Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball extends Nintendo’s free to play plans on 3DS

During the American Nintendo Direct today, Nintendo revealed a brand new free to play game for the Nintendo 3DS eShop.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is a collection of mini games all centered around Baseball. The base game is free to download and comes with one activity – if you like it and want to play different games you can purchase some. With a twist.

Nintendo will be offering additional mini games for around $4, that’s unless you bribe the titular Rusty with in-game items. These in-game items will actually lower the real world price of the additional games.

There’s no saying how low you can go on each game, presumably it wouldn’t go down to free. It’s an interesting concept and a weird spin on the typical downloadable content concept.
The game is out in April in North America, since it wasn’t shown in the European direct we should expect it a little later.

[quote]Ex-pro baseball player and dog Rusty Slugger owns a sports shack. He’s broke with 10 puppies to feed, so he offers a variety of baseball mini-games for sale, themed around the simple pleasures of baseball. Players can bat, pitch, catch and even umpire. The initial software containing a part of the first mini-game is free, but players can purchase additional mini-games in a unique way: by haggling to lower the real-world price for each downloadable game. Additional games start at $4 apiece, but giving Rusty items or listening to his problems might improve his mood and motivate him to offer steep discounts.[/quote]