FEH Revenue Drop!!!

[XRay]

I think it might be best if we create a thread for this, so we can keep the anniversary thread a little less panicky and a little more cheery.

On 2/2/2020 at 12:17 PM, XRay said:

Here is a slightly more complete revenue picture for anyone interested. Fire Emblem Heroes is Nintendo's most successful mobile game and most successful Fire Emblem game, but it is not exactly looking pretty financially right now.

For rough estimates of gross revenue by February of each year:
2018: $295,000,000 (Sensor Tower)
2019: $500,000,000 (Sensor Tower)
2020: $656,000,000 (Yahoo Finance)

And that gives us an annual revenue summary:
2017: $295,000,000
2018: $205,000,000; 30% annual drop
2019: $156,000,000; 24% annual drop, 47% drop from first year

But yeah, as you can see, Heroes' revenue dropped a LOT. If I was a Nintendo investor, I would be like "WTF!!!???" and keep in mind this is Nintendo's most successful mobile game (besides Pokémon GO); Mario Run is complete trash, and Animal Crossing, Dragalia Lost, and Mario Cart probably is not looking much better either. At least the Switch is doing well though, so we are not too concerned about its core business.

If they are locking quality of life improvements behind Feh Pass, things do not seem to be looking too good for Heroes.

HOWEVER, on the brightside, $156 million is still nothing to scoff out, and assuming developing for Heroes is much cheaper than a main series game, $156 million is not really that bad. Yes, it is pretty bad as a mobile game for them to drop so much, but maybe Nintendo is just really slow at learning what makes a good mobile game. Maybe they will improve in the coming year and Heroes can crawl back to somewhere around $200 million.

Edited February 4, 2020 by XRay

[Anacybele]

Yeah, Nintendo is still fairly new to the mobile business. They can learn and grow here, for sure.

[Othin]

Do we have any information about a more detailed breakdown? It'd be interesting to learn if it's been like, a pretty steady decline from month to month (or quarter to quarter), or if there's something else going on.

[XRay]

I figure I will move the discussion here so we can all panic here together and come up with ideas and hope that someone from Intelligent Systems read this.

31 minutes ago, Othin said:

That is concerning. But yeah, I don't think this will help. Maybe if they back off soon and open up some of the pass's options to all players (particularly the QOL stuff), to get views on it more positive, but... even then, two Resplendent Heroes per month is a significant increase in the character creation costs, so what are they even doing?

I am not even sure what they can do to turn this ship around. I want to say cheaper Orbs and more generosity, but they do not give enough financial info for anyone outside of Nintendo to determine that.

If they just stopped the bleeding and maintain $150 million next year, I would be happy and have a sigh of relief. And yeah, those quality of life changes need to be FREE not stuck behind a paywall.

24 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

What the heck, I didn't actually make the post you're quoting here and yet my username is on it...

I actually think the only time Heroes's story was legit bad was book 2 and this is coming from someone that likes Hrid. Book 1 was okay, book 3 was actually pretty good imo and book 4 is shaping up to be interesting.

That was not supposed to happen. Maybe I quoted too much?

Anyways, I think if they just spend a little more time expanding the story, it should be fine. I am not expecting Shadows of Valentia quality, but it there was at least more bulk and substance in the story, it might help draw players back in.

21 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

I really think they just need to hire a better writer and that’s not just feh either. That’s just in general. Again say what you will about fate but I will stand by that Nasu and Gen Urobuchi are really good writers in their own right.

I hope that would help curb the loss, but we really do not know if it work. I still think they should give it a try anyways, causing having a better story does not hurt anyone. I do not really care too much for the story, but I do appreciate it if it has a good one.

9 minutes ago, Midnox said:

I don’t think the lack of Awakening and Fates is a main factor of the player base leaving. I think it’s because many other problems plaguing the game. Incessant powercreeps, inability to keep up with constant new heroes with new skills necessary to stay on game, not updating the below 5 star pool nor removing the old and practically useless characters, focus on multiplayer, and basically the huge amount of grinding and attention required.

