Nintendo says Super Mario Run "Did Not Meet Our Expectations"

[babinro]

Hopefully Nintendo learns the proper lessons from this.

1) Don't overprice your game on the mobile market especially when runners are a dime a dozen (or should I say a dime a thousand).

2) Don't simply assume you need to 'dumb down' all your properties to exist on mobile. I'm sure plenty of people would like a proper platforming Mario on mobile. Take this risk and charge COMPETITIVELY.

3) Test the waters with some virtual console titles on mobile.

 

[Randomosity]

Seems pretty simple to me. They priced themselves out of the market. Running some basic math, they made roughly $39m gross sales. Now, let's say they charged $2.50 for the game. At that price I'd imagine they could probably get anywhere from 30% - 50% rather than the 5% they got now. Which would result in gross sales of about $58.5m - $97.5m

Now, this is very basic math, and based on assumptions, but I fell like at a much lower price point they could have exponentially increased sales.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

As a side note, there are game system emulators you can get for you phones that can play the ROMs. These Roms, if they existed, would undoubtedly offer a better Mario experience than a runner game.

 

[distortedreality]

I remember saying when it was released that the free part of the game doesn't come close to giving you enough of a feel of the game to warrant paying any price for it, let alone $10.

If they had extended the free portion to a longer section of the game, they may have found the percentage of people actually buying it rise. I'd pay $10 for a decent Mario mobile game, but not when I'm not sure of the quality of what I'm getting.

 

[FalloutJack]

Pffft, I don't even carry a cellphone. This wouldn't touch me.

 

[Kahani]

Nintendo stated that it plans to release 2-3 mobile games per year

Huh, I thought they were planning more games than that for the Switch.

More seriously though, 5% of people who downloaded a terrible F2P runner with a Mario skin actually paid $10 for it even after seeing how bad it was? That's an amazing conversion rate even for a good mobile game, let alone such a mediocre, high-priced one. Did Nintendo not do any research at all on mobile gaming before deciding to enter the market? All games using this sort of model rely on getting a tiny percentage of people to actually pay, and most of them would be ecstatic if they managed a hit rate as high as 5%. If Nintendo expected significantly more than that, in a market overwhelmingly not filled with dedicated Nintendo fans, they clearly don't have a clue what they're doing.