>>501430This is the Sensor Tower revenue report for the game since it's release. Now, there's a lot of debates about the accuracy of Sensor Tower since they just take Apple Store numbers and apply a multiplyer to simulate Android revenue but I still think it's worth to understand how well a game is doing.
There's also the fact that Infinity Nikki is mostly a PC and Console game rather than mobile so of course there's a lot of revenue here that isn't being counted but I really do think people overestimate the amount of both PC/Console players of any of the big gacha games (mostly bc the chinese market is just mobile dominated period) and therefore how much of that "invisible revenue" even exists.
So, with Nikki, even if PC/Console was making the exact same amount they did in mobile, they would still be in the red because the game has been on a downward spiral since it's release and it's highest revenue month doesn't match some of the lowest months in LADS, for example. LADS is actively growing since launch and their low months usually rank in in between $30.000.000 to $40.000.000 in a game that seems relatevily cheaper to maintain.
Infinity Nikki was in development for about 4 years and they come out to say that at some point they even had a staff of around 1.000 employees working on the game, including extremely expensive overseas talent like Kentaro Tominaga and they mostly did that because Infold had absolutely no experience with games that required 3D enviroments while developing it. LADS has an arena fighinting mode which is much simpler than even something like Honkai 3rd and it was in development together with IN and every other Nikki game was a fashion sim, they had developed really elaborate CGI techonology for clothing and cutscenes for Shining Nikki but really that was it as far as their experience went. An open world game is a massive undertaking on itself, and specially a live service one where players expect a level of area updates in a timely fashion. The game also runs on Unreal Engine which is new and therefore much more expensive and harder to work around.
Back when Genshin released Mihoyo announced that they invested around $100.000.000 in it's development pre-launchh, and last year it came out that the costs to maintain Genshin year round (counting servers, betas, development, marketing etc) is around $200.000.000. That was in 2020
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.