Nintendo Close To Hitting $1.8 Billion In Revenue From Mobile Games

Man screw them they cancelled dragalia!

What about Pikmin and Pokemon?

Share price going up again, woop!

Gacha games succeed in how much of the whale/dolphin [players that actually spend money] portion of the playerbase they can retain. Ask Genshin impact.

While having a ton of FTP players is nice to have for SMR it doesn’t help if that is all you practically have.

It’s always better if you have way less downloads, but way more people willing to throw money at you.

Also I can see why Drag Lost is going to die soon. Only at 167 million revenue and only 4m showed enough interest to even download the game shows any sense of real app growth was shot.

I want to like Mario Kart Tour, I really do, but it's way too busy for me to digest. Too many confusing menus and pop-ups and I can't figure out how to navigate properly. But that's more of a general mobile game issue, I was doomed to not like Tour from the start.

@RupeeClock Uh no. Dragalia Lost has character banners from what you expect from a typical Gacha

@RupeeClock : Really good point about Heroes’s revenue relative to the number of times downloaded. That’s $54.61 per player. And of course the number of active players is likely to be substantially smaller (a few million tops) which would suggest that some players are spending hundreds, if not thousands on the game! O.o

@Silly_G that isn’t a rare sight for the popular Gacha. To hit pity in Granblue on the banner you have to spend hundreds of dollars.

Same with Genshin Impact. Thousands if you want to max constellation the character which you see people show off in videos for Genshin

FGO is like nine hundred dollars with their new pity [global doesn’t even have it yet so you can spend over a thousand and still not get the character you want]

FeH is more “generous” then the above examples, but they make players pull often anyway because they opt to releasing powercreeping units very often so your existing units quickly becoming obsolete.

Since FeH has PvP having the best units matters hence why people keep rolling. Factor in that they have also have a subscription plan and other ways to make you spend money I’m not surprised FeH made big revenue. Meanwhile Dragalia Lost was honestly TOO FTP friendly. Little incentive to really roll with their current meta and they gave away free roll materials very often anyway which is even less incentive to spend money

Like I said Gacha games succeed and have a long shelf life with no sense of danger of being delisted anytime soon is not because of the amount of downloads which a bulk would be FTP anyway, but how many dolphin/whale players stick around

Given we know Dragalia Lost is shutting down this year, the data above suggests that within a few years everything except FE Heroes will be shut down.

@Grumblevolcano they might keep Mario Run and Mario Kart. While the direct revenue those games make is much lower, the amount of FTP downloads are big enough to provide the indirect benefit of advertising the games on the Switch

Dragalia Lost also had the disadvantage that it was a collab with Cygames [Granblue] so there wasn’t any real indirect advertisement potential with the mobile game. That game also had only 4M downloads

@KoRn1619 : They likely aren’t listed as they’re published/handled by Niantic rather than Nintendo themselves.

Say it with me:

"SEX SELLS"

Always bet on fanservice and ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.

I'm not into Mobile but if this and film help Nintendo spin that cash into hardware+ game development for said hardware, that's good news to me.

The mobile Animal Crossing and Mario Kart entries have generated ~$550 million in revenue while the Switch Animal Crossing and Mario Kart titles have generated close to $5 billion in revenue.

$550 million is not nothing, but it pales in comparison to how much money Nintendo's own dedicated software generates when their own hardware platform is firing on all cylinders.

I can't help but wonder how much of this has actually gone into non mobile games, in the end.

@Yosher Truthfully, I think it's mostly being used as a rainy day fund. I kind of think the main reason Nintendo has so much money in their bank account is just in case someone tries to do a hostile takeover, as seen with many companies in the last few months.

@BloodyMurder Wafius and Husbandos, OH MY!

I think the only part of that from me is $10 to download the full game of Mario Run when it came out.

@RupeeClock dragalia is a full gotcha action rpg and better than feh imo

@KoRn1619 Those are from Ninatic, not Nintendo. Nintendo licensed Pokemon and Pikmin to them, they didn't actually make the games.

If that means FEH not closing anytime soon, cheers.

Mario run is the only Nintendo mobile game that, imo, is good. The rest are just micro transactions with a shallow game around them.

@NatiaAdamo From my understanding though, company takeovers don't happen quite as easily in Japan as they do in other parts of the world to begin with, so I dunno if they're keeping so much in the bank just for that.

Of course it doesn't hurt though. But I'm just hoping they're using all that profit to a fair degree at least to increase their quality overall.

Very sad state of affairs. If there's one upside to this, it's that the real Fire Emblem games have gotten more tasteful after Fates, like they exiled all the horniness to the waifu gatcha money printer.

Kind of amazing when you get down to it; FEH has less than ten percent of the playerbase of MK Tour, yet it's generated over three times as much.

This of course not counting Pokemon Go, which makes as much revenue annually as Fire Emblem Heroes has in its entire run.

@SwitchVogel It's also been out like twice as long. It's still a huge difference, but that's part of it.

Have Nintendo got any new mobile games in the works?

Is Pokémon Go still popular?

It's honestly shocking how Fire Emblem Heroes is absolutely destroying all Nintendo's other mobile games in terms of revenue, especially to the point that it's outperforming all three of the Mario mobile games combined.

