So I finally caved and bought the full version of Super Mario Run this weekend, four days after it landed in the App Store, and I've got some thoughts that are more complicated than "cute game, good job Nintendo."
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring their phone: Nintendo dropped Super Mario Run on iOS last Thursday, the 15th. You can download it free and play the first three levels of World Tour, but to get the whole thing (all the levels, Toad Rally, Kingdom Builder, the works) it's a single $9.99 in-app purchase. One time. No lives to buy back, no gems, no "watch this ad to keep playing." You pay once and it's yours.
I want to like this more than I do, and honestly a big part of me does. I'm so tired of freemium mobile games designed around making you feel bad every ninety seconds until you cave and spend $4.99 on a bucket of gems you don't understand the value of. My oldest has about six of those games on her hand-me-down iPad and I've had to explain "no we are not buying more lives for the candy game" more times than I can count this year. Ten bucks flat, own it forever, is honestly kind of refreshing as a pricing model. I'd pay that for more games if the industry actually did this consistently instead of treating it like some bold experiment.
But here's my actual complaint, and it's the same one everyone else has been making since launch day: the game requires a constant internet connection. Even in single-player World Tour, where you are doing nothing that touches another human being's data in any way, it needs to phone home. I tried playing it on the train Friday morning and got the little "no internet connection" screen instead of Mario. On a train. In 2016. This is an auto-runner where you tap to jump — there is no conceivable reason this needs live connectivity to function offline, except that Nintendo apparently wants to make pirating it harder, or track engagement, or both. I get the business logic. I still think it's a genuinely bad experience for the actual humans buying the game, and it's the kind of decision that makes me roll my eyes at a company I otherwise mostly trust to know what they're doing with their own characters.
The gameplay itself is fine. More than fine, actually. Mario runs on his own and you just tap to jump and hold to jump higher, which sounds like it should feel like nothing but somehow still has that same tight, floaty-but-precise physics feel the Mario platformers have had since forever. Toad Rally, where you race a ghost version of another player's run and try to out-coin and out-trick them, is the part that's actually eaten the most of my time. It's a clever way to make an auto-runner feel a little competitive without turning it into a multiplayer mess.
What I keep thinking about, though, is the download numbers versus the money. Everyone's been reporting huge install numbers over the opening weekend, tens of millions of downloads, and it's obviously going to be one of the biggest mobile launches of the year just on volume. But the conversion from "downloaded the free version" to "actually paid the ten dollars" is apparently a lot lower than whatever Nintendo was hoping for, going by how the stock reacted. Which is a weird thing to sit with — a game can be a massive cultural moment, the kind of thing your coworkers are talking about at lunch, and still be kind of a financial disappointment relative to expectations, because expectations for anything with the word Nintendo on it right now are completely unhinged. This is still riding the tail end of the Pokémon GO summer, remember, when everyone decided mobile plus a beloved Nintendo property equals infinite money forever. Reality is messier than that.
Anyway. My kid has already beaten World Tour twice and is now just doing Toad Rally runs against strangers, which I did not expect to become a bedtime negotiation topic but here we are. If you've got an iPhone and any fondness for Mario at all, it's worth the ten dollars, connection requirement grumbling aside. Android users are apparently going to be waiting a while for their turn, so, sorry, guys.