Pokemon go has a pretty large base of paid players. A large number of who have admittedly spent more than $10.

I think the price point will get overlooked for 2 reasons. 1) It's Christmas. 2) It's Mario on the damn iphone.

It'll probably cross 1 million paid downloads the first day.

Fun fact to remember. Mario Kart 8 on the WiiU sold something close to over a million the first weekend it was out. We're talking a much lower price point over a near infinitely larger user base.

Best Selling Paid Mobile Games

Tetris - 425 Million
Minecraft - 30 Million
Angry Birds - 12 Million
Sonic the Hedgehog - 8 Million
Fruit Ninja - 6 Million
Doodle Jump - 5 Million
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years - 3 Million
Plauge Inc - 2 Million

Super Mario Run has as much chance of reaching 300 million paid downloads as... errr... can't think of anything.

So why 50 million of these 60 million people didn't buy NSMB2 or Super Mario 3D Land?

Angry birds paid attach rate has hovered between 15-50% paid downloads depending on the release. And various installments of that series to this point have flown past 1 billion downloads fairly easily.

Source: https://aytm.com/blog/research-junction/angry-birds-addiction/#sthash.0qgYwXI8.dpbs - A bit old, but proves something of my point.

I say easily over 20 million end of this year. Quote me on this.

The price point is an issue elsewhere - but the context here is special.

Let me put it this way....

30 million people on a 100 million user base on the Wii paid $25-$60 for NSMB

40 million-ish people bought SMB on NES in the same price range.

Super Mario World sold at least 20 million.

Successful Nintendo consoles have a potential reach of 40-100 million users. Expand that reach by 20x and drop the price of the SW by 50%-80%

8-10 million paid (would still be a lot considering Nintendo will get a much larger cut of the profits than they did with PoGo)

Around 1-2mil first year, methinks. That would put it among the most successful paid apps on the store

Your source is taken from a sample size of 500 people... that's not evidence of anything. The only information we have is the original game sold 12 million after a year on the market. Let me just post this again.

Best Selling Paid Mobile Games

Tetris - 425 Million   (was priced at $0.99)
Minecraft - 30 Million
Angry Birds - 12 Million
Sonic the Hedgehog - 8 Million
Fruit Ninja - 6 Million
Doodle Jump - 5 Million
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years - 3 Million
Plauge Inc - 2 Million

The chance of Super Mario Run exceeding 300 million sales is practically non-existant.

The OP's prediction has to be based on the 1billion ios devices PR announcement a while ago, but even at that joke figure, Given that I have 2 of those devices and I would not invest money in itunes ever then you have to factor in that a lot of the 1billion devices are either cases where many devices are owned by a single person and have 1 account on them (even 2 devices per person would half the number to 500m potential sales with 100% of owners buying it) and then you have to factor in of the 500m potential users of iDevices how many of those actually ever use their phone for anything other than just being a phone, let alone how many would ever consider spending money or time on a game, you are looking at maybe 1 in 10 so cuts down the potential buyers of the game to close to 50m at best, given Mario's attach rates on consoles are pretty high I would wager this will life time sell around 5-7m copies of the $10 version based on around 10% of the gamers on ios

This is just based on the ios version of the game and not taking Android into account, it is far harder to nail down numbers for android devices which are actively in use.

Regardless of anything though, to think you're going to get 300m sales on 1billion devices is insane.