Super Mario Run is Full of Love and Hate - The UpStream

Super Mario Run is Full of Love and Hate

posted Sunday Dec 18, 2016 by Scott Ertz

Super Mario Run is Full of Love and Hate

After showing off Super Mario Run at Apple's iPhone event, the anticipation for the release of the game has been high. Being another Nintendo-related, though the first Nintendo owned and operated, mobile game brought about the obvious comparisons to Pokémon GO, the game thought to be the clear winner for most popular mobile game of 2016. With the game finally on the market, let's start with the games' comparisons.

Pokémon GO, in its first day in the store, was downloaded about 1 million times. This is a great achievement for any mobile app, let alone mobile game. Super Mario Run, on the other hand, received as many as 10 million downloads on day 1. While this looks like a huge success for Mario, you must consider the phased roll-out that Pokémon GO used, rather than the 150 markets that Super Mario Run launched in all at once.

The real test is in average gameplay session length. While Super Mario Run averaged about 15 minutes per user per session on its first day, Pokémon GO averaged 22 minutes per user per session. That is a 50% decrease from one game to another. Part of that has to do with the lack of incentive to keep Mario running, and part of it has to do with an overall lack of content included in the game.

While the game has been downloaded a lot, there are also a lot of reviews, and they are not great. In fact over half of the almost 50,000 reviews in the App Store are 1-star reviews. If you read through the lowest ratings, you will find that many players were surprised and disappointed by the fact that so little of the game is available for free.

But there are, of course, varying schools of thought on that complaint. Many people have commented that, rather than occasionally paying $5 for just in-game items, like 100 Poke Balls, Mario makes it $10 to play the entire game. While some of us prefer this method of payment, it has seemed to cause a lot of ratings issues for the game.

Are you a fan of a pay once type game, or would you rather pay more over a period of time? Let us know in the comments.

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