A Nintendo mobile partner complains Nintendo won't let them make more money
17 replies, posted
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nintendo-to-smartphone-gamers-dont-spend-too-much-on-us-11551864160
The article was already locked behind a paywall, but I had a cached version and dropped the whole article in a pastebin. The title is in reference to this:
CyberAgent Inc., which developed the role-playing smartphone game “Dragalia Lost” with Nintendo, slashed its fiscal-year earnings forecast for the first time in 17 years in January due in part to the game’s disappointing performance. While player numbers for the game have grown due to an aggressive advertising campaign, revenue from each player has fallen short of projections, the company said.
When the game was released in September, some users complained about the difficulty of winning rare characters during in-game lotteries, which might lead some people to spend more as they keep trying. CyberAgent officials say Nintendo asked the game maker to adjust the game to avoid excessive spending by users.
“Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game,” one CyberAgent official said. “If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.”
deliver high-quality fun to consumers
Something about that phrase really rubs me the wrong way
To be fair, that was DeNA's idea not Nintendo's.
I mean yeah Nintendo most likely gave the go ahead but they didn't actively seek to do it whereas DeNA most likely did.
Nintendo's been very timid with monetization, which if you ask me is a good thing. Lately they announced the season pass for Smash Ultimate - five sets of a new fighter, a new stage, and a selection of music, with each one being revealed and released every few months - and the announcement video Sakurai even explicitly spelled out, "Look, normally we'd announce absolutely everything in a paid expansion, but because of the way newcomers are developed and revealed, we're not doing that this time, so you're not going to know what you're buying right away. Only buy the season pass if you're absolutely confident in its value."
It's good to see ethical business still practiced in this industry in certain places, rather than just wanton maximization of profits. I like to think the Wii U was a great example of this, too; its selection of individual titles ended up relatively small since its life was cut short, but the amount of post-launch support those titles got was pretty nuts and the way they were monetized was very consumer-friendly. That's on top of being the only Gen8 system with free online.
I mean, Nintendo effectively has infinite money so they don't necessarily have to nickel and dime everyone to get their fix. Then again, so does Valve and we know how how that ended up. Even so, Fire Emblem Heroes is pretty generous for a gacha game and it's been topping highest grossing lists on appstores for quite some time.
yea but valve works really weirdly internally. Im pretty sure that the teams decide a lot of how their product is turned into cash.
Sure, but even if we drop the Valve comparison the same thing can be said for EA or Blizzard. It's not like Blizzard can't turn a profit on Overwatch without lootboxing the fuck out of it, yet here we are.
Good for Nintendo for trying to keep a positive public image, personally im getting fucking sick of seeing endless waves of aggressively monetized gatcha games with needlessly huge marketing campain compared to western market so its kinda nice that someone big like nintendo is telling them to calm down when theyre involved but...
“If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.”
Maybe make a interesting game first you bunch of hacks
I... I like dragalia lost
pretty sure cygames had like 4 top grossing game at once, and even now their games are still near the top
Sorry if i sounded like i was hating on dragalia lost, I was talking about mobile games in general (mostly japanese ones) and its fine if you like that or those kind of games
I just kinda wished companies would try making something different for once
I go on twitter or a games website and theres ads and articles for like dozen different games all claiming to be the best thing ever and one of a kind but clearly is just "another one" and that just kinda gets on my nerves
Now if only the same approach was taken with Fire Emblem: Heroes.
Having played both games, Fire Emblem is more fair in its pulls. At least you can summon a bunch of characters if you play a lot. In dragalia you have to wait for Cygames to be generous and give you a summon ticket to do that. Playing the game gives you fuck all
They've been giving out more and more free stuff lately.
Nintendo wanted them to adjust the game, but they haven't changed the gacha rates they had at the beginning, outside of one summoning banner.
But they do throw out summon tickets and material (wyrmite) like it's confetti. They give you 1 free 10-pull-ticket almost every new banner, and raid events give out at least 10 single tickets for playing enough. The current raid event introduced something where you can get 1 extra summon ticket a day, as well. That might be from Nintendo having them adjust things.
Every event gives out at least some wyrmite too. Not very much - roughly enough for 3 single pulls.
In the end, FEH still gives out more, I think. But DL is closing the gap.
