Fire Emblem Heroes Has Earned Nearly $1 Billion For Nintendo

thegamer.com:

While mobile gaming represents an enormous part of the overall games industry, and is the fastest-growing segment, traditional console publishers have sometimes been slow to embrace the platform. Nintendo, for example, has been relatively late to mobile games despite the huge commercial opportunities available through mobile apps. But one game in particular might have demonstrated the vast potential of the platform for the Kyoto company.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a free-to-start strategy battler that shaved down the more complex aspects of the beloved series to suit mobile play, and is overall a simpler experience than the console version, but it has proven to be massively successful.

Related: Fire Emblem Heroes Is Embarrassing

According to Sensor Tower (thanks GamesIndustry), Fire Emblem Heroes has earned $959 million in revenue to date, and is Nintendo's highest-earning mobile game by some distance. Fire Emblem Heroes launched on February 2, 2017, and is nearing the one billion-dollar mark five years on from its release.

Nintendo's second-highest revenue generator is Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which has earned $267 million, which is not even a third of Fire Emblem's earnings but is still a significant sum. Coming in at third place is Mario Kart Tour which has made $259 million in global consumer spending.

It appears that Fire Emblem Heroes is most popular with mobile gamers in its native Japan as that country topped total consumer spending with a massive $523 million, while the United States represented the second-biggest market for Heroes with American players generating $308 million for the game. Canada ranked third in the revenue-by-country breakdown.

Fire Emblem Heroes has gacha mechanics which perhaps partly