Nintendo was slow to get into the mobile scene. They did so with tippy toes, so to speak, with the likes of Super Mario Run in the beginning. They’ve since released several titles in their biggest franchises for mobile devices, adapting them more to the usual mobile tactics. And as it turns out, it’s paid off for them, even if at a relatively slow pace, as combined revenue from their games have now passed $1 billion in lifetime player spending, according to Sensor Tower.

Interestingly, the number one game is Fire Emblem Heroes. While that franchise has grown significantly over the years, it’s still not at the level of a Mario or Zelda on mainline consoles. Heroes has struck a cord though, as a whooping 61% of Nintendo’s total mobile revenue comes from that game alone. Maybe more interesting is how the Mario games are all three battling at the bottom. Even Mario Kart Tour is behind Dragalia Lost and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, though it’s worth noting that Mario Kart Tour hasn’t been out for too long. This list does not include Pokemon titles, which are officially published by The Pokemon Company.

Nintendo hasn’t announced any other mobile efforts as of now, but the company seems to be getting pretty cozy with the market space. It’s inevitable that more IPs will make their way to your iOS and Android devices soon.

Nintendo’s first forays into the mobile market weren’t quite as grand as one might have expected. While Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp were successes in their own right, they lacked the long-term appeal of many mobile titles. It seems like things are changing, though, based on their latest financial report, which says mobile profits on the rise.

They reported that their revenue from the mobile market has exceeded $400 million (USD), a stiff rise from last year by 17%. A large part of that has been due to the success of Fire Emblem Heroes and their first original mobile property, Dragalia Lost. It makes sense, since both of those games are more in line with what the mobile market usually gravitates toward, from both an aesthetic and gameplay mechanics standpoint- much more so than earlier efforts, at the very least.

With Mario Kart Tour coming sometime this year, and having an Android beta starting soon, Nintendo hopes to keep this momentum going well into the next year. You can also read more about what Nintendo reported about their traditional games’ sales, and where Switch sales are standing.

Nintendo’s mobile efforts have been a little inconsistent so far. While games like Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia Lost have done reasonably well, and contributed to a few hundred million dollars in annual review to Nintendo’s bottom line last year, on the whole, it is telling when Fortnite on iOS alone makes more money than all Nintendo mobile games put together.

Put simply, the company is hoping for bigger hits on mobile than what’s they have going right now. Speaking to Japanese outlet Nikkan, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa noted that the company is currently working on multiple smartphone applications, and hopes that these new upcoming games will be “huge hits”. According to Furukawa, this is important, because he expects smartphone gaming to become a “pillar” for Nintendo, in addition to their main console business. That said, he did admit that this could take quite a while.

Personally, as long as Nintendo’s mobile games are kept separate from their console efforts, I have no issues with the company continuing to put some out. If nothing else, it quells the cries from investors who would otherwise want them to go third party.

While Nintendo’s mobile game efforts haven’t been a full fledged world conquering success like many may have expected, they have still mostly done alright. For instance, in the year 2018, Nintendo’s mobile games made $348 in revenue cumulatively, buoyed mostly by Fire Emblem Heroes and the newly launched Dragalia Lost, according to Sensor Tower.

$117 million of that revenue came in the fourth quarter, which is the most revenue Nintendo’s mobile games have generated in a single quarter thus far. As mentioned already, Heroes was the top grossing mobile game, earning about $225 million; Dragalia Lost came in second, with slightly over $50 million earned, and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp rounded out the top three with slightly under $50 million units earned.

Amazingly enough, this revenue from four Nintendo games put together is less than half of what Pokemon GO alone earned last year, which puts into perspective just how a) relatively muted Nintendo’s mobile efforts have been, and b) how massive Pokemon GO really is.

Nintendo so far has adopted a very scattershot approach to monetizing its mobile games- Super Mario Run, the very first mobile game it ever released, came with no microtransactions and in game ads, but just a one time payment of $10. On the other hand, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was free to play, started out with relatively relaxed monetization, before randomized lootboxes were introduced.

