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Regular readers will be used to the PocketGamer.biz team’s usual week in views round-ups but as the year draws to a close it’s time to take a deeper look at some of the biggest stories of 2024.
Here’s Pocketgamer.biz news editor Aaron Astle’s take on some of his favourite stories of the year.
Fire Emblem Heroes celebrated its seventh anniversary back in February, arriving at a momentous milestone that few mobile games ever reach. And now with its eighth anniversary closing in, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from Nintendo’s most lucrative mobile game.
Heroes first released on February 2nd, 2017 in a significantly different landscape to the one we see today, both for the Fire Emblem series and for the mobile games industry as a whole.
At launch, this tactical RPG didn’t yet have the success of its series’ Switch games to ride off – in fact the Switch wasn’t even out yet – but it also didn’t have the anime-style gacha giants like Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail for competition.
Heroes’ first year proved to be its most financially successful, but revenue continued to flow until it hit the $1 billion mark in 2022.
Since then spending has slowed considerably as Heroes’ new game modes, new character types and more have made it increasingly complex for a newcomer to pick up, but tie-ins to Switch games and plenty of power creep have clearly aimed to engage fresh eyes anyway, and to catch them up to speed.
Tie-ins to the main series fuel Heroes’ appeal too, with its gacha building predominantly upon characters from the main series’ 34-year history, recreating old favourites in a modern light.
The power of nostalgia means each new banner can target a different audience, depending on which eras of the series a person has played. One batch of characters may pull from the GBA era, but the next might come from the 3DS, then perhaps the SNES or the Switch.
And while the fan favourites have half a dozen or more alts by now, there’s always that chance for someone’s obscure favourite to make it in and shake up the meta, with shiny new skills and an even shinier redesign.
As a day one player, I can safely say this is my most-played mobile game of all time. I’ve followed Heroes through it all, ridden the rollercoaster of anticipation for my own favourite characters, and still, at times, this game manages to surprise me. I’m personally hopeful for many more years of fun to come.
A lot of game anniversaries have made me feel old this year, and Pokémon Masters EX is no exception. Currently The Pokémon Company’s second-biggest mobile game and another character collector, this title celebrated its fifth anniversary in August with more than $300 million to its name.
What helps Masters stand apart from every other Pokémon mobile release – and has kept me coming back for over five years now – is its focus on the series’ human characters as well as the fantastical creatures they call partners. This dynamic is at the core of Masters’ identity, adding an extra layer of incentive for fans to spend and experience new tales with their favourites – whether that’s Red, Cynthia, Volo or Ash Ketchum.
Like Fire Emblem Heroes, Masters has been around for long enough to have many lessons to teach in game design and in sustaining player spending. Masters is a particularly interesting case here as its worst-performing month was actually during its first year – and during the pandemic.
A gameplay overhaul almost a year after launch turned around that decline and healthier earnings have maintained all these years later. That overhaul included a stamina system, the titular EX upgrade system and a shift from free Legendary distributions to making them time-limited rarities in the gacha.
During my visit to King HQ in Sweden this spring, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with various heads across the match-3 giant’s library, gaining plenty of insights into King’s AI testing bots, the impacts – if any – of the Microsoft acquisition, and even past plans to replace Candy Crush.
After president Tjodolf Sommestad dished out his top tips for indie mobile games developers, and head of AI/ML Luka Crnkovic-Friis highlighted the “immense, fundamental” changes ahead with AI, I spoke with Farm Heroes Saga’s head of product Trevor Burrows about one of King’s smaller titles (though still a billion-dollar maker).
That’s where I’d like to focus here – on a lesser-known King game that’s undergone many changes this past decade to keep up with the times, without the Candy Crush name to carry it through.
Farm Heroes Saga’s team is spread across Sweden, Berlin, Barcelona and London with Burrows at the helm, spearheading its strategy and vision. He noted that Farm Heroes Saga is very “data driven” in informing development priorities, what to test when, and players’ reactions to those tests.
