Yeah I would’ve been surprised if this did well. I got it and enjoyed it... but I don’t think it really was worth the price (it was a fun way to fill time but nothing too impressive and there’s definitely enough free games that you’ll get at least as many hours of enjoyment before having to pay even a cent).

“Free to start” as they called this was doomed from the beginning in the mobile market. There’s a reason the standard has become “free to play” with microtransactions. The average smartphone user will not pay for games. And therein lies the problem. Smartphone games get a majority of their profit from “whales”. “Whales” are the 1% rich players that spend ridiculous amounts of money to get ahead in these games. These are players with large disposable incomes who don’t care if they throw money by the hundreds (sometimes even thousands) into a phone game. “Whales” are still attracted to games with large player bases, so ideally you need a game that many people download (a majority of who will likely lose interest quickly without spending anything) but then offer microtransactions so the “whales” burn a bunch of money in the game to get ahead; these are the players that don’t mind paying for shorcuts. And this is why Fire Emblem succeeded where Mario failed. All the fame in the world doesn’t help if the cap a player can spend ingame is $10. Most players won’t spend the money and the ones who do... only spend $10, not as much as they’d be willing. Meanwhile Fire Emblem is free so lots of people downloaded and played for a chunk of time (and still do) while the players who don’t care if they pay for microtransactions just dump money into the gachapon.

Basically, it’s very telling that the game with Mario made notably less than Fire Emblem. It’s all about the business model. They tried pricing it in a way that their console gamers might be interested (though I doubt it would’ve done any better on 3DS) instead of looking at how mobile games succeed. If they made the standard game free, put a little more effort into the Toad Run mode, and sold tickets for it, I’d bet it would have at least done a bit better.

Granted, once again, it’s not really the best genre for this market. The games that attract whales are games that have more PVP, using either gachapons or timers to encourage players to shell out some cash to get an edge.