Now that Nintendo's plans for smartphone app development have gone from persistent rumor to actual reality , it's time to start thinking about whether mobile profits can help the company's flagging console business . Earlier this week, SurveyMonkey Intelligence gave us some early information on that score , providing download, user, and revenue estimates for Nintendo's recently launched Miitomo social networking app/game.

At first glance, the results look promising for Nintendo's mobile move. Miitomo has already attracted 4 million total monthly users, with about 1 million using the game on any given day. On average, a Miitomo user spends eight minutes with the app across two or three play sessions.

More importantly to Nintendo's bottom line, plenty of those users are also paying for cosmetic items in the otherwise free-to-play app. SurveyMonkey estimates that Miitomo is already bringing in $40,000 a day in revenue, mostly from iOS users. That's enough for the SurveyMonkey analysts to write that "King, Zynga, Storm8, EA and Glu should be worried... In a nutshell, Miitomo is crushing it and Nintendo seems to have a hit on its hands!"

But Miitomo's early raw revenue numbers don't look all that hot when compared with Nintendo's existing core business of making games for consoles and portables. To make that comparison, I took a look at Nintendo's list of million-selling Wii U games and divided out their average daily sales from launch through December 31, 2015 (so recent releases may be artificially high compared to an eventual lifetime average). I then multiplied those daily sales out by a rough average of historic prices at Amazon, tracked by CamelCamelCamel (usually $45 to $55). This formula doesn't account for slight regional variations in sales price or release date, but it's good enough for a back-of-the-envelope estimate.

As you can see in the above graph, the revenue results don't look so hot for Miitomo at the moment. Even on a struggling console like the Wii U, a big hit like Super Mario Maker is bringing in about 40 times as much estimated revenue per day as Miitomo at this point. And even a warmed-over re-release like Wind Waker HD has averaged about twice as much daily revenue as Miitomo is bringing in so far. I didn't bother calculating daily revenues for popular 3DS games, but many of them also leave Miitomo's current revenues in the dust.

This isn't a perfect comparison; there are differences in costs associated with selling a disc-based game through a retailer and selling an app download through a mobile storefront. Nintendo's development costs have to be considered, too—the company probably spent hundreds of thousands of worker-hours to make a complex game like Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, while a relatively simple app like Miitomo could likely be cranked out more quickly and cheaply. That difference could make the mobile app business easier to scale up than the home console business, which has only seen about a dozen million-selling titles in the Wii U's three-and-a-half years on the market.

More importantly, though, Miitomo's current revenues might be at the low end of its eventual earning power. While console game sales tend to be front-loaded right after launch, successful mobile games can take a few months before they really hit their full revenue potential. This makes some sense, since the social-networking effects that lead to free-to-play success take some time to manifest in a critical mass of downloads (and revenues, in turn).

So far, SurveyMonkey estimates that Miitomo is bringing in 2.4 million new downloads every week. If that pace keeps up, those 1 million current daily users could easily increase to 10 million daily users in just a few months. And if those daily users continue to average three or four cents of spending per day, that would turn Miitomo from a $40,000-per-day game to a $400,000-per-day game. That would look much more competitive with Nintendo's existing console business and could easily convince the company to invest more heavily in mobile games (especially considering Miitomo's potential to keep growing and bringing in significant money in the long term).

That's a big "if" at this point, though. Much of Miitomo's success so far may have been driven by Nintendo's brand recognition and curiosity above the company's mobile plans. If Miitomo's weird mix of social chatting and cute characters doesn't maintain users' long-term interest, those revenue numbers could drop as quickly as they rose, or peak relatively soon.

All in all, Nintendo should be heartened by a relatively strong start for its first mobile experiment. That early success will need to continue, though, if smartphone gaming is going to become a major part of the company's business.