Nintendo's free-to-play Pokémon Shuffle passes 1m downloads
UPDATE: Now up to 2.5m.
UPDATE 23/3/15 8.20am Pokémon Shuffle has now been downloaded more than 2.5m times, Nintendo has announced.
The free-to-play puzzler has reached this milestone just three weeks after it passed hit the 1m mark. Shuffle first launched just over a month ago, on 18th February.
Users will be given another free in-game item to celebrate, this time a Disruption Delay.
ORIGINAL STORY 2/3/15 9.55am More than a million people have now downloaded free-to-play 3DS puzzler Pokémon Shuffle, Nintendo has announced.
The Pokémon-themed match-3 game arrived on the 3DS eShop less than two weeks ago.
Nintendo sent a message to all Shuffle users in celebration of the milestone, and included a free Complexity -1 item as a gift.
This item will simplify one round of the puzzle game, making a difficult level much easier. It usually costs a whopping 9000 coins to purchase.
A thinly-veiled take on the popular Puzzle and Dragons mobile app, Pokémon Shuffle lets you play five games for free during each play session.
The ability to play for free recharges over time, or you can pay to buy more play tokens (hearts). You can also buy lumps of in-game gold to use on items.
We previously investigated how long you should expect to play without paying up.
But Eurogamer's Christian Donlan wasn't convinced:
"Shuffle is a muddle, then," he wrote in our Pokémon Shuffle review, "an acceptable distraction undermined by the grasping philosophy behind its business model as much as the actual amount of money it could cost you."