 

is Dragalia Lost among the mobile Nintendo games that lost player base? Because that game has MANY things that makes it more friendly that FEH

Dragalia Lost did not even make it into the video that showed the top 30 mobile games in Japan, and they do not seem to be doing too well either according to this article. Not too sure about whether or not their player base shrunk though.

10 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

How much of it is a loss of players, though, as opposed to a loss of money? In other words, is the ~30% drop in revenue accompanied by a ~30% drop in players?

Because I can think of a few reasons that they'll lose more money than players:

• We're getting tons of free pulls now, both with the number of banners that run and the number of free summon tickets that we receive.
• The meta has gotten stagnant. While they've been continuing to make stronger and stronger units and skills, they're not so much stronger that they're absolute must-haves.
  • This means that players (like me) can just rest on their laurels and make their existing merged units stronger with new skills rather than starting merge projects with new units.

That is a good point. Although I am not sure what can make people spend more without overwhelming them.

24 minutes ago, Othin said:

Do we have any information about a more detailed breakdown? It'd be interesting to learn if it's been like, a pretty steady decline from month to month (or quarter to quarter), or if there's something else going on.

Sadly, I do not think Nintendo has ever released detailed information like that, at least not in English. If anyone has a background in Japanese finance, they might have a better chance to find their financial information. But from what I can gather from Google so far, Nintendo is extremely opaque by Western standards and their financial information is extremely vague. Like, they are so opaque and vague that they probably would not qualify to be listed on our stock exchange.

Ford has pages and pages for their annual and quarterly reports (more for general public and stockholders) and annual SEC Filings (more for accountants and financial analysts, but still a good read in my opinion, it just has less pictures and it is more jargony) detailing and breaking down their financial situation. In contrast, I cannot find anything similar for Nintendo at the same level of detail.

[Anacybele]

2 minutes ago, XRay said:

That was not supposed to happen. Maybe I quoted too much?

Anyways, I think if they just spend a little more time expanding the story, it should be fine. I am not expecting Shadows of Valentia quality, but it there was at least more bulk and substance in the story, it might help draw players back in.

I dunno, yeah...

Yeah, I wouldn't expect a high quality story in a mobile game either, but I definitely wouldn't complain about improvements there.

Speaking of Dragalia Lost, I liked it, but I couldn't keep it because I didn't have enough room on my phone anymore. Maybe that's a reason for its problems? It's too big and not many people can play it without having to delete stuff? For me, it WAS taking up more space than anything else I had.

[Etrurian emperor]

Fe Heroes is getting pretty old now. It makes sense for the money it brings in to decrease over time. 

[XRay]

1 minute ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Fe Heroes is getting pretty old now. It makes sense for the money it brings in to decrease over time. 

But FGO has remained on top pretty consistently year after year. I am not expecting FGO levels of financial performance, but I do wish it maintained around its second year performance of around $200 million. I am not sure if that is asking too much. Like, is the Fire Emblem fan base really not big enough to maintain $200 million per year for Heroes?

[Etrurian emperor]

I hope IS won't be drawing the wrong conclusions from this. In terms of units added book III was a gigantic improvement over book II. There were a lot more heavy hitters and neglected continents got the attention they deserved. Its a shame if IS gets reason to believe that's what caused sales to decrease and fall back into bad habits. 

[Rezzy]

I think their attempts to draw in more money by doing more and more powercreep has been backfiring.  I used to be a bit of a whale, but I cut back, and stopped spending money altogether, because it just doesn't seem like a good investment to go for new powercrept characters, if they're going to be releasing something more powerful a month or two later.  The first year was pretty cautious about letting the powercreep get too out of hand, but it's gotten crazy this past year, about a year ago it got the worst, with 5* locked A skills which were basically Tier 4 A skills in their own right with a B effect tacked on.

[Xenomata]

For what it's worth, I stopped spending money on FEH back in... it was either October or November, whenever I finally +10ed Witchy Nowi and had no more incentive to spend a dime on this game.
So while I don't wish to speak for everyone, it's possible that there's other whales like I was who simply got tired of the game and its bullcrap and just... stopped spending money. Maybe some faster than others, but still.

