The current state of Fire Emblem Heroes and its revenue in the year 2019
Recently, in r/gachagaming, there is a thread talking about the number of twitter followers of World Flipper (JP), Cygames' most recently released mobile game that just got released just two weeks ago [122.1k as of the time of this writing], surpassing that of Dragalia Lost (JP) [120.8k as of the time of this writing]. Yikes (for Dragalia Lost)!
Also, World Flipper for English, please!
But, since this is Fire Emblem Heroes, there is something on that thread that is needed to be noted here concerning this game – its current yearly revenue. One of the comments there shows the list of Top 100 Grossing Mobile Games in the Japanese market this year of 2019. As of the time of the writing, the game Fire Emblem Heroes is currently sitting at Rank 54 with ¥ 4.47 billion, just below Summoners War at Rank 53. This is still a lot of revenue but comparing that to the game's yearly revenue last year (Rank 26 with ¥ 10.7 billion), this can be a bit concerning especially for its developers and its publishers. For that matter, DL is nowhere to be found at Top 100 compared to last year and Nintendo's second most profitable mobile game right now in Japan is Animal Crossing Pocket Camp (Rank 63 with ¥ 3.69 billion) which is quite consistent in relation to its revenue (and even ranking) last year.
That being said, what happened to make the revenue to become like this compared to last year? Of course, naturally, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was released almost half a year ago so that might affect this game's revenue, but Fire Emblem Heroes' most profitable year is still in its release year of 2017, the year where Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia was released. Maybe this game's decisions this year made some of its consumers deciding not to spend as much money as before.
Perhaps, it can gain some momentum to push its revenue to more than 5 billion with the upcoming Holiday/Christmas summoning banner that can be followed by its newest New Year banner if the latter ever released this month. Quality of Life changes this year had been really good so far though. But this is something to be noted about this point.
So, for now, just as a meme says, “Daed gmae?”
The answer is no, absolutely not. Fire Emblem Heroes is still one of the Top 100 Grossing Mobile Games in Japan so that is still important. But that would also mean Intelligent Systems needed to work on something so the game could still garner more attention to its consumers now and even next year (and as a result, more revenue to meet Nintendo's expectations). Perhaps, the Divine Codes of Mjolnir's Strike will play an important role in the game's future. Maybe, more deals each offering a free Legendary/Mythic/Seasonal Hero would work too, like the ones with Holiday Tharja and with Legendary Roy, as these deals made the game be within the Daily Top 10 during those days these bundles are released (these bundles consists of a free Limited Hero, after all). Even more Quality of Life changes will work as well.
But for now, this game's potential revenue this year can be a bit concerning to look at the moment... and yeah, Dragalia Lost's too, especially in Japan.
Posted Dec 11, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC
More freebies wouldn't hurt. They're relatively generous, but one thing gacha games do is that they get MORE generous as the game goes on. FEH's generosity has stayed relatively stagnant. The free orb per month has stayed around the low 300s... for over 2 years. Yes, IS has thrown in other non-orb stuffs liek summoning tickets, but at the end of the day, the most valuable resource is orbs. FGO meanwhile is starting to give more quartz daily on the NA server for example.
But what they really need to do is fix fundamental problems with the game. They NEED to start with summoning, it's the meat and potatoes for any gacha game and is the driving income for gachas. Pity rates are fundamentally flawed in that you actively want a 3 or 4 star unit over the majority of off-focus 5-stars. That is NOT how you design a winning gacha.
Every gacha should want players to pull higher rarity units even if those units may not be particularly strong, simply because of rarity. If I pull someone mediocre in FGO like Artoria, I'm not thinking "what the fuck I got an Artoria when I could've gotten Merlin????", I'm thinking "well at least she's more interesting than another fucking 3-star saber that I've NP5'd a year ago because this is my first or second Artoria copy." But when you're pulling for Peony and you get 5% pity rate and then you end up with a Shiro, you feel like quitting the game because now your pity rate drops back to 3% and the Shiro actively hurt your chances of getting Peony, you would unironically be better off getting a 3-star Oboro over Shiro just because of the pity rate. This is a massive pitfall with the summoning system that is actively causing frustration when you summon, which is the opposite of what summoning should be; the player should WANT to summon and can't wait to drop his orbs/gems/quartz/etc. on the new banner, not be like "Well shit I could try for Peony but then I'm going to be fucking annoyed if I drop 200 orbs and all I get is a pity breaker Thea."
They need to also go back and fix existing game modes. IS is too quick to just add new game modes but don't go back to fix problems in existing ones. They're going for quantity than quality and that's a problem. FGO is a one trick pony; it's literally only good because of the
waifuswriting and it's otherwise a massive fucking grindfest, but they clearly spend a lot of time weaving their storyline and it shows. Meanwhile in FEH, the training tower is entirely irrelevant outside of dumb quests they force. It took them a year and a half to actually fix arena (which became a dumpster fire because of a change they made, so all they did was fix that change) when people were literally telling them how to fix arena the day after they made the babysitter change. They somehow consistently make modes WORSE, like the aforementioned babysitter arena, or when they made mythic heroes affect lift gains (defense MHs were implemented fine, the offense MHs however were horrendously implemented). Most games get better as they progress; FEH takes one step forward, one step back.This also extends to units too. They add like 10 units a month. Only 4 units a month get refines. This is not including units who have gotten refines but were bad or not enough (coughTakumicough). They cannot keep pace with the powercreep.
IS is falling into the common gacha designer trap of thinking that you always have to pwoercreep and make new toys. That's false. What you actually need to do is focus on your fundamentals. I don't want to go summon for fallen tiki if she's going to get powercrept in a year.