The rates are a different issue. at this point I'm explaining for people who don't play either
FEH has much higher rates than DL. FEH banners start at 6% for a 5*, whereas DL banners start at 4%. Both raise 1% for every 10 pulls without a 5*. (FEH does 0.5% for 5 pulls, it evens out.)
Furthermore, FEH separates its characters into 4 colors, and gives you 5 randomly colored options each time you pull on a banner. If you just want a 5*, it's more efficient to pick all 5 each time you go to pull. If you want a specific 5* though, you can choose a specific color to focus on, only picking it. This takes longer to get a 5* (due to costing more and not triggering the percentage increase as often), but you're much more likely to get what you want.
On the other hand, DL banners always only give out a single thing for a single pull or 10 things for a 10-pull. I say things, because you can get a character, a dragon (a power up mode), or a wyrmprint (basically equipment). As opposed to being able to pick what you want with FEH, 5* drops are split with 25% of the rate for characters, 25% of the rate for dragons, and 50% of the rate for prints. So the ACTUAL 5* rate for characters is 2% when you start a new banner.
Both games actually split their 5* rate between focus characters and non-focus characters, too. A 5* character has a 50% chance of actually being what you want, and a 50% chance of being something else, for both games. FEH has legendary banners which change up the rules a lot, and DL has gala banners which show up every once in a blue moon, but whatever.
TLDR: FEH lets you pick and choose what you want, whereas DL always splits your summons between what you want and 2 other things. FEH has better rates as well.
HOWEVER. And this is a big however.
When you get a 5* character in DL, that's it. You have that character. If you want to fully complete a party, you need 3 more 5*s, or promote some lower rarity units. And then, well, you're done. You can continue pulling for that element in the future, but anything past 4 5*'s of one element doesn't really help you much. If you see one with a playstyle or character design you like more than another, go ahead, but it's not really necessary. And again, 4* units that you promote are completely valid. You don't even need that many 5*s - hell, for most of the content, you don't need any 5*s, or even promoted 4*s, normal 4*s will get the job done.
But in FEH, characters have assets and flaws. You can get a speed-based character with a flaw in speed, and guess what? You're fucked. You need to either work with a substandard 5* character, summon ANOTHER of the SAME character and merge them, or fodder them off for their skills. Speaking of which - if you really want your 5* character to shine, you need to fodder off some other characters to give them new skills. Often 5* characters. So you don't just need to summon a 5* character, you need to summon one with the right stats, and some other characters to give them skills. This isn't even going into how you need E L E V E N copies of a character to max out their stats.
But sure. You get a 5* character, you delete some other characters to give them new skills, and you merge them with other copies of the same character. NOW you're done, right?
Nope. Fuck you. Next month, they put out a new character of the same type. Except this one is better. Explicitly, quantitatively better. So now your character is obsolete, so you need to either switch over to the new character, or hope what makes the new character better is a skill yours can inherit. Either way, you need to summon that 5*. Okay, good, good.
But then it happens again. And again. And again. Power creep, power creep, power creep. Current 5* character have skills that are PARAGRAPHS.
On the other hand, summoning an extra copy of a 5* character is simply annoying. It gets you some extra material for promotion, but it's actually kind of disappointing. It's not like FEH where you need as many copies of a character as possible.
TLDR part 2: FEH requires you to constantly summon more and more characters to stay relevant, whereas DL characters are (at least so far) good for life.
FEH has better rates and gives out more free summons, but you NEED those. DL lets you do max level content with 4* promoted characters, if you're good enough.
Oh, and another unrelated thing: DL's community feedback is FANTASTIC. FEH just puts out content, maybe it'll work maybe it won't. You think it's a bad idea to let people summon and use a literal boss character in PVP content? Too late now. Sure, they put out videos discussing future content, but it's mostly just "look forward to summoning this guy next month!"
But DL puts out surveys, has a feedback form that's much more visible and that they actually listen to, and puts out frequent notices about "hey, here's what's going on with the game, here's the new feature we're putting out next month, here's our plan for the future, here's some issues we're aware of and are fixing, we're THINKING of changing some of the mechanics of the game, please tell us what you think!"
What could possibly rub you the wrong way about that? Nintendo is literally saying they are going to put fun over immediate profit. That's a thing you want to hear from a games company.
Honestly, the phrase "deliver high-quality fun to consumers" makes me think of bukake and now I need a bath. I have an irrational hatred for the word consumer. It feels as though it depersonalises us.
Nintendo are a bunch of old, out of touch Japanese men, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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