Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes: eight years, $1.3bn revenue and the value of player voting

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Strategy RPG Fire Emblem Heroes has celebrated its eighth anniversary with almost $1.3 billion in lifetime player spending, securely maintaining its position as Nintendo’s most lucrative game on mobile.

In fact, Fire Emblem Heroes is Nintendo’s only mobile game to have surpassed $1 billion in gross player spending.

This 10-figure milestone was achieved in 2022 despite the Fire Emblem IP’s smaller status compared to Nintendo giants like Mario and Animal Crossing.

In fact, according to AppMagic estimates, Mario Kart Tour has earned just $390.9 million to date, slightly ahead of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp’s $387.5 million.

Fire Emblem Heroes has therefore outearned Nintendo’s second and third-biggest mobile games combined and made more than triple either’s revenue standalone.

The strategy title has also made more than 10 times that of premium game Super Mario Run’s $100.5 million.

The RPG genre’s lucrative and long-running reign on mobile surely helped Fire Emblem Heroes accelerate beyond the pack, as has its gacha system – the monetisation model behind many a successful RPG like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.

However, Mario Kart Tour was also a gacha game for its first three years before changing tack, featuring many more famous faces in that time than the Fire Emblem IP possesses. Yet, it was still outpaced by the smaller franchise on mobile.

This suggests that Heroes’ success has been the result of a complex array of factors.

A model for success

Fire Emblem Heroes first launched on February 2nd, 2017 in a vastly different mobile games landscape. Auto chess wasn’t yet popularised, hybridcasual didn’t exist and gacha giant HoYoverse wasn’t yet dominating the genre.

As for Nintendo, the company was busy making mobile games as an additional revenue source alongside the struggling Wii U – an initiative that’s slowed down dramatically since the success of the Switch.

The Fire Emblem franchise was among Nintendo’s first to get a mobile adaptation, having reached new levels of popularity on the 3DS. 2012’s Fire Emblem Awakening was the series’ first game to surpass two million unit sales and famously saved the franchise. It was followed by Fire Emblem Fates, a 2015 game which surpassed three million sales.

In February 2017, Heroes launched with its gacha promoting many characters from these 3DS titles, with developer Intelligent Systems clearly looking to leverage its new audience. The mobile game also featured prominent characters from the original Fire Emblem title on Famicom, plus a scattering of faces from across the series, to attract legacy fans from the ever-important Japanese market.

AppMagic data suggests that Heroes earned $52.5 million in gross player spending that first February, which remains its most lucrative month even eight years later.

Notably, Nintendo first revealed Fire Emblem Heroes alongside two games for Switch – spinoff Fire Emblem Warriors and main series game Three Houses, which was delayed until 2019, but would go on to become the best-selling strategy RPG of all time.

The joint announcements likely landed extra eyes on Heroes, especially as the first of those revealed titles to launch – helping tide players over in the wait for the Switch games.

After the reveal, Intelligent Systems also held a fortnight-long online poll for fans to vote for their favourite characters from across the series, promising to design and release unique alts of them later that year.

Naturally, this poll also allowed the developer to assess every character’s popularity from across its decades-long history – pivotal information to possess for a game built around monetising those characters in a gacha.

Over 1.2 million votes were cast and the four winners went on to receive their own gacha banner on August 28th, 2017, advertised via the game’s only live-action trailer.

Lyn from the GBA era of games won the poll with 49,917 votes and the banner’s release helped to turn around a months-long revenue decline, as players spent on the gacha for the objectively most popular characters at the time.

Heroes generated $7 million gross during the banner’s first week, versus just $3.1 million the week prior.

The winning vote

Following the success of the initial poll, “Choose Your Legends” became an annual event that still runs to this day. It has become a well-established tradition for the four new winners to release in a gacha banner every August, reliably surging player spending in-game.

Of course, the annual vote also provides Intelligent Systems with an up-to-date guide to characters’ popularity, almost certainly informing other banners released through the years too. The original winner Lyn, for example, has nine different iterations in-game to date, generally receiving one new alt each year.

The first year’s last-place character, Glade, still isn’t in the game.

In total, Heroes now features more than 1,000 playable units from across every entry in the main series. It’s also become its own advertising wing for Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, with cross-promotional rewards for playing multiple titles and even featuring early gacha banners of characters before their own Switch games release.

At the same time, Fire Emblem Three Houses’ popularity ultimately worked to Heroes’ advantage, with its divisive character Edelgard receiving 74,617 votes in 2020’s Choose Your Legends 4 – the most votes in series history to this day.

That August went on to be the game’s most lucrative month of 2020 at $18.6 million, compared to $14.3 million in July and $13.1 million in September.

Including her Choose Your Legends alt, Edelgard has already received six unique versions in the gacha and has a seventh on the way later this February, her enduring popularity clearly not going unnoticed by the developer.

Through the years, Heroes’ own original characters have also found popularity among players. Original characters Eikþyrnir, Sharena and Baldr won the latest poll in January 2025 alongside Three Houses’ player character Byleth.

However, with most top characters having already won by now – therefore no longer eligible in the poll – this year’s Choose Your Legends received fewer than 350,000 total votes.

A long legacy

The Fire Emblem series at large will celebrate its 35th anniversary on April 20th, 2025. Fire Emblem Heroes has so far run for eight of those years, making it something of an outlier among mobile games.

Over the years its annual revenue has declined, however, down to a fraction of where it began. After earning $283.3 million in year one, revenue fell slightly to $251.3 million in year two and continued its decline in year three. Its fourth year appeared to benefit, as many games did, from the 2020 lockdowns, making this the only time to date where Heroes’ annual revenue increased.

Most recently, Heroes generated $67.4 million gross during year eight, just 24% of where it started.

But even so, when only 17% of mobile games even make it to year three, and with Nintendo itself no stranger to ending service of floundering games – even those leveraging Mario branding – Heroes has clearly done something right.

Arriving at its eighth anniversary, and with Choose Your Legends 9 winners now set, Fire Emblem Heroes could well be in for yet another lucrative summer in 2025.