With $100M in revenues from zero marketing spend, Fire Emblem proves how "easy" it can be to take a franchise game and make it a success even on a platform that is not native. Whilst the majority of this revenue comes from Japan, it's till proved to be a reasonable success in the West too. I think the scariest thing is that mobile is still at the very back of Nintendo's mind. This game clearly has high ARPPU's and LTV's and Nintendo could profitably run a User Acquisition on this game if they choose too. The fact that they can make a mobile game that generates $100M in half-a-year with a Tier 3 IP shows you the potential Nintendo has on the mobile. Even more incredibly the game has obvious shortcomings compared to rival RPG's. Characters cap out at level 40, the Castle progression system is as limited as it possibly could be and there is no Rune based system to optimise or min/max characters to the level of Summoners War. These additions could easily increase the ARPPU of the title and would probably improve the retention too given the lack of things to do in the title at the end-game.

For the western market, the game is still rather complicated. Though the game has high production values, there is poor UX in places, as it's not clear how a lot of the game features function, and often it's unclear how the battle works. Sometimes when your characters do 0 damage, you are left scratching your head, and it took a group of us a few days to work out that special attacks weren't random and that there was a logic behind it! These things increase the self-discovery when playing the game but ultimately hurt the genre and title from really going broad on appeal. However, I suspect that's not really the goal of the Fire Emblem series.

For myself personally, I think the game is great and think the rewards are richly deserved by the team developing the title. How much more they choose to add and support the game will be interesting to see, but the game retains a loyal audience and almost endless potential.

Signup to Deconstructor of Fun newsletter and level up your game!

