Color me unsurprised, but I guessed the debate about Nintendo pricing Super Mario Run at $10 was going to continue after release, and it most certainly has. Analysis is all over the place about whether Super Mario Run is a huge hit (as the numbers say) or unimpressive (as the markets say) or a mix (as the reviews say).
What I find the most interesting is that Super Mario Run seems to have brought back an old debate about “entitled gamers,” this time focused on mobile players who are “whining” about the $10 price point in a largely free-to-play market.
My colleague Erik Kain wrote about this in-depth yesterday, and his argument was mostly about how Nintendo needed to “preserve its brand” by ensuring a Mario phone game is still a premium product with that price point. While I can see that angle, looking at Super Mario Run’s (frankly insane) 50,000 user reviews, where half of them are one star, I’m not sure I agree.
All the one star reviews are complaining about the $10 paywall, for the most part. They’re something along the lines of “I beat the first three levels and then this ‘free’ game costs $10? WTF???” and some are far less eloquent than that.
Here’s the first point I disagree with many about. I do not think that this paywall is terribly clear to people who haven’t been following the development of Super Mario Run from the start. Yes, you and I, avid gaming news consumers, know that the initial download is a trial and the full game costs $10, but most people just downloading this game on a whim have no idea.
The game shows up in the “free” portion of the iOS store, and the description goes on for 15 lines and under the fold before there’s an asterisk that says “*access to all 6 Worlds subject to purchase.”
While mobile gamers are used to hitting paywalls when they lose lives or have to wait to build things, no, they are not used to getting through three levels of something and being told they have to pay $10 to keep going. That almost never happens in this market, and it really is not made clear up front that’s what you’re going to run into. I can see why people who just downloaded the game would hit that wall and then race to leave an angry review. It is unexpected if you didn’t know it was coming ahead of time.
And here’s where you get people saying “oh it’s just $10, come on you cheapskates! In my day Mario cost $60 and was worth every penny!” I also don’t think that A) referencing the way things used to be and B) coming up with some sort of “respect your elders” argument to support Nintendo makes for a terribly compelling case. The vast majority of avid mobile gamers are either too young to have grown up with Mario games or too old. That middle ground is where Super Mario Run is probably selling the best, but I don’t think you can yell at people to pay for something that they simply don’t think is worth it.
I tested Super Mario Run out on my cousins who are in town to visit this weekend, ages 10 and 13. Right off the bat, when I told them the full game was $10, they simply couldn’t believe it. With hundreds of apps on their phones, they’d never paid $10 for one even once. My 10-year-old cousin is an avid Pokémon GO player who has never spent a dime on the game because her parents haven’t hooked up their credit card to it (smart people). I have watched her starve for Poké Balls this weekend, getting and using 3 or 4 at a time, and $10 would be like a windfall for her. Meanwhile, my 13-year-old cousin showed me a game called “Lep’s World,” the most blatant, terrible Mario rip-off I’ve ever seen. The game is free, loaded with ads and microtransactions, but even with that obnoxiousness and the poor controls, my cousin has beaten every level because it’s free and vaguely entertaining. Despite both admitting they had fun with Super Mario Run after I had them play it, neither said they would even fathom spending 10 whole dollars on it.
I feel like there’s a lack of perspective when it comes to berating players for balking at spending that much on a mobile game, even a well-designed one. You can say “this mentality sucks and the mobile market sucks” but that doesn’t mean that isn’t the reality.
I think it’s fairly hypocritical for “core gamers” to try and say that a $10 game in a mostly F2P mobile market is totally the right call, yet if say, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild unveiled its price and it was $120, double the standard cost for new games, those people would lose their minds. A big game costing $10 is almost unheard of in the mobile market, and this is further compounded by the fact that no matter what you think, for many players this fact does feel like it’s hidden from players until they smack uncomfortably into the paywall before the first boss level.
Nintendo could have made this game work as F2P, and it would not have damaged their brand. Playing through the game it’s easy to imagine paying for more rally tickets, or coins to buy cosmetic items in the Mushroom Kingdom, or skins for Mario and the other unlockable heroes. None of that would have changed the core of the game. The levels would have still been fun and well-designed, the challenge coins and Toad Rally hard to master. It would simply have slid into a different monetization format while keeping pretty much all the content the same. I do not understand why that would have been the wrong play, especially seeing the reaction to the $10 price point after launch. And you know what? For a game that promised “everything” was going to be unlocked for $10, I sure find myself being told to grind endlessly for Toads to unlock upgrades like it’s a F2P offering.
I think Nintendo was wrong with this price point. Perhaps it’s too early to say that for certain, but in this case “entitled mobile gamers” are not wrong when they point out that this format is way outside the norms of the industry, and that they feel tricked when running into that huge paywall in what was listed as a free game.
Perhaps there’s a different way forward here and Nintendo will change things up, or they’ll be happy with what gains they have made, and feel like they were right all long. But no, “respect your elders” and “F2P mobile games suck” are not compelling enough reasons to think this was the right strategic decision for Nintendo to make.
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