[Dandy Druid]

This is why you don't lock QoL features behind a paywall.

But from the yearly thing, there's probably less players playing now than there was at the beginning when it's new. This amount of revenue is still highly impressive for a mobile game.

That's the problem with gachas in general. They're popular for a year until a new, shiny one comes out. FEH is one of the better ones, but even highly rated gacha games like Epic 7 have slowed down a lot.

[Javi Blizz]

4 minutes ago, XRay said:

Like, is the Fire Emblem fan base really not big enough to maintain $200 million per year for Heroes?

Well, I think that there are a few points that needs to be made here:

- There’s a part of the game’s fanbase that is Fire Emblem player and not usual-gatcha-player.  This may influence how they react to usual gatcha cash grabbing. 
- Summoning right now is AWFUL. You almost never get basic fodder from the 3*-4* pool and the skills locked to 5* units don’t get re-run as often as they should. Also, almost every New Heroes banner has new skills, instead of adding common SI’ed skills to new units (or even things like freaking Blue Tome Breaker, it’s been 2.5 years). As a side effect, they would increase the number of side-banners at the same time, enticing more people to spend. 
- In line with my previous point, off-focus units are a joke. I mean, when I try to get copies to merge for a hero (sure, as a F2P, but gathering orbs for said banners) the ratio for focus/non-focus is absurd. For example: 2 NY!Anna/4 Off-focus. B!Lucina (weekly revival) 2/3 Off-focus. 
- As Ice Dragon said in another topic, there’s no real need for investing in new units when you can just update your best units and they’re still good enough. For example, having a +10 B!Ike, I don’t really need any green melee unit (just a freaking spare Nailah 🤦‍♂️)

[Ottservia]

30 minutes ago, XRay said:

Anyways, I think if they just spend a little more time expanding the story, it should be fine. I am not expecting Shadows of Valentia quality, but it there was at least more bulk and substance in the story, it might help draw players back in.

Implying that SoV has anything close to what can be considered a well written story. It's not. In fact book 3 of heroes is actually better written than that inconsistent mess of a plot.

[eclipse]

29 minutes ago, XRay said:

But FGO has remained on top pretty consistently year after year. I am not expecting FGO levels of financial performance, but I do wish it maintained around its second year performance of around $200 million. I am not sure if that is asking too much. Like, is the Fire Emblem fan base really not big enough to maintain $200 million per year for Heroes?

They're completely different systems.  One of the things FGO does RIGHT is that it improves older characters.  The closest FEH does is new personal weapons, but it's harder to close a stat gap of 21 (the gap between several debut foot archers versus Norne), or wonky stat distributions (a lot of units had a lot more HP than anything).  Skills that are good will most likely go to units that are good, barring favorites.

Worst of all, everything from the worst to some of the best is in the general summon pool.

3 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

Implying that SoV has anything close to what can be considered a well written story. It's not. In fact book 3 of heroes is actually better written than that inconsistent mess of a plot.

. . .wrong topic to hate on SoV.

[Hilda]

53 minutes ago, XRay said:

But FGO has remained on top pretty consistently year after year. I am not expecting FGO levels of financial performance, but I do wish it maintained around its second year performance of around $200 million. I am not sure if that is asking too much. Like, is the Fire Emblem fan base really not big enough to maintain $200 million per year for Heroes?

There are multiple problems in FEH from my personal point of view:

1. the growth for my older +10 units kinda has stoped. Dragonflowers are a band aid. Getting new skills is a hassle because barely of them drop into the regular summoning pool so most of the time i settle for "will do the job". There is no feasable way to keep up with the powercreep, so why invest more and likewise why pull for a powercreep unit when they are powercrept 6 months later anyway?

2. PVP is garbage, in every possible way. Arena and Arena Assault is an infested Armor-House battlefest which makes it barely fun and AR is just wtf, i just skate through AR since reaching Tier 21

3. Powercreep isnt needed to clear PVE content. Infernal ghb etc. are piss easy, while abyssal ones  are getting easier and easier due to the powercreep.

