Forum - View topic

NEWS: Princess Connect! Re:Dive Game's Global Version Ends Service on April 30

It was a low-effort localization made even worse by the fact that the game is literally region-locked outside the States. (I had to VPN into the game when I went overseas for work.)

While very disappointed, the writing was on the wall. Coming out of what should have been a relatively noteworthy event (nothing huge, but enough to get a blip) the total monthly revenue (not profit, just income) was around $200k.

I've seen people mention how big the IP is in Japan, but that has never been a strong indicator of success outside Japan. Kancolle was massive in Japan, but never more than a blip in the US. The Touhou franchise was and still is massive, but you can bet few westerners know a thing about it, let alone have touched any of the games. Even looking more broadly, there are countless anime series that do very, very, well in Japan and make no noise in the US, or vice verse.

Gacha games rely on a healthy mix of whales and F2P players. PriConne was extremely F2P friendly, made worse by the fact that there are rather large gaps between the release of characters of note, so there can easily be long periods of players being able to hoard the only real pay item in the game for the next banner of note if they're aiming to remain F2P. Looking at the expected banners for the year (again noting that the global server is 2 years behind the Japan server) there were 2 units of real note; one coming up here in April, the next near the end of the year.

And unlike the case we tend to see with the Asian market for a lot of games, Global market tends to have fewer "for the love of it" whales who will throw money at a game simply because they can and love the IP that much. PriConne was always a title that was going to appeal to a narrow niche. It just wasn't able to grow substantially beyond that in the global market.

DRosencraft wrote:

While very disappointed, the writing was on the wall. Coming out of what should have been a relatively noteworthy event (nothing huge, but enough to get a blip) the total monthly revenue (not profit, just income) was around $200k. I've seen people mention how big the IP is in Japan, but that has never been a strong indicator of success outside Japan. Kancolle was massive in Japan, but never more than a blip in the US. The Touhou franchise was and still is massive, but you can bet few westerners know a thing about it, let alone have touched any of the games. Even looking more broadly, there are countless anime series that do very, very, well in Japan and make no noise in the US, or vice verse. Gacha games rely on a healthy mix of whales and F2P players. PriConne was extremely F2P friendly, made worse by the fact that there are rather large gaps between the release of characters of note, so there can easily be long periods of players being able to hoard the only real pay item in the game for the next banner of note if they're aiming to remain F2P. Looking at the expected banners for the year (again noting that the global server is 2 years behind the Japan server) there were 2 units of real note; one coming up here in April, the next near the end of the year. And unlike the case we tend to see with the Asian market for a lot of games, Global market tends to have fewer "for the love of it" whales who will throw money at a game simply because they can and love the IP that much. PriConne was always a title that was going to appeal to a narrow niche. It just wasn't able to grow substantially beyond that in the global market.

You did mention Kancolle but you're just proving the publisher also has a big role in defining a game's reception. Kadokawa clearly didn't want Kancolle to be consumed by non-Japanese people and it made it very annoying for anyone outside Japan to even play the game. Of course it would be just a blip anywhere else. Same with Touhou, the original games are pretty much indies, the popularity coming from fanworks and ZUN's very laissez faire attitude towards them.

Here, we have a company with a game graveyard, and which clearly has a history of chasing trends, seeing how they're releasing that other game about that new isekai. Do you expect me to believe they really did everything they could to keep Priconne profitable?

It's a property that 100% could've succeeded if Crunchyroll hadn't mishandled it, and even when they had, it was still popular enough to continue surviving, except CR decided to can it without forewarning anyway.

The problem is that Crunchyroll put so little effort into marketing the game outside of their own website and the game's dedicated twitter that most people didn't know it existed.

Marketing makes or breaks a game. Just look at NIKKE, which came out of nowhere and is now posting four million revenue per month because the publisher knew how to hype it. Crunchyroll didn't market the game at all, and the result is that it was overtaken by games with similar gameplay that did do their best to stay in the spotlight, such as Blue Archive.

So yeah, pardon people for thinking this is entirely Crunchyroll being Crunchyroll.