According to exclusive data provided by Sensor Tower to foreign media Mobilegamer.biz, since Nintendo officially entered the mobile game market, the global total revenue of its mobile games has approached $1.8 billion.
Of all the mobile games released by Nintendo, Fire Emblem: Heroes had the highest revenue, reaching $983 million. Animal Friends: Pocket Camp and Mario Kart: Tour ranked second and third, with cumulative revenues of $276 million and $270 million to date, respectively. However, Animal Friends: Pocket Camp was released in November 2017 and has been on the market much longer than Mario Kart: Tour (September 2019).
From the perspective of downloads, Super Mario Parkour is at the top of the list, with 307 million cumulative downloads worldwide to date. But Sensor Tower estimates that with frequent content updates and in-game activity, Mario Kart: Tour downloads (224 million) may soon surpass Super Mario Parkour.
With the Switch blockbuster "Gathering! Compared with the IP mobile game "Animal Forest Friends: Pocket Camp", the market performance of "Animal Forest Friends: Pocket Camp" is not satisfactory, and only about 65 million downloads have been accumulated so far. Sensor Tower mentioned that Nintendo also rarely promotes the game.
Over the past three years (2019-2021), Fire Emblem: Heroes has been relatively stable in revenue performance, with annual revenues of $154 million, $154 million and $145 million, respectively. For comparison, Nintendo's other two best-selling mobile games, Mario Kart: Tour, and Animal Friends: Pocket Camp, both saw varying degrees of year-on-year year declines in revenue in 2021.
With Dr. Mario: World suspended and The Lost Dragon Covenant coming to an end, Nintendo will only have Three online games left on iOS and Android, Including Fire Emblem: Heroes, Animal Friends: Pocket Camp, and Mario Kart: Tour.
It is also worth mentioning that the market performance of the AR mobile game "Pikmin Bloom" (released by Niantic), developed by Nintendo and Niantic, is also quite mediocre. According to Sensor Tower, since its release in October 2021, the game's cumulative global revenue has been only about $5.3 million.
There are signs that Nintendo is losing interest in mobile games: the pace of updates for Super Mario Parkour has slowed down, and Nintendo is unlikely to develop new mobile game products. Mobilegamer.biz analysis believes that due to the great success of the Switch, Nintendo no longer needs to boost its business by investing in mobile games as it did a few years ago. In contrast, in order to expand the reach and influence of the company's IP, Nintendo seems to be more interested in producing merchandise, creating theme parks and making movies.