Not a doctor
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #72 - It's All About the Money. Check out the full article for more insights.
Nintendo announced last week that it's going to hit the undo button on Dr. Mario World, the game they released just before Mario Kart Tour. Remember that one? I can't say I do.
Why is Nintendo pulling the plug on the barely two-year-old title? Let's have a look at what matters--Money.
Since 2016, Nintendo has released several games that use my favorite plumber. Looking at revenue estimates, only one really made a dent, and that's not Dr. Mario World.
Since it was launched in 2019, Dr. Mario World brought in a little over $7M in net revenue from the U.S. and Japan, the two biggest markets for the title, according to our estimates. That's not a small chunk and exceeds all of the net revenue from those two markets earned by Super Mario Run. They have different revenue models, though, so let's not read too much into that.
But... Then we look at Mario Kart Tour with its $105M and remember that it launched after Dr. Mario World.
The bottom line. Everything Nintendo does is so well thought out, which means effort is put into it, which means money is spent on it. Quite a bit of it if I had to guess. At less than a 10th of Mario Kart's revenue, it's just not worth the effort.
I don't think this means something's wrong with Nintendo, or Mario as a property, or the App Store, or Google Play, or mobile gamers. It just means that not everything Nintendo does is a home run. I'm curious to see what's next.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
