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Fire Emblem Heroes catapults Nintendo to $1bn in mobile player spending

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Dragalia Lost, along with Mario Kart Tour and Super Mario Run also drew a lot of revenue.

What you need to know

  • Nintendo's mobile games have now generated more than $1 billion in revenue on iOS and Android.
  • That's according to the latest data from Sensor Tower.
  • The biggest contributor by far was Fire Emblem Heroes, which has drawn $656M in revenue.

Sensor Tower data suggests that Nintendo's mobile games on iOS and Android have combined to generate over $1 billion in lifetime player spending.

According to the report:

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.

Surprisingly, Mario Kart Tour and Super Mario Run actually contributed quite a small share, 8 and 7 percent respectively, but still drew a lot of money, a combined $162 million.

More than half of that revenue, unsurprisingly, was generated in Japan. $581 million to be precise. Next was the US with $316 million, 29% overall.

Perhaps the most eye-opening statistic is the fact that Fire Emblem Heroes, the highest-grossing title by far, only accounted for 4 percent of Nintendo's mobile download share. Conversely, Super Mario Run accounted for 244 million downloads, but a very small portion of Nintendo's overall revenue.

On the data, Sensor Tower said:

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.