Back in July when our blog first launched, one of our first entries was this realistic rendering of what Mario would look like if he was human.

Scary isn’t it?

This got me thinking what would Mario would be worth if he were an actual human being.  Now we all know it’s nearly impossible to put a price on a life, but if we work the numbers creatively we can arrive at a pretty good estimate for how much Mario has earned for Nintendo in 2008. (Or not). So here is my feeble attempt at calculating what Mario would be worth if he were indeed a living breathing entity. Please note that this blog post is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be taken the least bit seriously.

- Gross Nintendo Sales. In the last fiscal year alone, Nintendo did just over 16.8 billion dollars in sales, with expected net profit to come in somewhere around 3.45 billion dollars for 2008.  This gives them a net profit margin of around 20%.  While Sony and Microsoft struggle to make a profit in their video game divisions, Nintendo remains one of the few video game companies in this recession that is just absolutely flooded with money, fueled primarily by the Nintendo Wii and DS.

- Mario’s Percentage. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the Mario brand is responsible for 33% of Nintendo-related sales.  So that means one out of every two products sold by Nintendo are Mario-related.  I get that figure from the fact that Mario Kart for Wii is estimated to have sold over a million copies (in fact rumor has it that it sold 300,000 copies in the first week alone).  This just represents one game for one of their consoles, the other major console of theirs would be, of course, the DS. 

- Percentage and Profit of Games. Of the top ten best-selling Nintendo Wii or DS games, 40% have Mario’s face on the cover (Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy for Wii, Super Mario Brothers for DS, and Mario Kart for DS).  There were 228 million Wii Games sold as of September, 2008, 454 million DS games, and 10 million Virtual Console Games, giving us a total of 692 million games. Now, if we assume that this represents 3/4 of the total number of games Nintendo sold during the year, then we can assume that Nintendo sold around 925 million games in 2008.  And if even 20% of these are Mario-based, then Mario would be responsible for 185 million of these games.  At an average price of $49.99, that would mean that Mario games brought in 9.2 billion dollars.  Assuming the 20% net profit margin we established in paragraph one, this means that Mario games would have brought in a whopping 1.84 billion dollars, or just over half of Nintendo’s net profit in 2008. Wow.

- Bear With Me Here. Ok now I understand this math is getting really fuzzy, and I don’t think this is going anywhere.  But bear with me here - you already started reading this blog post so you might as well finish it!

- Other Mario Products. Lastly, we also need to consider the number of Mario-related products that Nintendo sold last year.  We know that here at vpgames, merchandise with at least one image of the famous fat plumber’s mug accounts for about 22% of all Nintendo merchandise sold.  Getting a solid number for how much Nintendo did in merchandise sales in 2008 is very tricky, but I think we can safely say it would be around 10% of sales.  So taking 2008 sales of 16.8 billion, divided by 10 we get 1.68 billion dollars in merchandise sales.  22% of 1.68 billion = 369 million dollars in Mario merchandise sales, and 73 million dollars in Mario merchandise profit.  That’s a lot of Mario junk floating around.

- In Conclusion. Putting it all together, we have 9.2 billion dollars in Mario game sales, combined with 369 million dollars in Mario Merchandise sales, for a total of 9.57 billion dollars in Mario-related sales in 2008.  Assuming Nintendo’s 20% profit margin one last time, that gives us a grand total of 1.91 billion dollars in net profit.  So we can say that Mario made nearly 2 billion dollars in net profit for Nintendo in 2008.  This doesn’t even consider Gamecube or GBA titles/merchandise, let alone N64 titles that do still exist and yes, Nintendo still has the rights to (though not for much longer...stay tuned for more information!)

- Mario = Beyond Rich. So in conclusion, if the numbers don’t lie (which they most certainly do), then this would make Mario easily one of the world’s richest men. Since Mario has been doing this for a few years, his net worth would now probably put him somewhere in the range of Five to Twenty-Five Billion Dollars, somewhere between #11 Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO), and #49 Michael Dell (Dell Computers) on the Forbes Top 50 Richest Americans list. He would still be behind Microsoft’s Bill Gates.  Also I am not sure he would qualify for this list, seeing as how Mario was technically conceived in Japan and is Italian by nature.  But still, you get the point. The guy would be freaking loaded.

P.S. - The more I think about this, the more I realize that it makes absolutely no sense.  These calculations are truly terrible, and I’m actually embarrased to post this blog.  How could any Italian cartoon plumber possibly be worth that much money?  Really. There are so many things I am leaving out here that it’s not even funny… If someone wants to do a better analysis of this someday, please be my guest.  Thanks for reading!

- Stefan

Posted by stefan on 01/08 at 11:44 PM
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