As for these others, these are some pretty poor numbers, especially with Super Mario Run. The downloads aren't surprising, but for such a large player base, that's some very small earnings. And yes, it's only the one payment you do to access the full game, but the number of downloads compared to its total profit suggests it wasn't anywhere near as successful as Nintendo was hoping. I'd imagine Mario Kart Tour isn't performing as well as they'd like either, but with all the shady stuff that game has, I'm not complaining. Dr. Mario World was just a complete failure, and that happens with mobile games.

I'm not sure how much longer Nintendo is willing to continue with this mobile business of theirs. FEH will likely be staying for the long haul, if it's making money, keeping it is sensible from a business perspective. When Nintendo started developing mobile games, it was really because they had no choice- the Wii U was living dead, and the 3DS was on its last legs. They had to get to work developing the Switch, and mobile could be something they could invest in to both hold fans over, and to try and recoup their losses from the Wii U era. But with the Switch, there is no inherent need to keep developing these mobile games. But it's not like Nintendo will unceremoniously cease support for all their mobile games without anime swordfighters. I can see it being a slow process, with support for these games ceasing one by one over the course of the next couple years.

Mario Run, come on down?

nice good for nintendo then they can do our nso+ free when they earn so much and this only mobile stuff for 1,8 b

@RupeeClock I believe Dragalia is a Gacha too.
To be honest, I thought the same of Mario Kart.

@CITRONtanker It would be absolute crap to soft-brick a game that people have basically bought.

(Might get delisted 10 years old, and closed 15-20 years old)

Yet we still have 60$ games when they were 50$ and 40$ during Wii and Wii U. Can't get virtual console games and people paying for extra benefits on the online service. Yea Nintendo is a whole bunch of saints and not a money hungry company like any else.

I'm happy to say that I bought Mario Run and didn't spend a cent on any of the others.

Shame about Dr. Mario, though. That was a solid game that really deserved more love.

I am shocked that Fire Emblem has only had 18 million downloads, but has made almost a billion dollars! What a dedicated user base with deep pockets. No wonder we keep getting fire emblem games.

Jeez, Fire Emblem Warriors fans need a new hobby.

Man crazy that Fire Emblem had way less downloads but raked in so much more money. Gacha people really do be HOOKED huh?

Jesus Christ-

That's about $51.61 per Fire Emblem Mobile player.

Fire Emblem has some serious whales.

This is interesting, although I wished there was some type trend analysis, mainly how was the growth yoy.

I'm also guessing Pokemon Go is not here, as it is not a Nintendo game.

Mobile games are still garbage, sorry, not sorry.

@Arawn93 Dragalia Lost didn't get much advertisement by Nintendo after its initial launch. Unlike all the other mobile titles, it was a brand new IP, and it didn't have an existing fanbase to support it. It also didn't benefit from any switch/console releases during its lifetime. Lastly, unlike all the other games, Dragalia Lost was a story/text heavy game and never got localization in most countries, it was too ambitious for a mobile game. I've played all the mobile games, except Dr Mario World, and I think that Dragalia Lost was the best, but like all the other mobile games it was starting to show its age. I think that Dragalia Lost would've been better as a switch title, as it had a very high buy-in at launch to even play it (I had to buy a new tablet just to have space to download it).

@Z-Core Regarding FEH, they're in game sales have been in decline, but the game has been around for 5 years. They made 100 million in sales, during their first 4 months of live service. I really hope that they can bring that game around, for me and other year one players, its become very stale and new modes are too focused on pvp, which feels like the game is going in the wrong direction.

@RubyCarbuncle Yeah, at the time I was using an iphone 5S and my tablet was an older android. I could run it on my android tablet (google playstore even said my tablet was supported), but all textures were black and the game would crash frequently. I found an ipad mini on sale, so I got it and enjoyed it more outside of the game. For me DL was worth it, as it became my solace during the first few weeks of the pandemic and while I couldn't find a switch to purchase.

Ah yes, the whale hunt Nintendo canceled the FE TCG to focus on.

This is lifetime. Over what, 10 years? And revenue, not profit?

Peanuts, but at least it's good advertising.

They should be pulling $1bn profit a year, min.

That’s very interstate statistics. Don’t care for any of them really but maybe Tour if I’m waiting in a lobby out and about. Love Fire Emblem but Hereos story is not very good and thus I don’t play the game.

@Z-Core
Wow, I’m sure there’s a good portion that never spent a penny either, which means some have spent hundreds on the game lol.

Is Nintendo still doing a Zelda mobile title?

@Axecon it looks very doubtful. It looks like Nintendo is switching gears after the success of the Nintendo Switch and maybe they'll eventually pull out of the mobile market. It seems that they originally got into the mobile market as a way to appease stock holders after the failure of the Wii U.

Is Pikmin Bloom not doing well? Have not spent $$$$$ on it but it keeps me moving. Also, tho I don’t play it often, I hope they keep Mario Run active. It’s cool to play every now and then.

What did they put a track in Amsterdam for. Are they gone mad.

Whales, I still think it's a sick business practice with gotcha systems and gambling style gameplay.

@Danrenfroe2016 That's really all there is to say on the matter.