Last week Nintendo published new usage guidelines for Animal Crossing that make it expressly clear that you cannot use the game for commercial purposes, including marketing your business, selling custom designs, or earning ad revenue with game content. I can understand why Nintendo wants to prevent the game from becoming spammy or overly commercialized, but also feels like there is a missed opportunity for them to catalyze some sort of economy around virtual goods. Plenty of Animal Crossing players are interested in paying for stuff to enhance their gaming experience. To satisfy that demand a number of third-party sites like Nookazon have cropped up where they can go to buy furniture, clothes, art, etc. Fashion brands are experimenting with bringing virtual clothes to the game as well.

It's not surprising that Nintendo is being conservative about Animal Crossing going in this direction. They have tended to be relatively cautious about stuff that is outside of what they know well -- and they are the best at what they know well! It's entirely possible that they've issued these rules while they try and figure out how to best to allow people to buy and sell within the game. But in all likelihood this is more or less going to be the policy around commercial activity in the game going forward.

Eventually someone else will likely step into the gap Nintendo has opened up here and create a game that's a lot like Animal Crossing, but that embraces the virtual economy and encourages, rather than discourages, creators, brands, sellers, etc to participate. This will be harder than it looks, of course, as it's easier to add a virtual economy to a fun game than to add a fun game to a virtual economy, but I'm excited to see what ends up getting built here, and if you’re working on something along those lines, I’d love to hear from you.