Super Mario Run Close To 150 Million Downloads, But Has Earned Less Than Fire Emblem: Heroes

"This surely won't be lost on Nintendo's key decision-makers; it's highly likely that the company will adopt the micro-transaction approach with future mobile games, as that is clearly the best way to generate revenue on smartphones."

That is exactly what I'm fearing.

Nintendo's creative side made a good mobile game that brought MARIO back to the masses, but it was ruined by Nintendo's corporate missteps.

I really hope they learn from this experience.

I think they should just give in and change how they monetise Mario Run. Either reduce the price or make it something along the lines of 99p for first 2 worlds then 99p per world after that. Not true free to play but should alleviate the App Store whinging idiots complaining, who spend more on 'free' to play games. Unfortunately they have to accommodate the lowest common denominator, which in the instance of Mobile gaming is cheapskate idiots.

@flapjackashley2 Agreed. All they needed to do was make the game cheaper and a paid for game up front. If they move to micro-transactions they will also be making a misstep.

OF COURSE it has earned less.

It has a very hard lock on how much you can spend inside it. And people even complain about this.

They'd rather be let loose in a back alley full of crack dealers giving you the first trip for free than pay up front for a ticket to the fun house.

It's all about the orbs. Getting free orbs isn't impossible, but it's a lot more trouble than just paying for them (which I haven't yet). The problem with Mario Run is that I found the demo really boring, so I just didn't buy the game. Had it been a "pay up front" kind of game would obviously have been a better idea

£5 Super Mario Run would've worked but now the oldies on the board will think micro-transactions are the answer.

I loathe mobile phone games, and would never buy any of these.

I'd consider them on Switch, though.

@flapjackashley2 Nintendo did recently say that they prefer the Mario Run payment model. . . . because it's fairer. . .

150 million downloads is great until you ask yourself how many of those people played just the demo versus how many paid for the game? I haven't downloaded the game as it looks boring and I'm certainly not paying €10 or whatever it is for it.

Edit: And to back up that point, Fire Emblem Heroes has sold 1/10th of Super Mario Run but has generated more revenue.

https://twitter.com/mochi_wsj/status/857496545993736192

The morons have spoken. Expect Nintendo to adopt the microtransaction model for all future mobile games. -.-

@SLIGEACH_EIRE I caved and paid the £7.99 price when I found out it was going up to £9.99. Very stupid of me. Was not worth it

Mario RUN was good. 150 millions is something. If nintendo was not here for the money but for the ip it was a success.

Not sure what people are spending money on in FE. £1.99 for 3 Orbs, which won't even get you one hero? Yuck.

One thing that should be fixed.
Customer's mindset.
Tons of Mobile gamers are Parasite.
Want Freebies, Dislike Paid games.
Well... Bad Romance Syndrome, want everything as long it's free.

I know a lot of people saw this coming. I expect the AC mobile game to be like Pokemon go and FEH. More money that way

That's not surprising, it's well known that free to play with microtransactions is the most successful approach to mobile.

@Grumblevolcano
Hm...
I think Animal Crossing for Mobile will implement micro transaction for the Villagers. Imagine I have to pay some $ to unlock specific Villagers permanently, just like I buy specific Amiibo Cards.

@Anti-Matter
However, when "that free game" have microtransactions, many people who didn't pay for a "free game", Spend much more for the microtransactions of the same game

I payed 7.99 after 2 hours it was over

I see a lot of people bashing FE:H because of it's business model; but make no mistake, it's a much better model than Super Mario Run.

I'm enjoying playing FE:H for free since launch. I have no problem getting progress thanks to the amount of free/new stuff released every days. The support for this game is excellent.

Super Mario Run makes you pay premium price for a quite small amount of content. You still need internet to play it and Nintendo never planned to add content to the game.

In the end, with SMR you pay 10 buck to have some fun for like 1 week (im generous) and never touch the game ever again. With FE:H you pay nothing to have fun for as long as you want, there's always new stuff coming and the game is just deep enough that it keeps you entertained. Sure If you're not paying you might not always get the exact stuff you want right away but you still get something worthwhile you can work with.

@SakuraHaruka
Ah... yes.
I forgot.

Eh, I don't really think there is enough content in Mario Run. 24 Levels? Almost everybody who buys will beat the main game in under an hour. The price per level ($0.42) for a runner is already on the high end of the market. If they were committed to doing Mario Run as microtransactions, they'd have to make it an evergreen title (new levels and characters monthly) and probably lower the price per (3 levels for $0.99).

It just seems to me there is so much more content and replayability in Fire Emblem heroes that it's not directly comparable.

@UK-Nintendo
2 hours to beat Bowser once again ?
LOL XD
So, after that there is nothing Special to do right ?

FEH is very generous to its F2P plyers tho.
I have not spent anything on the game yet and am still having loads of fun. New contet and events are added constantly and the devs seem to listen to the playerbase and make very good chnages based on feedback.

