Nintendo's upcoming Super Mario Run is predicted to achieve 50 million downloads and make $71 million in gross revenue in its first month.
Mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower provided the statistic, which would place the game in the top five highest grossing iOS games of all time based on first-month revenue.
With a price point of $9.99 and no ads in-game whatsoever, Sensor Tower is essentially predicting that around 7.1 million people will pay for the game. This is 14.2% of the estimated 50 million downloads that are converting to paid players.
Not to be sniffed at
This figure is less than half of the revenue Pokemon GO is estimated to have generated in its first month. It's also $36 million less than Clash Royale's estimated first month revenue.
50 million downloads in a month seems entirely reasonable and quite impressive. Sensor Tower arrived at the figure based on 20 million pre-registered players on the App Store, as well as Nintendo's marketing push for the game.
It is of course impossible to know how well Super Mario Run will perform until it actually launches on iOS on December 15th.
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I would actually hazard to guess that it will exceed these numbers in the first month. If we look at past history of how the App Store performs in December, people get finger happy with tapping that 'buy' button.
This game is coming out at the perfect time. It's a good Christmas present or a good use of those £10 App Store vouchers that people so love to give. I would guess that Nintendo will make $71 million on Christmas day alone.
Comparing to any F2P games is totally pointless and very misleading as this is essentially a premium game with a free trial and (as yet) no future monetisation options. Granted Minecraft and Football Manager both have decent numbers and are probably a better model to compare.
I do think that the majority of hardcore Nintendo fans will pay regardless (although equally some will reject this as not being 'real' Mario) but for more casuals $10 is a weighty price for a platformer when there are free (non-Mario) variants available.
I think it's actually likely that more than 50M will download the free trial as it'll be prominently promoted on the store (and 20M are already pending download) but conversion of 5-10% is probably more realistic. So maybe 5M / $50M sales?
Regardless of this, I don't think this would be a bad thing or a failure. I'd quite like Mario to smash both predictions and help to build a new valid model that's not f2p so we can have a little more variety in the market (and opportunities for devs who can't compete in the UA circus)
The big unknown is the fact it's Mario on mobile. It's impossible to know how receptive hardcore Nintendo fans will be to a free runner - will they be happy that it's not a conventional platformer? And will casual game fans really consider playing the premium price?
Absolutely would be great to see this do well - although I don't think it will change people's perceptions of mobile games as things which should be free or very cheap :-(