Nintendo Mobile Games Reach $1 Billion in Lifetime Player Spending

Nintendo’s mobile games have generated more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue from global player spending on the App Store and Google Play, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data shows. Nintendo’s mobile repertoire, which comprises six games, has also amassed a combined 452 million downloads worldwide.

The majority—$656 million, or 61 percent—of Nintendo’s mobile revenue has come from strategy RPG Fire Emblem Heroes. The next two highest-grossing Nintendo titles were Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which has accounted for 12 percent of all user spending among the company’s mobile games, followed by Dragalia Lost at 11 percent.

Those familiar with the company’s iconic, ubiquitous plumber Mario may be surprised to learn that Mario Kart Tour and Super Mario Run—the latter of which had a record-breaking launch day and remains Nintendo’s most-downloaded title—contributed smaller shares of overall revenue at 8 and 7 percent, respectively, with Dr. Mario World following with less than 1 percent.

Nintendo is unsurprisingly most successful in its home market of Japan, where the $581 million it’s earned totals 54 percent of its overall mobile game revenue; the U.S. has come in second with $316 million, or 29 percent. This distribution is reflected across all its mobile games with the exception of Mario Kart Tour and Super Mario Run, whose spending skews more towards the U.S.

The overall revenue distribution among Nintendo’s mobile games is a stark contrast to the downloads share; Super Mario Run holds the crown with 244 million downloads, or 54 percent of the publisher’s 452 million mobile game downloads, while Mario Kart Tour’s 147 million installs represented 32 percent. Fire Emblem Heroes, Nintendo’s highest-grossing title, has only accounted for 4 percent of the total.

Nintendo Monetization Experiments Have Paid Off

Nintendo has been experimenting with various monetization strategies since it first entered the mobile market in mid-2016. While its 2016 earnings from Super Mario Run amounted to a modest $26 million, it was in February 2017, with the hugely successful launch of Fire Emblem Heroes, that Nintendo found its mobile footing. Despite being lower ranked in terms of downloads share, the financial success of Fire Emblem Heroes—which boasts average revenue-per-download of $41—suggests that Nintendo has hit upon a winning formula with the gacha model.

Although it has since experimented with other methods of monetization, such as subscriptions in Mario Kart Tour and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Nintendo hasn’t yet managed to replicate the same scale of financial success with its subsequent titles. It did, however, manage to earn more than $350 million from its mobile offerings in 2019, and the publisher will no doubt continue experimenting with—and refining—monetization models in its existing and future titles to grow that total along with new releases later in 2020.

Note that for this analysis, we did not include Nintendo-published mobile apps such as Nintendo Switch Online or the social networking app Miitomo.