 Nintendo is finally bringing back the iconic Mi. In the recent Nintendo Direct, it was announced that these miniature custom avatars will be taking on a big role in the new Mario Golf, and will be taking a starring role as the 3DS role-playing game MiTopia comes to the Switch. Mi's have always had a presence on the Nintendo Switch, but their role has been far smaller than on previous consoles, like the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. At one point, Nintendo was running its own Mi-themed social media network in the form of the Miverse, so why did the company ditch all of these ideas, and why are the Mi games coming back now? The short answer is likely to do with the phenomenal amount of resources needed to run a lot of Mi projects. While these faces are simple, they've created Nintendo plenty of headaches in the past, and at one point simply became too costly to maintain. To talk about why Mi's are coming back, we need to first explore why Mi's were created in the first place. According to Satoru Iwata, these adorable avatars came out because of Shigeru Miyamoto's quote, unrelenting tenacity. Miyamoto has been trying to get a Mi-like system to work since the days of the Famicom, so when Iwata saw development work on a similar character creation feature in the DS game Tomodachi Collection, he knew it was exactly what his colleague was looking for. So the Tomodachi Collection team were assigned to turn their character creation system into a central part of the in-development Nintendo Wii console, and they were given just two months to complete the project. One of the big challenges was figuring out exactly which facial features to include. Initial prototypes were designed around Japanese faces, but the developers found their own cultural bias made it hard to design for a more global audience. Said project overseer Hisashi Nagami, when people judge whether a picture resembles a real face, they have an idea of what a standard face looks like in their minds. They then judge whether a picture resembles a face, basing their judgment on how different they are from this standard face. If that is the case, then there is no way I can possibly make an adequate lookalike of a non-Japanese face. After all, I have no built-in image of a standard non-Japanese face. When Mii's debuted on the Nintendo Wii, they were an instant success, not least because of their role in games such as Wii Sports. Designing the system had been a challenge, but as a large player base embraced Nintendo's new home console, the company looked at ways of integrating these custom avatars in more and more games. For the Wii's successor, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to take the idea even further. He said, Ultimately, I want Mii characters to be the world standard for avatars. I hope that in the future, when you have to go to the city council for some administrative formality, they'll ask you to submit your Mii character too. The result of this ambitious project was Miiverse, a social media network created and operated by Nintendo, which took the Mii characters further than ever before. The idea had a lot of promise, but it fell afoul of one major problem, the WiiU's install base. While Miiverse also came to 3DS and PC, the network needed a strong presence on Nintendo's home console to thrive. As with many projects from the WiiU era, with a smaller number of console owners, there wasn't much opportunity for the project to gain traction, and a social media network that doesn't reach a wide enough audience is going to struggle. Before long, Nintendo was getting ready to abandon the WiiU in favour of a new attempt at a similar concept, the Switch. This time around, having learned a lesson from Miiverse, Nintendo opted to integrate the Switch into existing popular social media platforms, allowing for easy sharing of photos and videos to platforms like Twitter. This was, in essence, because running a social media network was simply too costly. Nintendo had sunk a lot of resources into their Miiverse, and their plans hadn't worked out as they'd hoped, said Reggie Fesame. Miiverse was a great community. It was something we thought would be integral to the WiiU proposition. Unfortunately, the WiiU didn't scale the way we hoped it would, which makes continuing those services financially challenging. Once we made the decision for it to be concluded on WiiU, it meant it would be concluded for 3DS as well as the viewing service on your PC. So that was that. Having sunk a lot of time and money into turning Mii's into a fully fledged social media service, Nintendo decided to scale back their avatar system on the Nintendo Switch, to avoid incurring more costs. Now though, as the Switch has performed so much better than the WiiU, it seems that Nintendo again feels justified in showing these adorable avatars some love. If Metopia and Mario Golf sell well, it's likely we'll see more Mii's on the Switch in the future.