Like most people, I picked up Super Mario Run from the App Store recently and have been playing it over the past few days. The game is a lot of fun, and for a mobile game the quality is extremely high. The content is more limited than you’d expect from a full Super Mario console title, but we all know what we’re getting with a $10 mobile game.

So why is it getting underwhelming reviews?

A 2.5 star average, largely driven by the 1-star reviews

While most of the reviews are very positive, the average score is only 2.5. What’s bringing the score down is the many, many 1-star reviews.

Overwhelmingly these reviews are about one thing: price.

In an app store where price has been thoroughly driven down by freemium and $0.99 games, it seems a traditional approach to pricing up-front for quality content leaves a sour taste in user’s mouths.

In the console and PC gaming worlds, AAA titles from large publishers are typically retailed at $60, and run a range of playtime between 2 hours for shorter titles, up to 100 or so for the longer RPG types, and up to effectively infinite playtime for those highly repayable competitive games such as Counter-Strike or Overwatch. So it’s not that surprising that a traditional publisher like Nintendo might see $10 as a very low price.

But, this is the app store, where everything must be less than $5, or it gets slammed in the reviews.

So let’s think about those other games for a moment. While Super Mario Run is the top grossing game right now, there are other games that seem to always be top grossers, and they all have an icon with a picture of a cartoon guy screaming.

These games are designed to keep players playing, and eventually, keep them paying. There is no charge up front for most of these, but the game mechanics themselves drive players to spend money on in-game transactions.

These games also have pretty favorable reviews, mostly hovering around 4 stars.

Pay to Play

I think the reason these guys don’t have the same issue is because these games offer a way to play without spending money, even if that “play” mostly consists of waiting around until the next timer kicks in. The timers in these games are designed to manipulate it’s user base, turning their products in to habits. Only then will most of these ask for any payment.

Mario on the other hand, asks for a payment after only playing through a few levels, and continuing to play through tour mode is not an option. It is basically the end of the content after the first world. This isn’t really the end of the content, since player’s can continue to play in tour mode, but the game makes no real effort to drive players towards that after their “trial” ends.

This revenue model is one where the player pays for quality content, in the form of 5 unique worlds. This seems to be the crux of the issue.

Our experiences with mobile apps are, like it or not, driven largely by the revenue model the apps use to generate a profit. Follow the money, and you’ll understand the design intent.

If a game is free, but sells consumable (repeatable) in-game items, you can bet their plan is to keep you playing for as long as possible, regardless of whether or not you’re enjoying the experience. They want to keep you continuously buying more and more in-game items. It’s expensive for these companies to constantly sell new content (like new Mario levels), so instead they sell something that takes almost no effort to create, fake money.

This is usually presented as some themed item from the game world. Whether it’s a “bucket of gems” or “barrels of honey” or just “gold”, there’s always some fake currency to buy. This keeps the player feeling like they are getting something new, although in most cases they are not. This is all designed to keep players spending small amounts of money, for basically as long as they can keep them distracted.

You can easily confirm this for yourself by looking at the top in-game purchases for Mobile Strike, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, or any of these skinner-boxes-in-disguise. Do you notice a trend among the top In-App-Purchases for these top grossing titles?