Nintendo’s most successful game on mobiles is Fire Emblem Heroes, which, again, is free to play, and uses RNG gatcha elements to generate money (although at the very least it is reasonably relaxed for more casual players). So does that mean this is it? Nintendo will rely on this kind of monetization for all their mobile games going forward?

Speaking to investors at a general briefing, Nintendo’s former President Tatsumi Kimishima noted that this is categorically not the case, and that the company assesses monetization options on a game by game basis based on many considerations, including the intended target audience.

“When deciding how to charge for a smart-device application, we consider each one individually based on factors like the mechanics of the game, the characteristics of the IP it uses, who we think the consumers will be, their needs, and so on,” he said. “With Fire Emblem Heroes, there are many passionate fans of the series, which is especially popular among consumers in their 20s and 30s. So we set the target age to 13 and older, then aimed for a format that would allow consumers to have a deep enjoyment of the game according to their individual play styles. The way we charge for the game is through the purchase of in-game items called Orbs. Orbs are used in a kind of lottery system that randomly determines which character the user will obtain. That said, we clearly indicate the probabilities for obtaining each character within the game, and we employ a mechanic that prevents consumers from spending very high amounts.

“With regards to the smart-device business, we are pursuing several goals, one of which is increasing the opportunities for consumers all over the world to come into contact with Nintendo IP. Super Mario Run has already been downloaded by over 200 million people worldwide, making it an incredibly important application from the perspective of reaching consumers. Another one of our goals is for this to have a synergistic effect on our integrated hardware and software business. With these sorts of goals, we want to offer applications that meet consumer demands while pursuing payment methods which consumers find to be fair so that this can grow to be a pillar of our business.”

I think in the end it comes down to that- for Nintendo, these mobile games are not necessarily money makers (although, of course, they would like for them to generate revenue), but rather, they are meant to be synergistic with their core offerings on their own hardware. It is a strategy we have seen work for them in the past- remember the increase in 3DS sales, as well as of Pokemon games on it, following Pokemon GO‘s release?- so I can’t even say it is without merit.

In the mobile realm, Nintendo has two big hits- Pokemon GO, which it has minimal stakes in, and Fire Emblem Heroes. The other two of its offerings so far have underperformed (Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp). The result of this is that Nintendo company president Tatsumi Kimishima has admitted that the performance of Nintendo’s mobile initiatives has not yet reached a satisfactory level of profits.

“The efforts we have made to date have yielded certain responses to our goal of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP,” said Kimishima in Nintendo’s presentation to its investors. “Even so, we have not reached a satisfactory profit point yet, so our goal is to further expand the scale of this business to develop it into one of the pillars of revenue.”

Nintendo’s next game for mobile devices is Mario Kart Tour– if ever there was a Nintendo game that could perform beyond expectations on mobiles, it’s this one, assuming it is monetized well. How Nintendo chooses to handle that remains to be seen- hopefully it will be a bigger success for them than something like Animal Crossing.

Even as Nintendo’s core console and handheld businesses have been booming in recent years, thanks to the success of the Switch and the resurgence of the Nintendo 3DS, the company has slowly been building up a catalog of spin offs of its most beloved properties on mobile phones. So far, Super Mario, Animal Crossing, and Fire Emblem have all hit smartphones, with a Mario Kart game announced next.

Nintendo recently surprised everyone when they announced yet another new mobile title, this one unrelated to any of their existing IP- Dragalia Lost, which is being co-developed with Cygames, a mobile game developer that Nintendo has also acquired a stake in.

Speaking about the new mobile title, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima and his successor imminent Shuntaro Furukawa, explained that Nintendo is so far very satisfied with its mobile business, and intends to continue partnering with DeNA, also noting the value the partnership with DeNA brings them thanks to the latter developing and maintaining the MyNintendo and Nintendo Account infrastructures. The partnership with Cygames is different, and because Nintendo saw potential for a product that they would like to bring to the mobile market.