In particular, it was intriguing to hear about those tests that didn’t work out and how the team recovered – especially when even “a very small change can have massive repercussions”, to borrow Burrows’ words.
Farm Heroes Saga once trialled an art revamp, for example, by changing the look of all the cropsies, fruits and vegetables in-game. The team was excited about the change, Burrows said, but fan reception was surprisingly negative to such an extent that tangible impacts were seen on the game’s performance.
Despite the expense of creating this new art direction, King accepted defeat and U-turned on the change to win back its fans, reverting the style back. It feels like there’s a fascinating, perhaps even humbling lesson in that, about a willingness to listen to feedback even when it doesn’t support your own vision. Just food for thought.
Pokémania is back. Or it’s at least 91% there.
Any regular podcast listeners will know that I wasn’t around for the original wave of Pokémon fanaticism in the 1990s, so my only real-life experience of the series grabbing the whole world’s attention has been Go.
It’s a game we all know, having proved a ginormous hit in that fateful summer of 2016 and holding its spot as a behemoth of the mobile games industry ever since. But it’s a hit on a scale that’s proven irreplicable by Pokémon for many years, despite The Pokémon Company lending its brand to many developers in all sorts of genres.
It simply seemed like Go was lightning in a bottle, and that there might never have been another strike quite like it.
That was, until Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, a new digital iteration of the popular card game with so long a title it borders on superfluous. Released this October, Pocket thunderbolted past $200 million within its first month of global release and achieved 91% of Go’s launch month revenue in the process – coming closer to matching Go’s revenue than any other Pokémon game on mobile.
Given those others’ more modest achievements, it would be an oversimplification to hand-wave Pocket’s mega-hit status away as an inevitable result of Pikachu’s heavily marketable face making its latest appearance.
Instead, I believe there are certain philosophies shared between Go and Pocket that have driven their success, such as the methods by which they leverage 90s nostalgia and how they encourage a sense of community.
Pocket’s unexplained secrets have also kindled plenty of online speculation around mystery cards and more, which if you ask me, is another key reason for its success. And with a backlog of thousands of cards to build upon, it’s only going to continue to thrive in the years to come.
To finish off this year’s list, I need to talk about Monster Hunter Now. Capcom and Niantic’s geolocation game celebrated its first anniversary this September after 12 busy months packed full of major updates, revamps, events and collaborations, all leading to a game that’s made over $250 million to date across Google Play and the App Store, according to AppMagic data.
While this may pale in comparison to the mighty Pokémon Go, the rise of the web shop and Now’s incentives to move there over in-app purchases mean actual earnings are likely considerably higher. Either way, it’s still easily Niantic’s second-biggest game and has proven that the geolocation genre can find success beyond Pokémon (and Dragon Quest, if you’re in Japan).
One thing in particular that I like about Now, and that seems to be helping it succeed as a smaller franchise than Pokémon, is its focus on accessibility for rural players. It’s a refreshing decision that was front and centre in the Dimensional Links update this year, where certain monsters began to appear that could only be hunted in online groups – not locally.
For me, this is a much more engaging twist than Pokémon Go’s more local approach, which oftentimes overlooks its rural playerbase in favour of city folk who can join together to overcome challenging multiplayer content.
Monster Hunter Now feels so much more accessible with its emphasis on online connection, able to draw in rural players even if no one else in the area is out hunting. This accessibility is no accident, either, but the result of a “conscious effort” to include rural players, the dev team told me.
Wrapping up, I’d also like to claim a small win from my top stories of 2023. I discussed Monster Hunter Now last year too, and of all monsters across the series, I mentioned that I hoped to see the Tigrex make it into Monster Hunter Now in 2024. Well, on December 12th that hope has become reality: the Tigrex has officially landed!
Did my article inspire Niantic to bring this striped wyvern aboard? Who knows. But just in case it did, could we please get Garangolm in 2025?