4. meh story Book 3 was ok though

5. i spend less money due to the above reasons

What FEH needs right now is an overhaul to the summoning system, an overhaul how you can further your old units, an overhaul how you can get skills
and most importantly: My god can you finally f****** incorporate some Online Co-op play and messaging between players?!?! The friendlist is really really really useless outside of 2 modes and it would actually bond people together which means they might actually play FEH longer.

Also FEH Map Maker so people can create and share their own GHB maps.

 

EDIT: also skill-inheritance/new units is not the way to fix the glaring issues of the mechanics/meta.

Edited February 2, 2020 by Hilda

[XRay]

1 hour ago, Etrurian emperor said:

I hope IS won't be drawing the wrong conclusions from this. In terms of units added book III was a gigantic improvement over book II. There were a lot more heavy hitters and neglected continents got the attention they deserved. Its a shame if IS gets reason to believe that's what caused sales to decrease and fall back into bad habits. 

Yeah. While I personally do not mind it, other players do mind. The less players Heroes piss off right now, the better. I feel like we need every player to help save Heroes.

1 hour ago, Rezzy said:

I think their attempts to draw in more money by doing more and more powercreep has been backfiring.  I used to be a bit of a whale, but I cut back, and stopped spending money altogether, because it just doesn't seem like a good investment to go for new powercrept characters, if they're going to be releasing something more powerful a month or two later.  The first year was pretty cautious about letting the powercreep get too out of hand, but it's gotten crazy this past year, about a year ago it got the worst, with 5* locked A skills which were basically Tier 4 A skills in their own right with a B effect tacked on.

1 hour ago, Xenomata said:

For what it's worth, I stopped spending money on FEH back in... it was either October or November, whenever I finally +10ed Witchy Nowi and had no more incentive to spend a dime on this game.
So while I don't wish to speak for everyone, it's possible that there's other whales like I was who simply got tired of the game and its bullcrap and just... stopped spending money. Maybe some faster than others, but still.

I think the power creep is fine, but I guess it is too much if it is one of the factors affecting sales that badly. I hope they tone it down a bit this year.

56 minutes ago, Dandy Druid said:

But from the yearly thing, there's probably less players playing now than there was at the beginning when it's new. This amount of revenue is still highly impressive for a mobile game.

Yeah, on the brightside, it is still a nice amount of money. I am just not sure if the drop had to be that bad though. 47% drop looks horrible! Like, if I was a developer, I would be like panicking if I would keep my job.

51 minutes ago, Javi Blizz said:

Well, I think that there are a few points that needs to be made here:

- There’s a part of the game’s fanbase that is Fire Emblem player and not usual-gatcha-player.  This may influence how they react to usual gatcha cash grabbing. 
- Summoning right now is AWFUL. You almost never get basic fodder from the 3*-4* pool and the skills locked to 5* units don’t get re-run as often as they should. Also, almost every New Heroes banner has new skills, instead of adding common SI’ed skills to new units (or even things like freaking Blue Tome Breaker, it’s been 2.5 years). As a side effect, they would increase the number of side-banners at the same time, enticing more people to spend. 
- In line with my previous point, off-focus units are a joke. I mean, when I try to get copies to merge for a hero (sure, as a F2P, but gathering orbs for said banners) the ratio for focus/non-focus is absurd. For example: 2 NY!Anna/4 Off-focus. B!Lucina (weekly revival) 2/3 Off-focus. 
- As Ice Dragon said in another topic, there’s no real need for investing in new units when you can just update your best units and they’re still good enough. For example, having a +10 B!Ike, I don’t really need any green melee unit (just a freaking spare Nailah 🤦‍♂️)

Yeah, while Heroes is not my first gacha game, it is the first gacha game where I spend a significant amount of money on. I guess Heroes might one of the first gacha games for many Fire Emblem players.

Yeah, I definitely agree that they need more Foci right now. I think having at least 10 Foci every day would be good.

I do agree that the summoning rates do discourage me from summoning sometimes. I got Laevatein and Minerva yesterday when I was aiming for Nagi, and I just basically gave up after being pitybroken. It is not a bad haul, but I am not looking for more merges for those two units.