Even though Dragalia Lost is a brand new IP, Kimishima confirmed that the intent with Nintendo’s mobile efforts remains to bring its existing IP and characters to mobiles, increase familiarity and popularity among a larger pool of users, and then attempt to transition them to Nintendo’s own hardware. He also noted that Nintendo would like for mobile games to become a major pillar of revenue- this is the one area where Nintendo’s mobile games have faltered so far. Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp both underperformed, and Pokemon GO, while hugely successful, is a game they have minimal stake in. Only Fire Emblem Heroes has actually churned a meaningful amount of revenue yet.

It will be interesting to see how Nintendo continues to approach mobile games going forward.

Nintendo has announced its financial results for the nine months which ended on December 31, 2017. Not surprisingly, the company’s profits and sales have increased significantly over the previous year. The Switch continued selling very well throughout the holiday season . Titles for the console also performed exceptionally well with game like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2 selling very well.

Super Mario Odyssey has been a huge hit worldwide and has shipped a total of 9.07 million units globally. Additionally, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe shipped 7.33 million units while Splatoon 2 sold a total of 4.91 million units. The company also enjoyed success with other platforms such as the Nintendo 3DS and The Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Super NES Classic Edition. With regards to smart-device business, the company has been performing well with the success of titles such as Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes. 

Thanks to the great success enjoyed by the company in the past year, they have increased the predicted sales and profit numbers, with these numbers being substantially more than what was listed in the previous forecast.

The mobile gaming market is exploitative, marked by a relentless race to the bottom, with games being given away for ‘free’, and incessant, often underhanded hooks being layered into them to get players to pay money on an ongoing basis. It devalues games, and in the long run is more anti consumer. Nintendo, bringing their own games to the platform, decided to not adopt this model at least at first- Super Mario Run would be a one time payment game. You would pay $10 once, and you would own the game forever.

This model does not appear to have worked. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima admitted that the game has underperformed. “Revenue from the game did not meet our expectations,” Kimishima said according to Nikkei.

For Nintendo, it appears as though its mobile success story so far is Fire Emblem Heroes, a free to play game that does rely on usual monetization tactics- albeit its monetization hooks are less invasive than they are for most games. And yet, Nintendo has no trouble expressing distaste for the model, in spire of all the revenue that it is apparently generating.

“[Fire Emblem] Heroes is an outlier,” a senior company official said. “We honestly prefer the Super Mario Run model.” This seems to indicate that future Nintendo games may revert to a Super Mario Run style payment method- although there is a possibility that Nintendo will not price them as high as it did with Mario.

There are multiple takeaways from this- the most important thing to remember about Nintendo’s mobile ventures is that it got into them for intangibles- Nintendo views these games as marketing efforts, getting people interested in its brands so they buy Nintendo machines for the full experience. To be clear, this is a strategy that worked with Pokemon GO and the mainline Pokemon games. In Mario‘s case, not many people apparently ended up playing the game; in Fire Emblem‘s case, Nintendo is devaluing its own characters by essentially tying them into a monetary gamble.

The other, more important takeaway here is conclusive proof that Nintendo as a third party simply will not work- if a brand new Mario game on the biggest, most casual gaming platform of the world, backed by the marketing muscle of Apple and Nintendo, still managed to underperform, then there is no way at all Nintendo’s games will ever live up to sales expectations on PlayStation or Xbox. For Nintendo, their own hardware may be it.

Nintendo’s Super Mario Run is now available for Android devices in the United States. At least for those with Android 4.2 upwards.

The free to start game is already available on iOS and that version received an update for more new Yoshi colours, new buildings, more stages to be played for free and so on. Super Mario Run already had a fixed amount of free stages that you could play for free as part of a demo. Paying $10 upgrades you to the full version of the game which doesn’t have microtransactions.

Thus far, this strategy hasn’t worked out too badly for Nintendo despite initial worries. The company has since been experimenting more with its pricing models for mobile titles. This is evidenced by Fire Emblem Heroes allowing you to purchase different heroes for use in battles through microtransactions while being free to play.

What are your thoughts on Super Mario Run? Let us know below.