Super Mario Run had the most successful launch in the history of the App Store, but that has apparently not been enough to sate Nintendo investors, who got spooked, and caused Nintendo’s stock to tumble by as much as 7.1% on Monday. The game ended up at the top of the App Store’s Highest Grossing Apps list worldwide everywhere, except for in Japan.
The Wall Street Journal reports this was enough to cause Nintendo’s stock to tumble. Among the concerns voiced by investors and financial analysts are the game’s not charting in Japan, Nintendo’s unusual payment model for the game, which asks for an upfront $10 payment, with no further plans at monetization, and the poor reviews for the game on the App Store caused by a mobile market simply not used to this kind of upfront payment pricing.
Motoi Okamoto, a former Nintendo game director, in particular said that the last factor would be crucial- since it may have hurt the kind of numbers the game will be able to pull on Android. “The game should have either asked players to pay when downloading or given more free content if they were to pursue a free-to-download model,” he said.
That said, there are other analysts who feel that investors are being hasty in their assessment of the game. “If you were hoping that Mario would perform like Pokémon, then Mario clearly didn’t achieve its mission,” said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute. “But that was placing expectations too high because the Mario game’s business scheme is so different from Pokémon.”
Indeed, the fact that the game remains the highest grossing app on the App Store persistently, days after launch, and the fact that the monetization is the only reason people are scoring it low at all, and the fact that Pokemon GO was reviewed equally poorly (for other issues), which did not hurt its longevity, means that concerns about the game’s overall health may still be premature.