Nintendo Talks Mobile Market: Super Mario Run Over 200 Million Downloads
During its second quarter financial meeting, Tatsumi Kimishima, the President of Nintendo detailed its mobile market and gave an analysis on how some of the titles are performing. For the latest quarter revenue from this sector is up 426% versus last year during the same time, netting Nintendo $157 million. This is largely due to the subsequent releases of Fire Emblem Heroes and Super Mario Run.
Super Mario Run has been downloaded over 200 million times. 90 percent of those downloads come from overseas markets (not Japan). This includes some countries and regions where Nintendo doesn’t sell its hardware or software yet. In September Nintendo updated the software to version 3.0, which added some new features, including the Remix10 mode that allows for gamers to play for shorter bursts of thrilling play. The game was also 50% off for a few weeks to promote the new features. Mr. Kimishima admits that the game has not yet reached an acceptable profit point, but they have learned a lot in terms of game development and deployment that they will use in future products.
Fire Emblem Heroes continues to do well in the market. It follows the free to play model with in-game purchases. They are on track to meet their overall business objectives and admit that large-scale events, new characters, and adjustments and tweaks have kept users coming back over and over again. Although Fire Emblem has traditionally performed best in Japan, the audience has grown and in fact the overseas players have begun to spend more than the Japanese users on this specific title. Nintendo will be adding support for Traditional Chinese text and expand service of the game into Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Thailand, and Singapore.
The company reiterated continued support in the mobile device arena. They plan to continue to release two to three apps per year. Their next one, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, has already launched in Australia and is coming to other markets by the end of November. This game is following the rollout and formula used in Fire Emblem, so in addition to being free to play, expect lots of events and continued content support going forward.
[Source: Nintendo]
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