@Anti-Matter only toad rally which gets boring quick. Maybe I'm being harsh but I'm not really a mobile gaming person

@Sinister Exactly, F2P is not the devil, F2P done right is actually pretty nice.

This new IKE banner is the devil tho... ^^

@Kokusho Yeah i tried for Ike and got Alm instead. Well its my first Falchion so i am happy.
I have played a few f2p games on pc recently and so far i am having a good time with all of them. Some i even ended up spending money on. But i don't mind that when i get over 1000 hours of gameplay out of a game.

@UK-Nintendo
I see...
Same. Me neither, not a Mobile gamer.

@Switch81tch That's a personal opinion, obviously. I still have fun playing Toad Rally every now and then. I don't regret the purchase at all, but do feel sorrow about Nintendo trying a fair (yet expansive) payment model while people clearly prefer Skinner Box and/or Gacha games which are clearly psychologically manipulative.

To be fair with Fire Emblem Heroes is that it's the only free to play game (that I know of) with no ads, which is a nice bonus.

As a traditional gamer this is disappointing as I much prefer paying up front knowing I won't have to pay anymore (DLC aside but thats another topic). Unfortunately for people like me, this is the reality of the mobile space. You can try until you are blue in the face to explain that you are likely to end up spending more money for a FTP game than a pay up front game but its all about that first hurdle of handing over money.

Perhaps Nintendo should have given an option in SMR to either unlock stuff through microtransactions or a single payment.

An example would have been Ace Combat infinity's campaign. To unlock each singleplayer mission, you had to grind money through multiplayer missions which utilised Fuel Credits and I think even then you needed to use fuel. However, I like many others just coughed up a set amount at the start so all current and future singleplayer missions were available and could be replayed as often as desired.

I played up until the final stage but then deleted it. This is way over priced because it's not worth playing.

It's not really suprising and I'm sure Nintendo already expected that, afterall the F2P system became a norm on mobile exactly cause of the money it can make, not cause players loves it or how well it enchant the gameplay.

Then again the different results can't be attributed only to the prices, the two games are very different afterall.
Personally I spent nothing in both, but I would have loved to put some money in FE if the orbs were cheaper (my opinion, but their price is far from be tempting) while I'll never purchase Mario Run simply because I didn't like it enough (I didn't even feel compelled to finish the free part) even if I'm totally okay with its pay-once price.

I downloaded Mario run -play Toad Rally daily for points but only have the first 4 stages as refuse to pay a tenner for it. £5 would be sweet spot.

Fire Emblem is better than Mario.

Is that 150 million who actually paid for the full game? If so that that's impressive but I'm guessing the vast majority of that is people (like me) who simply downloaded the free demo

If Nintendo weren't so greedy with the price then they would have had twice as many downloads and people willing to buy the full game so technically they've shot themselves in the foot by charging so much

well that just shows how stupid people are. they rather let themselves get ripped off with FEH than get a good deal with SMR.

Or, you know, the game sucks and people downloaded the demo and then uninstalled it.

Maybe (shock, horror), Mario games aren't good?

There's a reason mobile games adopt a freemium model, people. It's hard to make good money on mobile by just releasing a decent game for a fair price when the consumer base is cheap and just wants to download free games to play for five minutes.

It's why we'll likely never see real improvement in the average quality of mobile game releases.

@RainbowGazelle most mario games are very good. Super Mario Run is sadly average and not compelling however.

I found this game even more boring than Super Mario Maker.
I really don't like touch controls.

@Nik-Davies I really enjoyed it. Getting all the coins including the rock hard black coins was a real old schoo lchallenge. A well crafted game and worth every cent IMO.

lol. That is sad. It would have been a huge hit and made them lots of $$ if they just made it f2p. What else can I expect from the out of touch Nintendo, though.

Free to play is the way to go it seems.

@Marios-love-child The number only represents downloads, not purchases. If it was (making 1.5 billion dollars), Nintendo would be singing a much cheerier tune.

I do really wish Nintendo had tried offering Mario Run for $5 and I hope a time comes where smartphone users value their time and quality of play in the future and realize how much better it can be when you wipe away all the junk and can just focus on the fun parts (rather than the base addiction parts) of games.

Nintendo could have offered a peek into that option for a broad set of users, but $10 was too much. Our family knew we'd pay for it, but it just made the whole experience feel more expensive than it should have been, marring what is a pretty fun game.

My daughter in particular loved mastering the stages, going back for everything, getting all the gold toads. She's great at it. At $5 you'd have made people who just wanted to try all the levels and go after a few rewards feeling like it was a good value. But that type of player is bound to resent the $10.

And, of course, it's a huge wall to jump, and most people couldn't figure out what they'd get out of it, or if they'd be like my daughter or be less taken with it over time.

As it is, it's more like an experiment.

