I paid 13 cents of real money, along with $20.87 in Google Play credit...
Will it hold for months though? I doubt it, unless updates and polishing come quickly.
It's only been out for a week, hasn't it? Isn't it too soon to be talking about this?
Understandable doubts. But here are some figures & facts:
Over 25 million active daily players after 10 days, and it's not out in China, Japan and Korea, all of which can reasonably be expected to add millions of players, and arguably Brazil and India as well.
Average monetization per daily user so far is = $0.25/day, so it's making ~$6.25M/day that it keeps those numbers.
Let's say with the far east releases they grow by another 15 million to 40 million, even counting the inevitable fall-off for some players (being very conservative there) and that
the falloff is 25% per quarter, you will have a slightly non-standard bell curve of users, and I expect they could make something like:
Obviously some speculation here, but reasonably conservative, since it doesn't consider merchandise, spin-offs, money from businesses and other deals.
I think they will make over a billion dollars this year, unless it falls off the rails, and even then several hundreds of millions. Best case - over $2B.
Now that is money to Ninantic and Nintendo, and I don't know what the revenue sharing deal is with Google. In 2015, Nintendo made $4.5 Billion or thereabouts, so even if they keep half, that's going bolster income in a big way.