Comment by yourdeadneopet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yourdeadneopet | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, Nintendo made a wonderful game called Super Mario Run. It was simple - Mario automatically runs and you tap to jump - but surprisingly deep. The timing of the jumps and the height of jump was paramount, and there was a ton of replayability in trying to get out-of-reach coins and finding shortcuts. It also captured the aesthetic of the Mario World games with modern graphics. I was VERY skeptical of a mobile Mario game, but was won over by the quality of game design and the clear level of polish.

Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience that would waste their time with energy charge ups, loot boxes, etc. and were upset when Nintendo didn't do that. In response, Nintendo switched to this type of experience for their next release, Fire Emblem, which performed much better.

The Wikipedia article for Super Mario Run explains in detail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Run#Commercial

A select quote - '[Nintendo President] Kimishima said that "we honestly prefer the Super Mario Run model", though in a June 2017 investor question-and-answer session, he said "in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'

Super Mario Run, on top of being a great game at a great price is basically single payment f2p.

And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone.

People just hated the fact that they had to pay for the cheapest priced Mario game ever.

It's based on the platform. Nobody would've bat an eye at a Switch or PC game for an upfront cost, but asking 10$ for a mobile game was kinda unheard of. I think they misjudged the market response there.

I can't say I'm not biased here, I basically hate 95% of all the mobile games I ever tried, or at least stopped playing after an hour - so a 10$ purchase for me would simply never happen, because I don't like the platform. On the other hand I did do the "paid unlock" after trying it out for a few. (Ignore this if they had a demo, I never tried it, wasn't it iphone only?)

You could play the first 4 levels for free, like classical shareware. And it was released on both iPhone and Android.

Good point, then the argument is a little different, as it's more like an ingame unlock. I still think I remember the outrage about the price.

> but asking 10$ for a mobile game was kinda unheard of

Kind of crazy that the whole market was defined by shovelware

> but asking 10$ for a mobile game was kinda unheard of

Ironically, this used to be the norm when the iPhone's app store came out. For example, Super Monkey Ball was $10 in 2008. Over time, there was a race to the bottom, and then F2P became the norm when Apple introduced IAP.

> And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone.

People already figured how to not allow kids to pay real money in games. They don't worry about that. You just don't attach card to account or require password.

> Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience...

Just look up "Super Mario Run" on your favorite store and what you will see is "Free", not $10. In fact, I am not sure if the actual price is mentioned anywhere on the store page.

So of course people expected a F2P experience, because that's exactly what's on the store page. If Nintendo was honest, they would have published it as a paid app, with the price clearly visible on the store page. Maybe with a separate free and clearly labeled demo, as it is standard practice for one-time payment apps.

This is false and proven false by your link. Super Mario Run was freemium from the start. The app was free in the stores from day one. You could download and play the first few levels and then you were (surprisingly) asked to pay $9.99 to unlock the rest of the game.

Users were annoyed by the bait and switch. Nintendo should have charged $9.99 in the store and been done with it. Instead they tried to straddle some line between freemium, paid, and demo.

In addition, Nintendo added always-on DRM so that even those who fully paid for the game were dealing with silly issues that you would only expect in a freemium game.

“While still using the freemium model, Nintendo eschewed requiring players to keep paying to access more levels, instead offering the game as a free demo with the first three levels unlocked and requiring a one-time payment to unlock the rest of the game.[12] Part of the reason for this pricing scheme was to make it transparent to parents who may be purchasing the game for their children so that they would not incur further costs.[42] Fearing piracy of the game, Nintendo added always-on DRM, which requires that players have a persistent Internet connection to play.”

To quantify "performed much better":

Super Mario Run: $60 million total by July 2018

Fire Emblem Heroes: $656 million by January 2020

An order of magnitude. Incentives are everything.

This story makes me sad. What a sorry state we've let the mobile (phone) gaming market become purely because of ads.

It's not popular to say, but maximizing accessibility (by minimizing up-front cost, in this case) has downsides: mechanics and business models end up needing to be shoehorned into the dominant economic model.

Touch controls and IAP impose serious constraints on the mobile game market still. There are some gems, but it seems like the golden age of gaming is occurring outside of mobile games.

Nintendo did the exact opposite with its subsequent mobile game Mario Kart Tour. It's free to play but has tons of optional paid upgrades plus an optional monthly subscription.

> "in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'

Iirc, they released a 3DS game with DLC, where you could haggle the price down in-game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty%27s_Real_Deal_Baseball

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