Almost two years after being released, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run hit $60 million in global revenue, app analytics company SensorTower reports. The auto-runner reached the milestone primarily due to iOS, the source of roughly 77-percent of its turnover. While the game launched on iOS half a year before it was ported to Android smartphones and tablets, owners of Apple-made devices also generally spend significantly more money on apps and microtransactions than consumers in Google’s mobile ecosystem. Android users started catching up to iOS gamers in terms of Super Mario Run spending earlier this year, having accounted for a 35-percent share of the game’s quarter-one turnover.
Super Mario Run remains Nintendo’s third most profitable mobile title after Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Fire Emblem Heroes, in that order. Some 43-percent of players who purchased the full version of the game that’s currently priced at $5 come from the United States, with another 17-percent of them being located in Nintendo’s home country of Japan. While the Tokyo-based entertainment giant is still unwilling to share any official revenue figures reached by Super Mario Run, its endeavor is still believed to have been profitable; assuming SensorTower’s data is accurate, Nintendo earned some $42 million from the app after subtracting Google and Apple’s cuts, whereas the mobile game itself isn’t believed to have cost more than several millions of dollars to make.
Super Mario Run is still one of the company’s least successful mobile experiments that only surpasses the discontinued Miitomo app which is estimated to have “only” generated some $3 million, though Android games contributed about half of that figure, thus spending above the industry average, according to data compiled by market research company Apptopia. Nintendo is presently working on two confirmed mobile projects – Mario Kart Tour and Dragalia Lost, with the latter being an Android and iOS JRPG co-developed alongside Japanese studio Cygames.