Fire Emblem Shadows makes less than $200,000 in 30 days

• Revenue peaked early as monetisation relies more heavily on season pass sales than Heroes' gacha.
• Predecessor Fire Emblem Heroes has generated $1.3 billion.

Fire Emblem Shadows has generated just under $200,000 in its first 30 days globally, less than 0.4% of predecessor Fire Emblem Heroes’ month-one earnings.

Nintendo’s return to mobile via the Fire Emblem franchise follows Heroes’ $1.3 billion success, the only mobile game in the giant’s catalogue to achieve 10 figures. But Shadows has taken a drastically different gameplay and monetisation approach, leading to significantly weaker results.

Shadows is also Nintendo’s first new mobile game since 2019’s Mario Kart Tour. It was shadow dropped on September 25th, 2025 after Nintendo teased ongoing R&D on mobile despite going six years without a launch.

Shadows overshadowed

Relying primarily on season pass purchases with little else to spend on, Shadows fell just short of $200,000 in its first month, according to AppMagic estimates. It made $107,000 on the App Store and approximately $92,500 on Google Play. However, the game ranked too low on the Play Store until September 29th for estimates to be generated, meaning total earnings there are likely fractionally higher.

Spending peaked early on September 26th at almost $22,000 and declined considerably in the weeks that followed.

Meanwhile, Fire Emblem Heroes’ gacha formula generated $51.4 million in its first 30 days back in 2017. $26.2m of that came from the App Store and $25.2m on Google Play, with spending rising and falling throughout the month as new characters were added.

Though both are Fire Emblem games, evidently Heroes had the far superior launch, likely the result of vastly different promotional, gameplay and monetisation formulas to Shadows.

Heroes was announced in a Fire Emblem Direct back in 2017, a Nintendo presentation where two main series games and a Switch spinoff were also unveiled. A community vote called Choose Your Legends was held before launch to inform Intelligent Systems of who were the most popular legacy characters at the time, and has helped inform decisions going forward as to who would be most profitable to add to the gacha.

Heroes’ gameplay is also much closer to the main series with turn-based battles on gridded maps, many of which are scaled-down versions of main series maps redesigned to fit a mobile display. The game is mainly monetised through its gacha, where original and legacy characters are regularly added for players to spend premium resources attempting to summon.

A subscription service, FEH Pass, wasn’t introduced until the game’s third anniversary in February 2020.

Conversely, Shadows was shadow dropped alone, not revealed as part of a Direct, and is a real-time social deduction game seemingly drawing inspiration from Among Us. Players work together online to determine who among them is sabotaging their battles.

Rounds still take place on a grid, but otherwise Shadows has been more clearly marketed as a spinoff.

It also launched with a subscription service on day one and features no gacha for unlocking characters. There are only two returning faces thus far - one being Lyn, who won Heroes’ Choose Your Legends vote back in 2017.

Her new Shadows-inspired design has since appeared in Heroes and has likely made more money there than Shadows itself.

The next season pass will add the third legacy character, Corrin, on October 28th. This should give some indication of whether spending will spike with each new pass or if the game's fast decline will be ongoing.