I am not really sure how to handle between creating more powerful units to get people summon more while at the same time limiting power creep since power creep can also turn off players in the long run. Feels like a catch 22. If you do not create more powerful units, you are not giving people enough of a reason to summon. If you create more powerful units, you are also turn off people from summoning.

45 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

Implying that SoV has anything close to what can be considered a well written story. It's not. In fact book 3 of heroes is actually better written than that inconsistent mess of a plot.

I think it is pretty serviceable and it is really well presented. Heroes does not need a masterpiece story, but I think it might need more bulk and substance for players to talk about. Like, there is enough stuff going on in Shadows of Valentia for you to critique about. However, Heroes does not even have that. Sure, we can still complain about Heroes' stories, but it is so short that there is not really much to complain about besides stating a sentence or two about how we feel about it.

18 minutes ago, eclipse said:

Implying that SoV has anything close to what can be considered a well written story. It's not. In fact book 3 of heroes is actually better written than that inconsistent mess of a plot.

Yeah. Weapon Refines are nice, but with gen IV BST, the Weapon Refines does not feel like it is enough at this point, especially with how questionable some of Refines are.

18 minutes ago, Hilda said:

There are multiple problems in FEH from my personal point of view:

1. the growth for my older +10 units kinda has stoped. Dragonflowers are a band aid. Getting new skills is a hassle because barely of them drop into the regular summoning pool so most of the time i settle for "will do the job". There is no feasable way to keep up with the powercreep, so why invest more and likewise why pull for a powercreep unit when they are powercrept 6 months later anyway?

2. PVP is garbage, in every possible way. Arena and Arena Assault is an infested Armor-House battlefest which makes it barely fun and AR is just wtf, i just skate through AR since reaching Tier 21

3. Powercreep isnt needed to clear PVE content. Infernal ghb etc. are piss easy, while abyssal ones  are getting easier and easier due to the powercreep.

4. meh story Book 3 was ok though

5. i spend less money due to the above reasons

What FEH needs right now is an overhaul to the summoning system, an overhaul how you can further your old units, an overhaul how you can get skills
and most importantly: My god can you finally f****** incorporate some Online Co-op play and messaging between players?!?! The friendlist is really really really useless outside of 2 modes and it would actually bond people together which means they might actually play FEH longer.

Also FEH Map Maker so people can create and share their own GHB maps.

 

EDIT: also skill-inheritance/new units is not the way to fix the glaring issues of the mechanics/meta.

Yeah. Ranged Player Phase teams are even less dependent on stats as Enemy Phase teams are, so last time I intentionally +10 anyone was Olivia for scoring purposes around sometime during the end of the first year or beginning of the second year.

Most Abyssals are pretty easy too if anyone runs a nuke with 3 Dancers/Singers, so there is not really need to get the latest and greatest nukes to clear them. You might need some merges, but +10 is not necessary at all.

I do not think the Arena is that bad anymore, although I am not still a huge fan of the scoring mechanics. But I do like that they are piss easy, and being piss easy helps make the repetitiveness easier to stomach.

Yeah, having some community and social integration would be good. I think one reason I am so invested in Heroes is partly because I am part of Serenes Forest with a Heroes community to share experiences with.

[SuperNova125]

58 minutes ago, Javi Blizz said:

Well, I think that there are a few points that needs to be made here:

- There’s a part of the game’s fanbase that is Fire Emblem player and not usual-gatcha-player.  This may influence how they react to usual gatcha cash grabbing. 
- Summoning right now is AWFUL. You almost never get basic fodder from the 3*-4* pool and the skills locked to 5* units don’t get re-run as often as they should. Also, almost every New Heroes banner has new skills, instead of adding common SI’ed skills to new units (or even things like freaking Blue Tome Breaker, it’s been 2.5 years). As a side effect, they would increase the number of side-banners at the same time, enticing more people to spend. 
- In line with my previous point, off-focus units are a joke. I mean, when I try to get copies to merge for a hero (sure, as a F2P, but gathering orbs for said banners) the ratio for focus/non-focus is absurd. For example: 2 NY!Anna/4 Off-focus. B!Lucina (weekly revival) 2/3 Off-focus. 
- As Ice Dragon said in another topic, there’s no real need for investing in new units when you can just update your best units and they’re still good enough. For example, having a +10 B!Ike, I don’t really need any green melee unit (just a freaking spare Nailah 🤦‍♂️)

These are my thoughts exactly 

-Many normal FE fans started playing gatcha games because of Feh so they propably would only buy to get their favourites and not care so much about other stuff.

-They really have not made any decent attempt to fix the pool in general last year especially was pretty bad to say the least.

-I don't really care about off Focus, being F2P they are the only way to grab older units or merge others. I just think that generally if 5* rates were a bit higher then perhaps more people would spend knowing that their orbs would weild results far more easily. 

-They can't really spice the meta up more I say. They introduced over the last year 2 new hero types (Duo and Pair up), they broke the BST ceiling with units like Winter Sothis, every new banner has new flashy tier 4 skills and new units are becoming more powerful by the month (Altina, Celica etc). So the Meta is pretty static and players that spend a lot would have gotten already the monster units to +10 and they wouldn't need anything else. For example, how many people are going to be pulling are going to be pulling for Mamori when a month before Sothis was released and people had her already at +10 with full Flowers mere hours after the banner released (the example might not be that good but I think I made my point clear). Or for example, a brand new mainline FE releases and there are only two banners for it which were mostly for advertising, also note that the second was cast in the shadow of CYL. At the same time November's, December's and January's new hero banners were from some games that the western audience has no official way of playing (not that I minded as I love Jugdral and Elibe generally and these banners has some of the characters I used a lot). Something tells me that more people would pull if instead of Igrene we had Lysithea with same stats and skills just as a mage without implying anything about her or trying to offend anyone who likes her it is an example. 

I do like Heroes despite its problems and I hope that it won't shut down any time soon. Isn't it still Nintendo's best selling mobile game? 

[Hilda]

7 minutes ago, XRay said:

Yeah. While I personally do not mind it, other players do mind. The less players Heroes piss off right now, the better. I feel like we need every player to help save Heroes.

I think the power creep is fine, but I guess it is too much if it is one of the factors affecting sales that badly. I hope they tone it down a bit this year.

Yeah, on the brightside, it is still a nice amount of money. I am just not sure if the drop had to be that bad though. 47% drop looks horrible! Like, if I was a developer, I would be like panicking if I would keep my job.

Yeah, while Heroes is not my first gacha game, it is the first gacha game where I spend a significant amount of money on. I guess Heroes might one of the first gacha games for many Fire Emblem players.

Yeah, I definitely agree that they need more Foci right now. I think having at least 10 Foci every day would be good.

I do agree that the summoning rates do discourage me from summoning sometimes. I got Laevatein and Minerva yesterday when I was aiming for Nagi, and I just basically gave up after being pitybroken. It is not a bad haul, but I am not looking for more merges for those two units.

I am not really sure how to handle between creating more powerful units to get people summon more while at the same time limiting power creep since power creep can also turn off players in the long run. Feels like a catch 22. If you do not create more powerful units, you are not giving people enough of a reason to summon. If you create more powerful units, you are also turn off people from summoning.

I think it is pretty serviceable and it is really well presented. Heroes does not need a masterpiece story, but I think it might need more bulk and substance for players to talk about. Like, there is enough stuff going on in Shadows of Valentia for you to critique about. However, Heroes does not even have that. Sure, we can still complain about Heroes' stories, but it is so short that there is not really much to complain about besides stating a sentence or two about how we feel about it.

 

Yeah. Weapon Refines are nice, but with gen IV BST, the Weapon Refines does not feel like it is enough at this point, especially with how questionable some of Refines are.

Yeah. Ranged Player Phase teams are even less dependent on stats as Enemy Phase teams are, so last time I intentionally +10 anyone was Olivia for scoring purposes around sometime during the end of the first year or beginning of the second year.

Most Abyssals are pretty easy too if anyone runs a nuke with 3 Dancers/Singers, so there is not really need to get the latest and greatest nukes to clear them. You might need some merges, but +10 is not necessary at all.

