I admit that I had no idea until yesterday Fire Emblem Heroes was still active and updated. But a lot of people still play the game and apparently spend money on it too. This is shown by new data Fire Emblem Heroes has just surpassed $1 billion in sales, becoming the first Nintendo mobile game to do so.
First published in 2017, Fire Emblem Heroes is a free tactical RPG in which players collect various characters from the past fire sign Play and use them to complete missions and battles. And according to new data from Sensor Towerit has now surpassed $1 billion in sales and earned nearly $30 million this year alone.
Not only is this the first Nintendo mobile game to do so, it is also by far the most financially successful mobile game. As a matter of fact, fire sign has made more than all other Nintendo mobile games combined. If you take the lifetime earnings from all these games like Mario Kart Tour and Super Mario run, and add them together, you get a respectable $883 million. Beautiful, but still smaller than a billion.
Fire Emblem Heroes is one of Nintendo’s older mobile efforts and is only the second true production targeting phones (if you’re not counting – and I’m not –the now dead Mitomo, which felt more like a social app). So it’s had almost five years to gather its big treasure trove, but that’s still impressive when you compare it to the relatively poor performance of other Nintendo mobile games. 2019 dr Mario worldfor example, has earned less than $15 million to date, and doctors usually bank.
Interestingly, while it made a lot of money, Fire Emblem Heroes isn’t Nintendo’s most downloaded mobile game. That would Super Mario run, which has racked up over 310 million lifetime downloads. In comparison, heroes has only about 18 million. You can be sure that Nintendo is taking notes on this.
Of course, compared to other popular mobile games, a billion in five years is pretty slow. PUBG mobilelaunched in 2018 made over two billion just last yearjust like … did Open-world role-playing game Genshin Impact. But a billion dollars is a billion dollars. Heck, I’d take a billion dollars after five years. Just say.
As for Nintendo’s future in mobile gaming, it does not look good. The last game it released was Mario Kart Tour in 2019. Since then, the company appears to have shifted its focus elsewhere. That makes sense to me. If you have a console as popular as the Switch, why keep making free-to-play games for iPhones? With such fierce competition in the mobile space, it seems much safer to stick with the hugely successful bespoke console that you actually control.
