Super Mario Run is the new Nintendo mobile game heading to IOS and Android on 15th December, it will initially be free to start but to unlock the full game, there’s a single charge of $9.99.

During an interview with the Financial Post, Shigeru Miyamoto discussed Nintendo’s decision to have a single payment for the game. Instead of micro-transactions, Miyamoto advised that the company feels “pretty strongly” about having a form of monetization where the user would just pay once and then be able to play as much as you like without any further charges.

As data firm Sensor Tower is projecting that Super Mario Run will net Nintendo $71 million in gross revenue for its first month on the App Store, the company is still likely to see a large profit from the app. Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

“When we first started talking about bringing Nintendo games and Mario to iPhone, we talked a lot about what we would do from a monetization standpoint and debated this even with Mr. Iwata back in those days (Satoru Iwata was CEO of Nintendo until his death in 2015).

Certainly there are a lot of different ways that you can monetize a game. In Japan there’s a mechanic that’s referred to as “gacha,” where you keep spending small amounts for a raffle or lottery to get rare items. There are other ways that you can charge people repeatedly to get money. And there are games that rely on a very small number of people who pay a lot of money and the rest of the players play for free.

But we looked at who a traditional Nintendo game player and consumer was, and we feel that in our case with a lot of our products we see parents buying the game for their kids. In that sense, we felt pretty strongly that we needed to have a form of monetization where you would simply pay once and be able to play as much as you like. That was important for Nintendo and our audience. You don’t see a lot of [mobile] games that are set up that way these days, but we felt it was important for us to establish that for this game.”

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Filed under: Nintendo Tagged: android, ios, mobile, shigeru miyamoto, super mario run