How Nintendo closes up shop: Inside the sunset of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

And my go-to recommendation to scratch that shooter itch.

Kayla’s avatar in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Possibly in their ‘funeral’ outfit.

Nintendo has to be the gaming industry’s most unpredictable company. In 2017, after years of resisting pressure to do so, the gaming giant released a trio of mobile games leveraging its hot intellectual property: Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.

All three ticked away with similar business models. You could initially play them for free, and then upgrade your experience with a combination of a subscription or purchase in-game new content with microtransactions. This year, the company announced that it would be ending ongoing support for one of those games, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, moving it to an offline model with a one-time purchase.

It piqued the interest of Kayla Medica, a player of the game and specialist business-to-business marketer — who runs her own Substack, Mehdeeka. We sat down and discussed what it all means and why it's interesting from both a marketi…