Puzzle & Dragons: $5 Billion Made, 0 Influence in the West
GungHo last month released Puzzle & Dragons 0. It seems not everything is going as expected for a company that released the original Puzzle & Dragons with $5 billion revenue on 60 Mil. downloads 🤔.
A little bit of history, Puzzle & Dragons released in 2012 is the first mobile game that did $1 Bil. in revenue. You may know its western iteration from Small Giant Games under the name of Empires & Puzzles, which streamlined its core. In the original you not only match the tokens but you literally drag one token across the board, with which you can rearrange it and match the whole board in one move 💥. So now they released a version 0 again and we just had to take a look at on the podcast.
Surprisingly, there is no gacha in it. You read that right 😱, the main progression and monetization system, responsible for that $5 Bil. lifetime spend of the original was left out in favor of linear unlock progression, where you farm materials for higher-star-rating monsters, as you see on the 3rd Image. The whole game seems to me more like a museum piece that an actual attempt for a consumer product. On top of it there are rewarded videos in it, which even ads more mystery to it 😅. I still encourage anyone to play this mobile gaming history just to properly understand its very unique core gameplay, which was iterated and copied through out the years so many times.
Doing just $650K revenue from its May 28th release and still 94% of that only from Japan just gives more fuel for my museum piece theory 😅, as this still won’t find any audience in the west.
