It doesn’t look like Nintendo’s own debut on smartphones was as much of a resounding success as Pokemon GO was for them earlier last year. According to Newzoo (via The Wall Street Journal), a mobile market research firm, Super Mario Run saw significant uptake in its first month on the market, with 90 million installs- a significantly high number by any metric.
However, that’s where the good news ends- you see, in this period, the game has generated just $30 million in revenue (a far cry from the predictions, that had it pegged at $50 million or thereabouts for the first month); worse still, the implication of that is that the full $10 game purchase was made by just 3 percent of the total install base.
It looks like Nintendo’s experimentation with mobile payment methods – Super Mario Run is free to start, but requires a one time $10 purchase after a few levels to be played in its entirety – may have been a failure. Hopefully this doesn’t come back to bite them in the long run. Super Mario Run is available now on iOS devices, with an Android release coming later.