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Mario Kart Tour races to 20 million downloads in 24 hours

Nintendo's best-ever launch on mobile to date

Mario Kart Tour races to 20 million downloads in 24 hours

The race has started and already the numbers are coming in.

And it seems Mario Kart Tour is off to a great start, at least in terms of downloads.

Earlier in the day, Apptopia cited 10.1 million downloads across iOS and Android globally.

The game was the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store in 93 countries.

That’s more than double the total Super Mario Run racked up back in late 2015, although it was an iOS-only release.

The previously most downloaded game on launch day was Pokemon Go, which hit 6.7 million back in 2018.

Although, as Apptopia points out, if you had pre-ordered the Mario Kart Tour and you didn’t have auto downloads turned off, you woke up with the game already loaded onto your phone.

That’s a clever way of boosting your numbers.

And there’s more

Later in the day, Sensor Tower weighed in with its take on proceedings.

It put total downloads at 20 million.

And more significantly, it put day one monetisation at $1 million.

Interestingly that’s only 25 per cent of the total generated by core RPG Fire Emblem Heroes on its launch day.

Sensor Tower says the game's most popular IAP was it's controversial $4.99 a month subscription, although it pointed out that users won’t be charged for another 13 days, and some of those will cancel their purchase before that point.

Still, given Mario Kart Tour forces players to have or create a Nintendo ID, what will be really interesting to see is how installs converts into players, and eventually monetisation.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.