Nintendo is experimenting with monetization. In the Mario Kart Tour game coming out today on iOS and Google Play, along with the monetization mechanics standard for a free-play game, there is also a subscription.
Its cost is $4.99 per month. For this money, the player is allowed to open “golden” cosmetics and participate in a closed mode for other users.
The subscription does not give any characters, cars, or gliders. The player continues to receive all game content from the local analogue of gacha.
The mechanics work in the traditional way. The player spends rubies on launching gachi, which are both earned in the game and purchased for real money.
The gacha itself in Mario Kart Tour is an expensive pleasure. For one scroll, it requires five rubies. Three rubies in the game will cost the user $ 1.99. However, as always, the more rubies a user purchases, the cheaper they cost him.
This would not be a problem for the skill-based PvP project that is Mario Kart Tour, if not for one circumstance. The content in the game has rarity levels. The rarer this or that content is, the more advantages it gets during the competition (at least, this was the case at the softlonch stage).
Mario Kart Tour is the fourth product in the framework of the strategic cooperation between Nintendo and DeNA. Within its framework, Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp were previously released. An unconditional hit (by Japanese standards) of them can only be called Fire Emblem Heroes, which, including with the help of gachi (this mechanics was not in other cooperation games) earned about $ 500 million.
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