Following today’s Switch 2 reveal, let’s have a quick look at how Nintendo’s mobile experiment is going.
In short: it appears to have given up.
It’s worth remembering that Nintendo entered the mobile market at a low point: 3DS was not a huge success by its standards and the Wii U was catastrophic; in 2016 Nintendo needed to stay relevant and make some money – and that meant trying its luck in the mobile game market.
We pulled all of the below data from Appmagic, which does not record the 30% cut Apple and Google get from IAPs. So the below revenue figures are estimates of Nintendo’s actual earnings from each game.
First, the headline figures: Nintendo’s lifetime earnings from mobile stand at $1.64bn, with a total of 730m downloads to date. Here’s how that looks over time:
Top earning games (lifetime):
- Fire Emblem Heroes: $891m from 13.9m downloads
- Mario Kart Tour: $273m from 267m downloads
- Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp: $271m from 65.8m downloads
- Dragalia Lost: $122m from 4.6m downloads
- Super Mario Run: $70m from 365m downloads
- Dr. Mario World: $11.2m from 13m downloads
As you can see from the chart above, Nintendo’s mobile efforts peaked with the launch of Mario Kart Tour in October 2019, and have steadily dropped off since.
The earning power of free-to-play games is laid bare in the difference between ‘free-to-start’ game Super Mario Run, with its one-off $9.99 unlock, and Nintendo’s top earner Fire Emblem Heroes.
Nintendo’s mobile debut Super Mario Run, revealed at an Apple keynote by Miyamoto himself, remains the only first party Mario platformer ever to appear on a non-Nintendo device. It has racked up a huge 365m downloads over its lifetime, and yet has earned just $70m because of that $9.99 spending limit.
Fire Emblem is at the other extreme. With a modest 13.9m lifetime downloads – under a million more than the short-lived Dr Mario World – it has still earned Nintendo the most revenue by far due to its high spending player base. 50% of the total lifetime $891m in IAP earnings came from players in Japan, with 36% from US players.
This leads us to each game’s estimated lifetime revenue per download, a handy measure of each game’s per-player earning power.
Lifetime revenue per download:
- Fire Emblem Heroes: $64.13
- Dragalia Lost: $26.71
- Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp: $4.11
- Mario Kart Tour: $1.02
- Dr. Mario World: $0.82
- Super Mario Run: $0.19
As one might expect, the hardcore RPGs most popular in Japan attract the highest spenders by a huge distance. Dragalia Lost’s RpD is notable given that it was an entirely new IP, and clearly the long-term play patterns and collectibles in Animal Crossing are well suited to free-to-play monetisation.
Below that, Nintendo has been more conservative monetising its Mario-branded mobile games. Mobile game-makers have long struggled to monetise the racing genre, but Mario Kart Tour performed relatively well due to its popular brand, battle pass-type structure and gacha pulls.
More recently, though, its earnings have been dropping off more quickly after it removed that gacha system in October 2022. Nintendo later announced that it would not be producing any more new content from October 2023 onwards.
Spare a thought for Dr. Mario World, too, which showed an RpD that perhaps wasn’t as terrible as its brief time on the market (July 2019-January 2022) might suggest.
And of course, Super Mario Run’s poor conversion rate tells you why Nintendo went ‘full free-to-play’ with each of the games that followed its mobile debut.
Nintendo’s average monthly earnings (based on the last six months): $6.7m
Top earning games (monthly, average from last six months)
- Fire Emblem Heroes: $3.8m
- Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp: $1.7m
- Mario Kart Tour: $1.1m
- Super Mario Run: $113k
Three of the four remaining Nintendo games on the app stores are each in decline, and the one exception, Animal Crossing, only saw a revenue bump in December due to its conversion into a premium game. After that spike, though, one can expect Animal Crossing’s revenue decline to speed up due to its lack of ongoing monetisation.
With just remixed content going live in Mario Kart Tour these days, it is also on autopilot in terms of earnings, though Fire Emblem is still doing fine.
Super Mario Run is now effectively a marketing tool with updates mostly aimed at promoting relevant Switch game releases. Perhaps we’ll see an update with some Switch 2-themed content soon…?
Only the money men at Nintendo will know at which point each game slips under an earnings threshold that means it’s not worth supporting these games any more. But with Switch 2 on the horizon and Nintendo’s earnings from mobile now low enough to be considered a rounding error overall, it’s not looking good for those four remaining titles.
