Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Shadows makes just $90,000 in first week on iOS

• Fire Emblem Shadows made $90,000 in its first week on iOS, while Heroes picked up another $437,000.
• Shadows' new design for fan favourite Lyn has already been implemented into Heroes.

Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Shadows has generated just $90,000 in its first week on iOS.

The first new Nintendo mobile game in six years, Shadows has had a significantly less lucrative launch than its 2017 predecessor Fire Emblem Heroes, which released before the Switch when Nintendo was putting more emphasis on other platforms.

Over $1 billion later, Heroes has evidently benefited from its gacha monetisation formula and many legacy characters, which fans of the series can attempt to obtain in exchange for earned resources or hard cash.

An annual, series-wide vote called Choose Your Legends also informs dev Intelligent Systems of which characters are most popular among Heroes players, thus who may be the most lucrative to add to the game or give a new alt.

Meanwhile, Fire Emblem Shadows has launched without any gacha mechanics, instead opting for a season pass to unlock legacy character Lyn with a new, beastly design. All other characters can currently be obtained for free, meaning interested long-term fans need only make one purchase, for a guaranteed unlock at that.

Heroes and Shadows

Shadows’ lesser launch can also likely be attributed to its greater emphasis on original characters and its deviation from main series gameplay. Unlike Heroes, which scaled down the series’ turn-based, grid-based battles to fit on mobile, Shadows is a real-time deduction game, thus relies on fans’ interest in an entirely different genre.

Currently, that intersection looks small based on AppMagic estimates, with Shadows earning just 1% of the $8.2 million Heroes achieved in its first week on iOS. Even eight years later, Heroes earned more on iOS this past week than Shadows did during its debut - at $437,000 versus just $90,000.

56% of Shadows' iOS spending has come from Japan, followed by 32% in the US and merely 1% in Canada.

Notably, Lyn’s redesign for Shadows has already landed in Heroes within this week of launch, and that same day player spending in the gacha surged by 217% to $112,000 on iOS. On October 1st, Heroes hit its highest daily peak since May.

It is possible, therefore, that Lyn’s new Shadows design has already earned more in Fire Emblem Heroes’ gacha than it has in Shadows’ own season pass.

Fire Emblem Heroes is Nintendo’s only billion-dollar mobile game, having outearned the combined sums of its second and third-biggest mobile games, Mario Kart Tour and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.