Why has mobile Super Mario Run earned little?
In almost two years since the launch, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run mobile game has earned $60 million, Sensor Tower analysts estimate. Compared to the top games on the mobile market, this is very little, but can this project be considered a failure?
The next game of the popular franchise, Super Mario Run was released in September 2016 on iOS and six months later on Android. The game is distributed according to the freemium model – you can download it for free, and to open all the content, you need to pay ten dollars. At first, revenues and downloads of the game were high, but they fell very quickly.
When compared with other Nintendo mobile projects, Super Mario Run shows itself worse than Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Fire Emblem Heroes, despite the advantage in downloads. Both of these games are distributed according to the freeplay model.
So, in May 2018, Super Mario Run earned $ 300 thousand with one million downloads, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp received $2 million with 200 thousand downloads, and Fire Emblem Heroes had monthly earnings of $7 million, and the number of downloads was only 60 thousand.
Here are a few factors why Super Mario Run earned quite a bit:
- The Freemium model initially could not bring a result comparable to F2P. However, it was a conscious decision by Nintendo, which likes this model more, including because it allows parents to protect the child from unreasonable spending. As Variety notes, a lot of players were also satisfied with the lack of in-game purchases.
- There was not enough content in the game, an additional nine levels appeared in it only a year later. Due to the small number of levels, many gamers considered the price of $ 10 too high.
- The platformer performed poorly on the Japanese market – unlike the two aforementioned Nintendo mobile games, which receive the main revenue from Japan, where the company has the greatest authority. Super Mario Run had stable success only in the USA – 43% of revenue came from there.
- The version of Super Mario Run for Android came out loaded, which affected sales. The game received 77% of all revenue from the App Store.
Also on the topic:
