'Super Mario Run' Is Attracting Millennial Customers, but Losing Mobile Purchases

Earlier this December, Nintendo officially released the highly-anticipated Super Mario Run mobile app for iOS. Just four days after launch, the tap-to-play adventure game culled over 40 million downloads in Apple’s App Store despite its disputable $10 USD price tag. More specifically, the app nabbed a whopping 30 percent of mobile game purchases from iOS users. Although it received a ton of fanfare in its first few days, a new report from Slice Intelligence may attest that Mario isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Apparently, people are slowly losing interest in the game due to a number of reasons. As mentioned before, in-app spending could very well be a deterrent, and even if you were to play the game for free, you would only have access to a small number of levels.

What sort of demographic is Mario attracting anyway? Slice reports that Nintendo is trailing Pokémon Go by wrangling the millennial generation, which approximately accounts for 43% of the total mobile game buying population. However, unlike Pokémon Go, Mario sees a strong imbalance in its gender pool. Pokémon Go sees nearly an equal split between male (58%) and female (42%) players while men dominate SMR with a whopping 79%.

Could there be a correlation between Mario’s lack of gender diversity and buying population? Or is its paying population decline rooted in gameplay experience? Take a look at the statistics below and head over to Slice to read the full report here.