Fire Emblem Shadows makes $892,000 in first year, just 0.3% of Heroes’ initial success

• Fire Emblem Shadows has generated $892,000 in its first year, compared to Fire Emblem Heroes' $265.1 million in year one.
• The spinoff title has focused on social deduction and season passes, where Heroes has maintained the main series' formula and monetised through its gacha.

Fire Emblem Shadows has generated $892,000 in its first year on iOS and Android.

Launched on September 25th, 2025, the tile-based social deduction game marked Nintendo’s first mobile game release of the decade, six years on from now-shuttered Mario Kart Tour.

The game’s first year has been a modest one, monetised primarily through monthly season passes as opposed to Fire Emblem Heroes’ more successful gacha. The gameplay also marks a departure from the main series, plainly marketed as a spinoff title unlike Heroes’ condensed, mobile-suited adaptation of the main series’ turn-based formula.

The result has seen Shadows achieve just 0.3% of the revenue Fire Emblem Heroes made in its first year, launched back in 2017. According to AppMagic estimates, the older title picked up $265.1 million in its first year.

All estimates look specifically at Google Play and the App Store.

Revenue results

Fire Emblem Shadows’ revenue peaked early at $230,000 in its first month, equating to 37% of its entire year-one earnings. Daily spend also peaked during that launch month. After making $18,000 on release day, Shadows hit a lifetime high of $20,000 on September 26th, 2025, before beginning to decline.

Total player spending for month two fell to $169,000 and to $106,000 in month three, with no 30 days since seeing revenue surpass six figures. After five months of decline, Shadows saw a slight resurgence this spring when celebrating its half-year anniversary and the launch of Book 3 story content, The Axe's Heir.

The update introduced Platinum Treasure, offering better rewards from in-game chests, as well as graphical improvements, a new map to battle on and the labyrinth kingdom of Notia.

More recently, monthly revenue appears to have stabilised around the $30,000 mark. The monthly decline has ended with the final two months of the year actually seeing growth, during season passes featuring legacy characters Celica and Roy.

On the anniversary itself this September, the latest season pass introduced the first representative from new Switch 2 release Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, Dietrich, pushing daily spend to its highest since March.

This also coincided with Book 4’s release, the Version 2.0 update and a restock of the limited Beginner Support Pack for purchase, allowing players who bought it during year one to do so again.

This resulted in daily spending rising above $4,000, just 20% of its peak but double the recent peaks of around $2,000.

In the shadow of Heroes

Fire Emblem Shadows also celebrated its first anniversary with the release of the Black Knight, a legacy character distributed for free. Notably, this same character was also made freely available to all Heroes players in the gacha game’s first year.

Both titles have found their largest markets in Japan, but Shadows has closer competition from the US. Japan represents 35% of gross player spending while the US represents 32% to date. France ranks third at just 3%.

Meanwhile, Heroes has made 50% of its revenue from Japan, 36% from the US and 3% from Canada. In its first year, those percentages stood at 55%, 32% and 4% respectively, indicating an increasing share from the US over time.

Both titles have seen greater spending from Google Play than the App Store.

Comparing first years, Heroes far exceeded Shadows’ daily revenue record with $1.2m on February 10th, 2017. Shadows’ $20,000 peak reached just 2% of this success. Heroes made $20.1m in its first month, of which Shadows made just 1%.

The older title is now approaching its 10-year anniversary, a feat few mobile games achieve, as Nintendo’s only mobile game to surpass $1 billion in its lifetime.

The game has leveraged successful gacha mechanics with legacy and original characters introduced approximately once per fortnight, while story content has explored new worlds and the array of game modes has expanded. Heroes also monetises through a battle pass model, encouraging recurring spending for bonus characters and quality-of-life features.

It’s taken more than a year, but Shadows’ first original characters have also debuted in Heroes’ gacha today, October 7th. Shadows protagonist Kurt has appeared in a limited-time banner alongside Rose and Shea, encouraging players to spend and get to know these spinoff characters in the more successful Fire Emblem game.