Badge Arcade shows Nintendo’s accidental mastery of free-to-play ⊟

I don’t really like crane games. I once worked in an arcade, and one of my main duties was opening the crane machine every time a toy got stuck to the crane, then giving the toy to the kid anyway, because who cares.

I also don’t care about decorating my 3DS. Despite occasionally declaring a theme worth purchasing, I have yet to take the step of actually paying money for a 3DS theme. My home screen is the most utilitarian tiny grid of icons possible. Any frivolous badges would only slow my launching of games.

And yet. And yet, I’ve been playing Nintendo Badge Arcade every day, eagerly awaiting my five free practice credits, hoping to unlock free plays on the real machines. I’ve been optimistically going for the most desirable badges and feeling real disappointment when I get another brick block.

I spent a dollar.

There are a couple of things that make Nintendo Badge Arcade work better than it should. First, the actual crane game is fun to play. Unlike every other machine in the world, the virtual claw machines in Badge Arcade are not rigged against you. It’s possible, even likely, to pick up multiple items in a single round, grabbing one and pushing others into the chute. Some machines even have special gimmicks on the crane, like a hammer or a bomb that change the experience.

It’s possible for Nintendo to put the odds in our favor because, unlike that Scooby-Doo plush nobody actually wanted but everyone tried to grab, the prizes in Badge Arcade have virtually no value. They’re just tiny JPGs of repurposed character art and sprites, usable as decoration on the 3DS home menu. Some of them can be used as icons for Mii Maker, 3DS Music and other built-in apps. They don’t really cost anything to make, Nintendo doesn’t have to spend money to restock the machine after I’ve cleaned it out, and so I can experience the joy of actually winning a thing.

Also novel: Badge Arcade is a refinement of the approach to F2P Nintendo tried with Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, and is also sort of about being F2P like that game is.

As in Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, Nintendo acts under the assumption that free-to-play mechanics are best delivered in the form of a salesman accompanying you through every moment of your experience – an extremely literal way to underscore the importance of customer service, I guess. Both games guide you through a friendship with salesmen, to different ends.

Whereas Rusty unpacks more and more of his sad life story to guilt you into buying baseball games – and giving you hints about what would cheer him up and get you a discount – Bunny is almost conspiratorially friendly, making bad jokes and telling you things “the boss” might not want you to hear. It’s a little weird that this approach would ever work to encourage you to spend money, but… it’s nice. It’s nice to have a sympathetic face taking my dollars, even if it’s a fake cartoon rabbit.

I feel like this was an accidental discovery on Nintendo’s part, like a sarcastic game about F2P needling turned out to be a really effective F2P game. But it’s unfair to assume Nintendo blundered into what was likely a deeply researched, secretly iterated experiment.

Best of all, I can play Badge Arcade every day without spending any money, even though Bunny is very clear that Nintendo could use the cash. The game hands out five “practice” tokens every day that can be used to get fake badges. If you get enough badges, or get special ones, or if there’s some kind of promotion going on, etc. you get free plays on the “real” machines. The game is generous enough with the free plays that I haven’t felt the need to pay more than once.

Of course, the reason the game encourages you to come back daily is that Bunny opens each day’s sessions with a cute story that… also happens to be an ad for Nintendo games. Somehow this also comes off as charming, like when Bunny gushed about Mario Kart 8 under the guise of a “hardcore gamer review.” Yeah, Nintendo has this down.

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