It has been less than two weeks since Nintendo Co., Ltd. unleashed “Super Mario Run” upon the mobile gaming world, and while the app broke numerous records set by the release of “Pokémon GO” — also by Nintendo — earlier this year, the game has steadily lost steam, both in terms of revenue and number of downloads.

A couple of days after its Dec. 15 launch for Apple devices, “Super Mario Run” was the most profitable iOS app in 49 countries and the most downloaded app in 138 countries, according to app research website App Annie which was cited by Bloomberg. But a week later, on Dec. 24, it had stopped being the top grossing iOS app in any country, and it topped even the free downloads list in only 88 countries.

And the main reason behind the app’s declining performance seems to be the $9.99 that players must pay if they want to access the full game beyond just the first three levels. If it were priced at $1.99, a fifth of its current price, Nintendo would have made another $20.76 million in December alone, according to Apptopia, another app researcher.

Talking about the number of players who buy the full version after the initial free download, Adam Blacker of Apptopia told International Business Times: “Right now, Nintendo is converting between 1-4 percent every day but they could be converting at more than 10 percent with a lower price point of $1.99.”

An update to the app was released Dec. 20, but both versions of the game have the same 2.5-star rating on the App Store. The first version received 69,071 ratings and the updated version had 13,461 ratings at the time this article was written.

The Android version of “Super Mario Run” is expected to launch some time in 2017.

Shares of Nintendo had fallen about 20 percent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since the release of Super Mario Run, but rose 4.07 percent during trade Monday, perhaps because most of the negative news related to the game’s launch has already been digested by the market.

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