I do not think the Arena is that bad anymore, although I am not still a huge fan of the scoring mechanics. But I do like that they are piss easy, and being piss easy helps make the repetitiveness easier to stomach.

Yeah, having some community and social integration would be good. I think one reason I am so invested in Heroes is partly because I am part of Serenes Forest with a Heroes community to share experiences with.

One of the biggest mistake they ever made was allowing more then 1 Dancer in a group. It undermines most of the tactics and degrades the game into a dumb shelf.

[Water Mage]

Like I said in the other thread, I firmly believe that one of the reason for the revenue drop is the lack of fanservice. FEH has toned down the fanservice a bit and it hurt it’s sales, since fanservice characters are huge moneymakers in Gacha. A good example of that is FGO, anyone who plays FGO knows that characters like Maou Nobu and Summer Okita aren’t exactly stellar in terms of gameplay, but they still are popular due to being fanservice characters.

[Othin]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

How much of it is a loss of players, though, as opposed to a loss of money? In other words, is the ~30% drop in revenue accompanied by a ~30% drop in players?

Because I can think of a few reasons that they'll lose more money than players:

• We're getting tons of free pulls now, both with the number of banners that run and the number of free summon tickets that we receive.
• The meta has gotten stagnant. While they've been continuing to make stronger and stronger units and skills, they're not so much stronger that they're absolute must-haves.
  • This means that players (like me) can just rest on their laurels and make their existing merged units stronger with new skills rather than starting merge projects with new units.

This is interesting, because there's all these complaints about power creep, and yet it's still not really making for that much pressure to use new units rather than old ones. Is there anything they can really do about that combination of issues?

[eclipse]

BRB, warning the quote box for being weird!  😛

I'm not sure if stat inflation on the older units is a good idea, but I'm not sure how ELSE to deal with the mess of stat distribution that some of the older units have.  Or skills, for that matter.  I'm still waiting for a time where Defiant Res is strictly better than Brazen Atk/Res.

[Ottservia]

1 hour ago, Javi Blizz said:

- As Ice Dragon said in another topic, there’s no real need for investing in new units when you can just update your best units and they’re still good enough. For example, having a +10 B!Ike, I don’t really need any green melee unit (just a freaking spare Nailah 🤦‍♂️)

pretty much this honestly. Once you have like a couple good well balanced teams, there really is no reason to summon for any new ones unless there's a skill you want or one of your faves is on the banner

3 minutes ago, Water Mage said:

Like I said in the other thread, I firmly believe that one of the reason for the revenue drop is the lack of fanservice. FEH has toned down the fanservice a bit and it hurt it’s sales, since fanservice characters are huge moneymakers in Gacha. A good example of that is FGO, anyone who plays FGO knows that characters like Maou Nobu and Summer Okita aren’t exactly stellar in terms of gameplay, but they still are popular due to being fanservice characters.

Also this. This is why seasonal alts are a thing in the first place. People like anime titties and that's just a fact. I think book 4 is a step in the right direction. I mean just look at Plumeria's design. I don't even know why she bothers to even wear clothes at that point

Edited February 2, 2020 by Ottservia

[Lord-Zero]

A drop in revenue and a player exodus? Not surprised.

- Powercreep is as strong as ever.

- Buffs/refines for older units are going at a snail’s pace.

- The “story” is an embarrassing mess. And now, we have fairies into the mix...

- Next to none character interactions. Sure, FB was a nice start but they haven’t really improved on it except giving us more generic headbands.

- A lot of boring grinding events. Sure, most of the Japanese audience has been sort of domesticated into thinking this is good but it’s pretty bad in FEH. 

- The summoning pool keeps getting more and more bloated...why are units such as Raigh and Est STILL in 3* AND 4* rarity? Send those old units to a separate summoning pool with the currency being something similar to FGO’s Friend Points and put them in 1* and 2* rarity. 

- They’re too afraid of fanservice. 

[Ice Dragon]

2 hours ago, XRay said:

That is a good point. Although I am not sure what can make people spend more without overwhelming them.

