Nintendomay hold a tight grasp on all its IPs, but its few mobile endeavors have shown profitable results. With watered-down versions of its most popular series, Nintendo has been outputting more and more mobile games for everyone to enjoy… at the cost of your wallets.
Every mobile game comes at a cost, and while Nintendo’s are high quality, they aren’t free from dreaded microtransactions. These can be the most overpriced waste of money you have ever seen, but we all can’t help but crack when a mobile game hooks us. If you thought $80 games were bad, you haven’t seen Nintendo’s worst yet.
All prices listed are in USD and are taken from the base price, not accounting for any sales or special bundles.
Paid Unlocks:Gacha and upgrade items
One Gacha Pull:120 Wyrmite or Diamantium
The now unavailable Dragalia Lost was a fantastic title that was co-developed by the creators ofUmamusume: Pretty Derby,CyGames, and it remains as one of Nintendo’s best, likely due to CyGames' involvement. Dragalia Lost was an original action RPG IP that, while nothing special, was a fun time that had tons of charm and passion poured into it, as well as a wonderful story and well-written characters.
Like all CyGames titles, Dragalia Lost was very generous with its rewards, so even though there was pricey paid currency in Diamantium, the game would always give you more than enough Wyrmite to get the characters you wanted. This is why we personally have placed the game higher, as while the microtransactions were pretty rough, they were countered by how easy it was to obtain Wyrmite.
Paid Unlocks:Tour mode Worlds 2-8 and World Star
One Gacha Pull:No gacha
Nintendo’s most prestigious series will always be Mario, and none of its IPs get treated with as much care and love as the Mario series does. When it came time for Nintendo’s first proper foray onto mobile, of course, the red plumber was first with the title Super Mario Run. This game is an auto-runner take on 2D Mario platforming that reuses assets to create a pocket-sized adventure.
Super Mario Run is the only Nintendo mobile game that has no paid currency and only requires a small payment to get access to levels past World One. This is great, as it makes Super Mario Run feel like a demo that allows you to get a taste of the game before deciding whether you want to invest more. It was likely that Nintendo just hadn’t figured out how to properly make microtransactions work yet, and treated it just like an eShop title.
Paid Unlocks:Gacha (before 2022), 200cc, Boost Tickets, characters, and karts
One Gacha Pull:500 Coins
Nintendo, in the 2010s, was seemingly the master of creating social media platformsthat we now sorely miss. While we only have fond memories of Miiverse, Miitomo is quite the sad story. This mobile title was a social app where you can enjoy one day at a time with your friends in some questionably limiting gameplay.
Despite being more of a social media platform, there were still microtransactions and even a pachinko game that would get you nothing more than cosmetics. Some of these cosmetics were themed around other Nintendo series, but little did that matter to the few fans. Many people had no reason to spend money on it. For those who did, they could quite easily get the items they wanted without paying.
Purchasable Currencies:Coins
Maximum Purchase:35,000 Coins ($219.99)
Monthly Pass:No, but has monthly events with premium passes for 999 Coins
Paid Unlocks:Items, storage size, cosmetics, and event passes
Surprisingly, Pikmin of all series made a mobile debut with a Pokemon GO-like title developed by the same development team in Niantic. Pikmin Bloom is a cute little game that lets you amass an army of Pikmin from across your real-life journey, and unfortunately, it also has the same monetization flaws as its predecessor, but with less impact on the gameplay.
While its sibling title, Pokemon GO, is also on this list, Pikmin Bloom has been much less predatory in comparison. No major content is locked behind a paywall, and while things are practically the same in terms of monetization methods, Pikmin Bloom is much more player-friendly when it comes to earning items without money.
Monthly Pass:No
Minimum Purchase:20 Leaf Tickets ($0.99)
Paid Unlocks:Gacha, speeding up in-game timers, special areas, materials, and items
One Gacha Pull:50 Leaf Tickets
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp may have a cute exterior, but there are egregious microtransactions hiding behind its cuddly softness. While you get lulled in by yourfavorite villagers, you will quickly find the game is full of classic mobile game mechanics that we all loathe, such as gacha mechanics and having to wait in real time in between certain actions. Most of these can, of course, be made less annoying with your hard-earned cash by buying Leaf Tickets.
