachi Life. A big part of it has probably been Nintendo’s reluctance to use Miis very much on Switch, but in recent years they’ve been getting better about that (probably because they’ve distanced themselves from the 3DS/Wii U era enough by now) so I could see it being that a new Tomodachi Life game just wouldn’t have been green-lit over other projects until very recently, if one is even in development at the moment.
 
Tye said:
They’ve already made queer relationships between Miis a thing in Miitopia (even at the cost of the game being rated 18+ in Russia because of it), so I doubt that’s the reason we haven’t gotten a new Tomodachi Life yet. Of course, Miitopia’s relationships aren’t as prominent to the game as relationships are in Tomodachi Life, so I could see there being some hesitation and uncertainty on how exactly to implement it (especially with the whole baby feature), but I don’t think that alone has been stopping us from getting a new Tomodachi Life. A big part of it has probably been Nintendo’s reluctance to use Miis very much on Switch, but in recent years they’ve been getting better about that (probably because they’ve distanced themselves from the 3DS/Wii U era enough by now) so I could see it being that a new Tomodachi Life game just wouldn’t have been green-lit over other projects until very recently, if one is even in development at the moment.
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Yeah, as I said in a different post above, I had no idea Miitopia did that, so it does make me more optimistic about Tomodachi’s chances
 
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I think another part of it is Nintendo just aren’t pushing miis as company mascots the way they did back on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. They’re still around and in popular games, but it definitely feels like Nintendo is less interested in them now than they were in their heyday.
 
I love this game. I still play it on 3ds regularly. It’s a damn shame there hasn’t been a switch port yet. Maybe the miitopia port was their test bed and didn’t do too well or something, personally I love miitopia on switch
 
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Stuck in Mii purgatory.
Dutchie said:
For some reason they ported Miitopia of all games over Tomodachi Life. Why???
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I assume because Miitopia was a more recent game that in most of the world only released after Switch had already stolen all the attention away. So it was a case of giving a game a second chance, like with Wii U games, rather than taking an already big success and doing a special rerelease.
 
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