Miitomo, Nintendo's first mobile game, saw over 2.6M downloads last week, is making about $280K/week
The early results are in - here's just how huge Miitomo, Nintendo's new game is — Why King, Zynga, Storm8, EA and Glu should be worried — Late last month, Nintendo released …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nintendo's first smartphone app followed a careful ramp: announced in October 2015 as a free download with paid character add-ons, it launched in Japan in mid-March before the U.S. and wider rollout at month's end. This week's SurveyMonkey Intelligence data puts hard numbers on that rollout for the first time.
The split in the data matters more than either figure alone: 2.6M weekly downloads against roughly $280K in weekly revenue means Miitomo is winning reach at a rate traditional mobile publishers pay heavily for, while monetizing far below what King or Zynga would consider healthy for that volume.
First-order effects
- Nintendo has converted brand awareness into top-of-chart distribution without a visible user-acquisition spend, immediately pressuring Zynga, King, Glu, EA and Storm8, whose install funnels depend on bought traffic.
- Nintendo itself learns that its social-avatar concept monetizes weakly — the character add-on purchases flagged in the original plan are converting at a fraction of incumbent free-to-play rates.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent publishers face a competitor that can treat mobile as marketing for its console business rather than a profit center, forcing them to compete against a player who does not need the revenue to justify the game.
- If Nintendo reads the same revenue-per-download gap, expect its next mobile releases to lean harder on proven franchises with established purchase intent rather than original social mechanics.
Third-order effects
- That is roughly how the pattern resolved: Nintendo shut Miitomo down in May 2018 after barely two years, while franchise titles like Super Mario Run's record-setting 40M+ four-day downloads became the template — original social concepts were the experiment, IP was the product.
- Structurally, Nintendo's entry signaled that platform holders could enter mobile at scale on brand alone, compressing the economics of mid-tier publishers whose only edge was acquisition expertise.
The trend: Nintendo's mobile strategy evolved from experimental social apps toward franchise-led releases, with Miitomo's strong-reach/weak-monetization profile marking the first data point in that pivot.