March 2016 saw Nintendo finally release its first game for smartphones, and while it wasn't one of the company's classic franchises, the oddball Miitomo seemed like it might be a good smartphone fit.

Although the game attracted headlines and millions of downloads in its first week, it didn't turn out to be a solid, classic Nintendo "social game" like Animal Crossing. Less than two years later, the app has already taken its first steps to a game-as-a-service graveyard, as Nintendo announced the game's immediate freeze of paid microtransactions (MTX) on Thursday ahead of a full game shutdown on May 9. On that day, all login attempts will stop working, and all "Mii" characters made in the game will be trapped. (Log in ahead of the shutdown should you wish to transfer those Miis to other compatible consoles like the Switch and Nintendo 3DS.)

This announcement, like the ones we've seen for other dying-soon MMOs and online games, offers a consolation of free in-game items and bonuses for players who continue logging in until the final days. The game's Japanese site describes impending refunds for any unused paid currencies in the game, but we didn't see similar text appear in the English-language announcement, perhaps owing to the default, non-refundable nature of MTX in shops like Google Play and the iOS App Store.

Miitomo's arrival in early 2016 resembled another Nintendo franchise, Tomodachi Life, and, at first blush, we were hopeful that some of Tomodachi's failings would be corrected by the accessibility and wider social net cast by smartphone platforms. Unfortunately, Miitomo was a skeleton of a full social experience , in that it didn't offer meaningful interactions beyond a limited question-and-answer system and generally felt like a half-baked version of Twitter.

Worse, Miitomo players were generally locked in tiny, hard-to-customize apartments. Trying to gather virtual friends in the game and have Nintendo-like fun felt largely like twiddling thumbs in a jail cell. Even a straight smartphone port of Tomodachi Life would have been a better call than Miitomo, both from a fun standpoint and from the sheer business potential of giving players more reasons to pay real money for virtual items.

Really, for all the butt-kicking and business bluster Nintendo has pulled off with its Switch console, the company's smartphone efforts stand in sharp contrast; Miitomo never received substantial, game-changing updates, and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp didn't appear to learn any of Miitomo's lessons. There's also the matter of Super Mario Run's business failings being blamed on its pricing strategy, as opposed to the fact that it just wasn't a very good Mario game, while Fire Emblem Heroes has leaned a little too hard on its "gacha" money-baiting systems instead of adding legitimate new types of battles and gameplay in its first year of existence.

It's time to admit that Nintendo just isn't very good at this smartphone-gaming thing so far. The obvious exception to this list, Pokemon Go, stands out largely because it is developed and maintained by outside companies, not Nintendo. The company has a rich history of classic games that would port beautifully to smartphones, and I don't mean the classics that benefit from real buttons and D-pads. Slow fare such as JRPGs and interactive fiction (Famicom Detective Club, anyone?) and classic Nintendo DS entries with touchscreen systems already exist in Nintendo's archives. Publishing those kinds of games and setting a tone might have given Nintendo a better foothold as a "brand-new" company in the established smartphone market. But alas, until the company wakes up and tries putting out a good smartphone game, cost and economics and MTX be damned, I'm officially unmoved by whatever tactics, games, and gacha systems they flex next.