A Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream demo has been out since yesterday, complete with a robust new character creator and tons of customization and user input features not present in the last game. Which has, uh, pretty quickly made it apparent why Nintendo put heavier restrictions than usual on media sharing from this game specifically. Because, well, they’re already making Miis say and do things that would be wildly inappropriate for sharing through official Nintendo channels.
For some context, we learned back in January that Nintendo would be imposing very heavy image-sharing restrictions specifically on Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. Specifically, it looks like you can’t share screenshots directly from the game to social media or a smartphone, though gameplay sharing via Game Chat is still allowed. That means it will be significantly more difficult to get screen captures of silly stuff happening in the game and dump them on social media. It won’t be impossible for the dedicated, but it will likely be challenging enough that most casual players simply won’t bother.
This has upset fans of Tomodachi Life, who say that this is killing one of the core joys of this series, which is sharing extremely silly emergent moments with friends. And they’re correct: Tomodachi Life is basically all about setting up a bunch of strange characters, seeing what happens when you toss them together in weird situations, and then sharing the results.
And yet…after the demo launched yesterday, you can kinda see where Nintendo was coming from. I won’t share them here for obvious reasons, but there are already dozens of uploads across social media of players showing goofy-looking Miis in Tomodachi Life talking about some pretty serious, upsetting, and/or controversial topics, including the Epstein files and the shooting of Charlie Kirk.
We’ve also recently learned that Nintendo allows you to freely draw whatever you want on the faces of Miis, and while most people will likely use that to make like, cat people or something, it’s almost certain there will be a small handful of users who draw stuff that Nintendo does not want to be hosting on its app.
Given all this, I can see why Nintendo doesn’t want to be a middle man for these sorts of posts. It still feels like a futile effort, in that the people who make this sort of content almost certainly do so with the intent of sharing it and already have made preparations to do so easily.
It sucks that the possibility of this sort of thing has reduced our ability to see silly images of Reggie Fils-Aime asking Dragon Ball’s Piccolo if he likes potatoes, or whatever else these guys get up to. But so goes the world, I suppose.
Tomodachi Life is out on April 16. That aforementioned free demo is out now, but be careful as you play it, as it has a hard cut-off point that can sneak up on you unexpectedly.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