How do you propose they fix the summoning issue you described in paragraph 2 and 3
4 refines a month is so fking pathetic. It takes barely any effort on their part to do these, and yet we’re getting a pittance of an amount. We’re still not done with gen 1 refines when we’re in gen 4 now ffs.
There are a lot of ways to fix it but I think this would be the simplest while still keeping the "pity rate" system.
5-stars no longer break pity rate.
Pity rate caps off after 50 summons on the banner, but your pity rate stays at that amount until the banner ends.
Done, fin. There are plenty more you can do to add (e.g. it would be nice to get a guaranteed random focus unit every 50 summons, you could increase the focus rate, etc.) but you would immediately fix like 90% of the problems with the summoning system in 30 seconds.
Pity rate could probably be adjusted so the off-banner 5-star rate is significantly lower than the Rate Up characters, which would probably be the 'fairest' fix in the sense that you have better odds to pull what you want, but IS still has a way to encourage you to spend. (It never did make sense to me that the off-banner rate is the same exact percentage as rate-up...)
Even still, IS needs a much more severe summon pool fix because it really is terrible as it is.
No more 4-5* rarity. There's no point to this, and all it serves is to make pulling a Thea/Mordecai/Reyson at 5* even more soul-crushing than any other pitybreak. Just do straight demotions.
Group summons by series. One of the most hated aspects is that it gets extremely difficult to summon copies of certain 3 or 4* characters because the pool is so diluted. A way to address this is to have all characters of a series be on Rate Up during New Character banners, so you'll have a slightly higher chance than normal to pull characters from the game(s) the banner features.
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I don’t believe this for a second. New units have to have the artwork done, the voicework done, the base kit figured out, the animations done, the sprite work done, and probably a ton more I’m not even mentioning.
All a refine requires is figuring out how to make the prf look, which is only when they didn’t have a prf to begin with, and what the prf will do and program that.
It’s ridiculous when people say this, because they’ve done more than 4 a month before. Stop defending laziness.
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Quests like "play mode x times" should replace roundabout nonsense like "leave the mode you're actually enjoying, to do Training Tower / Arena"
No, I really don't feel like leaving to do Training Tower / Arena so I can continue the mode I actually am enjoying, thanks for asking game.
3500x4 over 14 days is 1000 points per day. 2500x4 over 10 days is still 1000 points per day, but is faster to do if you've taken slack days. (P.s. fix the rewards structure, the last 1500 points are very unrewarding.)
Let us drop a Lance to add 8 stamina to the score multiplier, and maybe the mode will cause significantly less burnout (I feel most people currently average 5
10 minutes a map, which is about 25 hours to reach GC25.)I mean, it doesn't always have to be a quarterfinals slug fest between "destined to fail" and "so massive its impossible to lose", sometimes it'd be nice to have the meat and potatoes from the get go.
Or sometimes it could be a team match, Team Hoshido vs. Team Nohr, or literally whatever theme.
I think everyone's just... done with the foregone conclusions, it kind of defeats the spirit of the mode.
I don’t agree with this take that FGO’s summoning experience is that much different. People get pretty fucking triggered when getting an off-rate-up servant when summoning in FGO, but the same applies when getting a pity breaker in FEH.
I think a really easy and effective solution would be to divert some percent from off-focus rate to the focus rate. So, instead of a 3% / 3% split, it should be something like 4% focus, 2% off-focus and pity rate increases only increases the focus rate and not the off focus rate.
TRUE. But I don’t know how and if FEH can implement something like this. They tried something similar in the form of Forging Bonds, but that just fell flat to me; I just started insta-skipping all the dialogue after how bored I was in the first couple FBs. Writing to flesh out your characters helps immensely in drawing people in to wanting to summon a character, but IS seems so clueless when it comes to breathing life into their characters. Who’s going to want to summon a newly added FEH hero bar the people who are already familiar with the character or if the hero has some powerful skills? Sure, some people pull for good art, but that doesn’t seem to be as gripping as a character with some good ass writing.
Anybody who’s familiar with FGO or Girls’ Frontline can probably relate; How often did you initially feel indifferent to some newly released character that you knew nothing about, and then after you read the story or event that the character was featured in, you were like, “Wtf i love this character now. i want them”? How often does this happen in FEH?
Most of the time. The story writers really know how to indulge the player to every character without repeating the same archetype. Mandricardo, one of the new Servant character there, got me like "I really don't know who you are so why I care? You're not even popular and just a douche villain." to "Oh my gosh. He's such a bro! He really likes to befriend us but his introvert attitude is pulling him back. Then he tried his best to interact and cheer us even though he is weak. Nasu and the other writers makes him more awesome than real life lore. Let me throw all of my grails and golden Fous on him!" Creating characters with proper backgounds is a great way to entice players to pull for a character. Even if the said characters are not playable in other games.
They tried but always end it on a cliffhanger. Gunnthra, Fjorm, and all of Book OCs suffer in this situation. TT and Forging Bonds is not enough. They should just have combine the two to make a proper story content. They don't even try to pander a character with story, all they do is give them alts and call it a day.
Is powercreep really that bad? Surtr was released in Nov 2018 yet even 13 months later, I'd argue he's still the best axe armour in the game so it was a worthwhile investment.
Surtr is the exception, not even close to the norm. They gave him an awesome kit that is insanely unique and functions well for an armor unit.
A better comparison would be between Ranulf, who came out in 2019, is already powercrept by NY! Lethe who has not only better stats, but a way better weapon as well.
Not to mention the 3-4 star pool has barely changed since launched. Grail units did not help change this either with lackluster additions being more common. So if one is summoning with no bias, Getting a, let's say, Kjelle would be disappointing when Forsyth exists. He has more skills to offer even if you don't want to use him while Kjelle gives a lance that was already available and a dumb AR defense skill while being released in the same year no less. Even though it's sadly still better than getting Shiro or your 856th Est.