There is one reason why this title is not even higher, the game was relaunched as Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete. This overhaul of the title keeps the core gameplay the same but removes in-app purchases and reworks mechanics that once used them. However, this comes at a steep price as the game now costs $19.99. This may be seen as even worse than the microtransactions, but for us, it’s a blessing.
Paid Unlocks:More lives, characters, and items
After creating a mobile version of Mario Kart, it made perfect sense for the next Mario spin-off to make its leap to mobile, being the Dr. Mario series. Puzzle titles are all the craze on mobile with countless matching games all over every inch of every store. Just like its clear Candy Crush-inspired gameplay changes and design, Dr. Mario World also copied its monetization schemes, but somehow made it worse, and that was its downfall.
This game had an intrusive life system that was designed to get people to spend their money, as when you get so close to completing a level and are all out of lives, the game would dangle candy in your face. This would range from things such as a thirty-minute infinite lives pack for “just $2.99” or some power-ups you could buy with the paid Diamond currency.
Monthly Pass:Yes for $4.99 a month
One Gacha Pull:5 Rubies
One of the most infamous parts of Nintendo’s venture into the mobile market was the shock horror of the Diddy Kong bundle that was found in Mario Kart Tour. This bundle only contained 90 Rubies along with Diddy Kong for a whopping $39.99 and sparked a ton of controversy at its release. The obscene microtransaction prices combined with Mario Kart Tour’s gacha system instantly set a sour feeling for what was a pretty fun mobile version of theMario Kart series.
Nintendo did eventually remove the gacha system, and this was received well, but also not, as it was replaced with a store, and the prices were “a bit” more than many players expected. A single High-End rarity character costs 150 Rubies, which, at minimum, requires you to spend the price of a copy ofDonkey Kong Bananza($70) to buy. DLC in Nintendo games can be expensive, but it has never reached this level of absurdity where all you get is a single character for the price of an entire game.
Monthly Pass:Yes for $9.49 a month
Paid Unlocks:Gacha, characters, stamina refills, and upgrade items
One Gacha Pull:5 Orbs (decreases by one for consecutive summons)
Fire Emblem Heroes (FEH) is Nintendo’s consistently best-grossing mobile title, with it earning over a billion dollars in revenue over the course of its lifespan, and it’s all thanks to its gacha and microtransactions. While the mainlineFire Emblem titlesare quite niche, FEH has seen huge success thanks to its perfect nature as a gacha game, with the classic FE gameplay making it stand out among other gachas.
The issues arise, however, with the game’s monetization, as not only is there an expensive monthly Feh Pass, but also a gacha system using paid Orbs. These are ridiculously overpriced, as for just five summons, you have to spend 20 Orbs ($10). This can quickly tally up with the poor gacha rates for the multiple five-star characters that are released every month, which are plagued with power creep, making the game feel very unbalanced unless you spend or get lucky.
Monthly Pass:Yes for $7.99 a month
Minimum Purchase:100 PokeCoins ($0.99)
Paid Unlocks:Items, storage size, team change, cosmetics, exclusive events, and Pokemon
One of the biggest mobile games to grace a Nintendo series is Pokemon GO, and while Nintendo wasn’t directly involved in the development, this list would be incomplete without it. Pokemon GO is a game like no other and, with almost a decade of updates and features, it still somehow has questionably bad microtransactions. The PokeCoins currency can be used for items and cosmetics, but is also required for key features such as changing your team or expanding your storage.
While you can obtain PokeCoins through playing, things get worse as there are also paid special passesfor eventsthat are ludicrously greedy and even lock Pokemon behind them. Fans have been complaining about how horrible the monetization is in the game since launch, and even with a change of development team,it just gets worse every year. 2025 even introduced a premium battle pass to top off all the other purchases and hinder your journey to catch them all even more.
