Nintendo recently announced The current version of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is being discontinued as a F2P mobile game, but it will return as a pay-to-play title for iOS and Android. Nintendo’s historic profit numbers may provide clues as to why this is happening.

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Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is Nintendo’s third most popular mobile title with over 10 million downloads. So why is the company discontinuing the title and relaunching it as a pay-to-play game? There are several possible reasons for this.

The first reason is that NDCube, the development studio responsible for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, may be too busy to keep the live game updated with new content and in-app purchases over time – especially via Pocket Camp’s subscription service. After all, NDCube was pretty busy in the last 6 yearswho has developed five Switch games, including two Mario Party titles.

The online service for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will end on November 29, 2024 at 00:00 (JST).

Once the service expires, you will no longer be able to play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.

Please note that we are currently developing a paid version of the app that you can transfer your saved data to. It will be released during the same period that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp service is discontinued.

The second reason could have to do with Nintendo’s ambitions in the mobile space.

The company takes a unique approach to mobile gaming, offering free-to-start models for some games, such as Super Mario Run, and a completely free-to-play option for games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes, and the newly released Pikmin Bloom.

A closer look at Nintendo’s past mobile revenue could give us new insights into the company’s current mobile plans.

Nintendo generates the majority of its revenue from its dedicated Switch platform. There are two other segments: A combination of IP-related revenue (think licensing and the Super Mario movie) and mobile games, and the second segment, Nintendo’s traditional game cards and others.

By isolating IP-related and mobile revenue, we get an interesting insight into the evolution of Nintendo’s smartphone games.

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Since the fourth quarter of 2017, when the Switch launched, this segment peaked at $220 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, thanks to royalties from the Super Mario Bros. movie. This is despite the release of several mobile titles, many of which were on the market at the same time. The second best period was in the second quarter of 2020, when Mario Kart Tour and Dr. Mario were released, and the segment grossed $154 million.

Note that it is currently not possible to separate IP-related revenue from mobile gaming revenue, so it is more difficult to estimate how much of this revenue comes from mobile gaming.

Over the last 30 quarters, this segment has been a guaranteed moneymaker, with revenue never falling below $78 million in any quarter. That suggests some success for Nintendo, but it’s certainly not the high-end success Nintendo was hoping for; in 2018, CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said that mobile could be a $1 billion business for Nintendo.

While Nintendo has indeed earned billions of dollars from this segment since the Switch launched in March 2017—about $3.394 billion, to be exact—revenue is still unlikely to be as high as the company hoped.

So the move to a traditional pay-to-play model, at least in the case of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, represents a guaranteed form of purchase and it feels like the game is following a more traditional model and outside of the microtransaction-based economy that Nintendo had previously envisioned.

This trades potential purchases for guaranteed purchases, which could shore up Nintendo’s mobile revenue during a potential downturn – that area declined significantly shortly after Pikmin Bloom’s release.