28 minutes ago, Othin said:

This is interesting, because there's all these complaints about power creep, and yet it's still not really making for that much pressure to use new units rather than old ones. Is there anything they can really do about that combination of issues?

That's kind of a huge underlying problem with Heroes's design.

The first 2 years basically managed to get by without cranking up numbers very much by adding new skills that did novel things. However, now that the meta has matured and most of the novel mechanics have been explored, there are fewer means of making new mechanics, resulting in more units and skills that simply amount to bigger numbers or cramming more effects onto a single unit. Even when new mechanics are introduced, many of them don't actually make a large enough difference such that they feel quite as desirable as new mechanics years ago. And they certainly won't have the impact that something like Bold Fighter and Vengeful Fighter had that made them mandatory for every single unit a player builds.

This basically means that if they want what they're selling to be desirable, they're stuck either selling bigger numbers or popular characters.

The problem with bigger numbers is that increasing numbers too fast pushes away players that spend less by making them feel like they can't catch up. However, increasing numbers too slowly means that players that can spend more aren't compelled enough to spend for them since they can usually get by comfortably by simply updating older units with newer builds. And unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any middle ground, considering the current rate of stat inflation is already high enough for low spenders to complain yet too low to entice high spenders.

The problem with popular characters is simply that there aren't enough of them to consistently pump them out. We only get new characters when a new game or new story arc is released, and the number of extremely popular characters that aren't yet in the game (and aren't brand new) has pretty much dropped to zero. Additionally, there is a clear limit to when repeats of popular characters will stop garnering the same amount of enthusiasm.

I feel like the release of Three Houses is a huge sigh of relief for Heroes since it gives them a lot more characters to work with. Additionally, the fact that pretty much all of the characters in Three Houses are actually fleshed out characters (rather than one-trick ponies or cardboard cutout filler with no personality) helps a lot by making more of them be popular and thus enticing to pull for. However, they're still forced to pace out the release of Three Houses characters both to prevent the well from running dry and to prevent the player base from being fatigued with characters from the same game, and constantly relying on new games to refill the well simply isn't sustainable.

 

 

If I were to do a quick contrast between Heroes and F/GO, F/GO has a few huge advantages against Heroes in terms of game longevity.

It releases new characters at a much, much slower rate, helped by the fact that it doesn't have a large number of existing characters in its backlog from other games in the franchise. This significantly decreases the rate that existing roles get saturated and results in each new release feeling more novel.

The format of gameplay, a 3v3 turn-based combat system, allows party members' actions to affect each other far more directly, creating more opportunities for its existing mechanics to create emergent synergies without the need to introduce more mechanics or make bigger numbers.

In terms of the popularity of characters, F/GO's advantage is that almost all of its new characters are original characters, meaning it is fully within their liberty to make their characters popular rather than to build off of existing popularity. Furthermore, the actual format of the game as a whole, a visual novel, is one of the best formats to actually do character building and make players care for their characters, and they will often even hold back from releasing a character until after the story chapter the character appears in has been out for some time in order to build up hype (even if the character is temporarily usable during the story).

Finally, F/GO very infrequently adds new characters to the standard summoning pool and constantly updates outdated characters, meaning re-releases of old limited characters generally still give you a good reason to try to pull for them (because you couldn't have accidentally pulled a copy while going for something else), especially since updates often coincide with re-releases.

 

Also, having the majority of characters being original characters gives them every excuse to make characters be waifu and husbando bait.

Also, the visual novel format of the game is generally more appealing to the female demographic, which helps broaden the player base.

Also, it actually has plentiful husbando bait.

Edited February 2, 2020 by Ice Dragon

[NegativeExponents-]

Ok, to those saying not enough fanservice. How? Every book introduces a slew of new female OCs for fanservice, we get two summer banners dedicated to it too, (hideous) playboy bunny outfits every year, bridal banner every year, and this year we even got a hot springs banner. We also get characters that recieve touch ups to make them even more fanservicey than they were before. How is that not enough fanservice? Unless you want every character to be introduced with radical redesign from their original, I think alts already do plenty to satisfy fanservice.