@chiefeagle02

exactly as I suspected

The price point was always going to be a sticking point with most! I've never paid more than £2.99 for any app on iPhone but regularly spend over £150 a month on console gaming

$10 was too steep. $5 would have been much closer to a reasonable impulse-buy, especially because I tend to avoid phone games

It was smart of Nintendo to try different $$ statagies for Mario and fire. Animal crossing will be done form of free to play w/micro I'm sure.
Hate on it all you want, but I play hearthstone daily and never pay for it.
And mario run was just to short for $10. It was a great game but just should have cost 1/2 price day 1 and been on sale by now.

I got bored with both mobile games, I just don't think mobile is the right place for nintendo even. Only thing I really do is collect dailies on FEH and do summons on occasion, but part of that is probably because I have a couple other mobile games I play religiously and FEH isn't as good as them.

I really don't understand how so much of the public can be so stupid as to want to pay more for games by paying for them a little at a time forever. I imagine in the mobile space it started with the manipulation by big telecom, where post people still think their $800 phone is "free" or "$99" and everything is financed on credit approval. It's a mindset that STARTS when they obtain the phone, and continues to everything they do on the phone. The manipulation just continues from there in gaming where the "It's just another $.99" takes over, "it's all really cheap stuff."

I imagine a lot has to do with small kids on allowances playing on tablets as well. Asking mommy for another $.99 is easy. Asking for a ten spot proves more challenging.

However as cfg said, Kimishima already said Nintendo prefers the SMR model. That presents the brand image they want to present. And as Iwata and Kimishima and Miyamoto have all made perfectly clear, numerous times, from the very beginning, mobile isn't being used as a profit engine, though they do wish it to be profitable, it's being used as a marketing tool for brand awareness so more people buy Switches, 3DS's, Marko Kart fruit gummies, Mario vitamins, and Pikachu socks.

Nintendo will earn Billions if they port Zelda Breath of the Wild to mobile and tablets.

It's entirely possible, in a year all the mobile processors will be faster than Switch. Someone will make a Switch emulator to run on Android tablet.

Fire Emblem: Heroes has given this kangaroo who was down on luck recently a 5 star One (which I like), Super Mario Run, meanwhile, needs Rosalina and more levels, lol

It's a shame that the microtransactions model did better than the one upfront payment model. I'd much prefer to make one single payment instead of constantly being pushed to pay more microtransactions.

That said, I haven't payed for Mario Run, and I've now uninstalled it. I was planning on buying the game after getting all the black coins in the four free levels, but the Gold Goomba event put me off. I was never going to get enough gold goombas before the event was over, and missing limited time items slightly decreases my excitement for a game.

I happily bought SMR. But the need for a constant internet connection means I barely play it.

Lol. You complain about the price.but spend $60 on a game that last maybe a week lol

Super Mario Run isn't a good enough game for me to play for free, let alone spend money on it.

@Phin68 Agreed. I wanted to like it and was willing to pay the full price, but I just didn't like the game play.

@Switch81tch
They expected people to want Mario and be convinced that this version was indeed good fun after having played it for a bit.

There are actually plenty of mobile games at this price point.

On paper it didn't look too stupid.

There are multiple reasons it didn't do exactly as hot as some had anticipated.

@Switch81tch But of course I do agree with you that Nintendo made a dumb move on nearly every aspect by putting a paywall on a 2016 mobile game and making it a whopping €10. Mario Run was meant to bring Mario back to the masses, with everyone joining in, as it was clearly demonstrated by their Pokémon GO-ish advertisement.

A company like Nintendo should've seen it coming, even though they're new to the mobile game market. Also, the way Race Tickets are bombardedly distributed in the game makes it clear that it was a last moment decision to include a paywall. All elements for microtransactions are there.

Reminder that different Yoshi colors aren't new characters

This is also why mobile gaming will never catch up to consoles/pc

I honestly would have bought Mario Run if it had been $5 or less. $10 for what I amount to an experience that is more fleeting than Mario's Game Boy titles was too steep for many.

As for Fire Emblem, I play that all the time. I haven't paid a dime for it but at some point I will buy something. I think if a game has me hooked that much and it being free without the annoying ads as other mobile games do then I will believe they will earn my $2 at some point.

@flapjackashley2 As sad as it is, as Nintendo and video game fans we love Mario Run's paying model, but people who play mobile games just want in app purchases.

I guarantee that Mario Run at half the price would've made more money overall (i.e sold more than twice the amount)

I still think that when compared to similar games on the App Store this game is priced I had higher than it should have been. Even if it is worth the price the reality is that the mobile market judges value in completely different ways from that of the core gamer market. Had it been half the price I am certain FAR more people would bite.

Edit: Dang it @Dezzy had my point covered!

I dunno about you people, but I paid for Super Mario Run, and I'm still playing Toad Rally once a day on a daily basis, trying to unlock all the remaining buildings for my Mushroom Kingdom.