Among the mobile games released by Nintendo, a game that surpassed 1 billion dollars was born.
Nintendo officially announced its participation in smartphone games at Apple’s iPhone 7 announcement event in September 2016. At that time, Nintendo decided to advance into mobile games by unveiling ‘Super Mario Run’. Nintendo, as a global game company, has an overwhelming IP and amazing records.
However, in the smartphone market, there has been no surprising game worthy of its reputation with the exception of ‘Pokemon Go’ produced by Niantic. This is probably because Nintendo does not focus on the smartphone game market. Nintendo’s ‘Super Mario Run’ received good reviews, but it did not record large sales because of its good charging model, and most of Nintendo’s mobile games are showing good charging.
However, among Nintendo’s own games, a game that surpassed 1 billion dollars was born. The main character is ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’, a turn-based SRPG game released in 2017. Unfortunately, it has not been released in Korea so far.
An industry official said, “Most of the mobile games released by Nintendo show a good charging model. Therefore, it is rare that the name goes up in the mobile game sales ranking compared to the reputation. However, ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ broke the 1 billion dollar mark in five years after its release, making it the best performance among Nintendo games. This game, which has a long history, was evaluated as having a low IP awareness compared to other games, but it is recording the biggest box office hit on mobile.”
‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ surpassed 5 million dollars in a week after its release in February 2017, and accumulated sales of 110 million dollars by July 2017. showed the results. In 2019, it surpassed $500 million, showing the record sales of any mobile game released by Nintendo, and it is revealed that it recently surpassed $1 billion in sales.
Nintendo mobile game cumulative sales
Sensor Tower, a mobile market research company, recently announced that ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ has surpassed $1 billion in sales. This accounted for more than 54% of Nintendo’s released mobile games, and is gaining more popularity than ‘Super Mario’ or ‘Animal Crossing’.
According to Sensor Tower, ‘Mario Kart Tour’ has recorded sales of US$283 million so far, and ‘Wood Forest Pocket Camp’ has recorded sales of US$281.6 million.
Regarding downloads, ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ recorded 17.8 million views, which ranks fourth with 2.7% of Nintendo’s games. In first place, ‘Super Mario Run’ with 310 million, 47% of the total, ‘Mario Kart Tour’ with 227 million, and ‘Animal Crossing Pocket Camp’ with 65 million.
Sales of ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ have been steady since launch. In the first quarter of this year, it recorded more than $29 million in sales. This is more than 50% of Nintendo’s mobile game sales in the first quarter of this year.
Nintendo mobile game sales in Q1 2022
Countries with the highest sales of ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ were Japan with $540 million, accounting for 54% of the total, followed by the United States with 32% and Canada with 3%. The number of downloads was also 8.4 million in Japan, 47% of the total, 26% in the US, and 3% in France. The game recorded $583.7 million on Google Play and $417.3 million on the Apple App Store.
Meanwhile, Sensor Tower announced that Nintendo’s mobile games have recorded sales of $1.8 billion so far.
‘Fire Emblem’ was released on the Switch in 2019 and ‘Fire Emblem Weathering Snow Moon’, which was released in 2019, received a good response. In addition, ‘Fire Emblem Heroes’, which was released on mobile, is receiving good reviews for its so-called good billing. Most of them require charging for convenience, storage, and castle expansion, so it is evaluated as a game that does not have a large difference between non-billing users and charged users. However, despite good billing, it is surprising the mobile game world by breaking the 1 billion dollar in sales.
