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Free-to-play games are starting to find a sizeable audience on the Nintendo 3DS. Earlier in the month, Genius Sonority announced that their free-to-play RPG, The Denpa Men RPG Free!, had been downloaded over 500,000 times. This week, Sega announced that Initial D: Perfect Shift Online has crossed 400,000 downloads.
Initial D: Perfect Shift Online was released in April. The game isn’t quite a racer—instead, your race car moves automatically, and you have to shift gears at the right time in order to maintain your lead during the race.
Prior to its release, Sega CCO Toshihiro Nagoshi said that the company considered Perfect Shift Online an experiment to gauge how a free-to-play project might perform on the 3DS, and that they intend to release more free games on the device, due to its popularity in Japan.
“I understand that the market is different, but on the other hand, I believe that everyone is aware of that, and that’s how the Nintendo 3DS has kept going on without having to release F2P titles,” Nagoshi said. “So, I’d like to try it out, and see the results for myself. As a game creator and producer, I’m very interested in seeing what happens.”
Nintendo themselves have been experimenting with free-to-play games on the 3DS as well. The publisher currently has two such games available on the device—Steel Diver: Sub Wars and Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball. Download figures for those two titles have not been revealed yet.
