Back in November 2015, Futurefly, a Finnish start-up founded by the former head of franchise development at Remedy, Oskari 'Ozz' Häkkinen, closed a seed round of $3 million.

Today, the studio is launching its first release, Rawr, a chat app which looks to gamify social interactions with the introduction of animated avatars.

Users can send each other messages via text, while their avatars react and emote by using Natural Language Processing to scan the text and behave accordingly.

Trascending language barriers

The comparison's to Nintendo's first foray in the mobile world, Miitomo, are obvious – both involve animated avatars, though Miitomo only allows communication through answering specific questions.

Rawr is instead a full-fledged social platform, and Häkkinen doesn't seem too worried about the competition.

"Nintendo had us for a moment there when we thought Miitomo was doing the same thing, but we were relieved to see a very different execution," he said.

"At the same time, Miitomo’s popularity has been good validation that the world could be ready for this."

The app is available only on iOS "initially", and will be kept updated regularly with new animations and emotes.