One year in, Dragalia Lost revenue surpassed by Pocket Camp again
Nintendo and CyGames' new mobile IP has made $106m since launch
One year after its launch, Nintendo and CyGames' original mobile IP Dragalia Lost is still bringing in money slowly, far behind hit Fire Emblem Heroes.
Sensor Tower estimates that the game has brought in $106 million since it released across 3.2 million downloads, averaging out to around $33 spend per player. $60 million or 57% of the game's lifetime total comes from players in Japan, and $62 million was spent on iOS devices.
Though the game's lifetime revenue managed to surpass that of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp back in July, Pocket Camp has since caught back up and has now made $111 million since launch. However, its average spend per player is far lower, at $3.90 per user.
Dragalia Lost's revenue has struggled over time, achieving the $100 million milestone in July and only bringing in $6 million since then. Sensor Tower says August 2019 was the game's worst month to date, with the game only bringing in $3 million for the whole month. That's admittedly still more in one month than Dr. Mario World, which launched in July, has brought in through its lifetime -- only $1.8 million.
Image Credit: Sensor Tower
#1 is obvious - people are in FEH for twenty different versions of Lyn or Marth - normal, easter, christmas, swimsuit, halloween... gotta roll them all.
#2 seems paradoxical - too much to do? But Dragalia is an obvious iteration on Granblue Fantasy, which was already extremely process heavy, and it just throws in the kitchen sink. You can literally spend the entire day just leveling up weapons, characters, skills, dragons, dragon skills, your castle... those are all separate mechanisms. It's overwhelming, and it's not fun to have endless FOMO. It doesn't feel like a game you can just check once a day like FEH.
#3 may be controversial. They decided to add active positional combat on a mobile device to make it more exciting. You have to constantly move and dodge and attack with touch controls and it's quite clumsy as you'd expect, especially when a boss goes into bullet hell mode. Further, it means once you start a run or raid you are locked into the game, no interruptions. With something like FEH or FGO it's all at your leisure in case you get an interruption.
It's too bad, because I can see exactly where they were coming from - escaping Granblue Fantasy's extremely clunky web interface must have been extremely liberating. We'll be super generous with things to do. And GBF's real time raids were a big part of the game, so why not make them even more real time? But they don't seem to have considered whether all this made a good mobile game.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Ron Dippold on 30th September 2019 10:32pm