UK rejects calls for stronger consumer protections and Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes hits $1.3bn in revenue | Week in Views

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The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can’t let go of.

So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over, here’s our weekly digest where members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming over the past week.

UK government rejects calls to strengthen consumer protections against live service shutdowns

A petition in the UK was put forward to update consumer laws that would prevent studios from disabling its previously sold video games and related content without offering an alternate way of retaining their product or being reimbursed. 

The UK government has rejected this call to action. As with all things there are two sides at play here. I understand from a consumer standpoint, if you purchase a product you feel you now own it and wish to retain access to it. 

However, if you’re a studio that made a game years ago that nobody is playing anymore, the cost to keep running that game just may not be feasible. 

The decision of course favors publishers and developers, ensuring they have flexibility and free reign to stop supporting a game which works out much better for them. Which means consumers need to essentially accept that a game they purchased may one day not be accessible.

But publishers and developers should also try to ensure that they maintain good standing with their consumers, canceling a game early on or doing so too often with too many games, could quickly earn distrust. Some studios are already trying to combat these scenarios by keeping games running longer or in some cases even offering refunds.

With mobile games being digital and console games leaning away from physical media, I expect this is an issue that we will be hearing about again in the not so distant future.

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

I’ve been playing Fire Emblem Heroes ever since its release day on February 2nd, 2017. That was eight years ago!

As a huge Fire Emblem fan, I remember my excitement at the reveal trailer – at the potential for so many of my favourite characters to come together into one title. I remember installing the game on its release date just to play for five minutes before school.

At the time, I never gave much thought to how this mobile game might stick around with me for so many years, even through university and into a job where I’d be writing about it right now…

But here we are. It’s been eight years, and Fire Emblem Heroes still firmly holds its spot as Nintendo’s most lucrative mobile game. It’s the company’s only mobile title to reach the billion dollar milestone, despite the franchise’s smaller size compared to the likes of Mario Kart and Animal Crossing. In fact, it’s out-earned both those franchise’s mobile games combined.

As for how this smaller series has outperformed Nintendo’s goliaths, I’d argue that developer Intelligent System’s own data is a significant contributing factor. Each year since 2017, the company has held a voting event called Choose Your Legends where players elect four characters to receive guaranteed alts in the summer. Given those characters are voted on by the playerbase, it’s unsurprising that those gacha banners go on to be a success.

But it isn’t just the winners who get special treatment. After all, it’s only natural that highly popular characters who don’t win get added to the gacha too – albeit often not as meta-defining as if they’d won. Still, when the dev’s so spoilt for choice with 35 years’ worth of characters to draw from, why not add those characters fans went out of their way to vote for?

As for myself, I’d like another Inigo alt next, please…