Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

MiiStation in the Wall Street Journal

You may have already heard that one of our projects, MiiStation (where we offer to make a Mii avatar on Nintendo’s Wii console), was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.  The article discusses businesses sprouting up around the Mii concept and brought in a wave of orders this weekend, helping us make one particularly interesting (to me, anyway) observation: avatars are a popular business (and Nintendo’s Wii will be making it more so). 

When customers who can’t get their hands on a top selling game console still aspire to be a part of the action, you know you’ve got something special.  I would say at least a third of our “Make Mii” orders were from customers who don’t have a Wii console but want a Mii they can use in other digital contexts (chat avatars, blogs, even power point presentations!).  Before Nintendo’s Mii started making the rounds, most avatars lived in their closed environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft, and were not very relatable to others outside of those environments.  With the Mii, Nintendo has essentially established an ‘avatar platform’ that anyone can understand in practically any digital domain.  The mr. potato head-like pieces are just simple enough for non- geeks and gamers to understand and relate to, and just fun enough to want to share.

When MiiStation made the rounds on gamer websites, we received a lot of traffic but few orders.  So far the Wall Street Journal article has brought in about a 1/3 of the traffic but with a much higher ROI: significantly more customers and happier ones to boot, like this person:

“I am so impressed with this service, I can assure you that … I shall be sending you additional photos of our other 2 boys … so that they can have their own Mii created.”

Yay! :)