Dragalia Lost is a mobile game from Nintendo and Cygames that released on September 27, 2018 and after being on the market for three and a half years, has announced it’s plan of closure later this year.

Dragalia Lost is an action adventure game for mobile devices with a gacha mechanic to summon adventurers with different abilities, using them correctly to explore dungeons and defeat bosses. This game sounds generic, but for a mobile game, the game was packed with love and detail from new characters to stories to music to boss battles and even more, and it made money obviously being a game people enjoyed, so why did the game fail to continue running? There’s a lot of reasons, but these are some of the big ones.

The first big reason is that the game just couldn’t make money. The game, like I said had incorporated a gacha mechanic (a gacha mechanic is like a gumball machine, glorified gambling with fun prizes you can earn at random) to try and get new units, so you were able to purchase digital currency to gamble, though the prices were quite high and there was also a free alternative via in-game currency you obtained by just simply playing the game. The abundance

of free currency you were able to obtain easily made it doomed to not sell well since there was no real reason to buy currency if you could just grind up enough by yourself and guarantee the new character you want after a certain threshold, even after the amount you could earn was cut in November 2020, combined with the egregious prices of paid currency made it difficult to get players to make purchases in the game except for a few deals here and there.

Though even with these circumstances if the game could have enough players there would be enough who felt the need to purchase to keep the game flowing, but that’s where the next reason lies, marketing. If you were confused when you heard this game was made by Nintendo since you don’t remember it, that’s probably because Nintendo is very hands-off with this game. Absolutely zero marketing was done by Nintendo besides a few times they put it in a Nintendo monthly rewind, that has caused the game to be forgotten by Nintendo fans as the game never got promotion. Nintendo is a large, well known company so it’s obvious that if they had just marketed the game and made it known that it existed just like their other mobile games then it would be more widely played, even though the game wasn’t available in some regions.

Those aren’t the only things that made Dragalia shut down but those are the two main ones and most people find it sad that this is the fate of the game, seeing as the fanbase is very passionate and like I mentioned earlier the game is filled with love for a mobile game. But all good things must come to an end eventually and Dragalia’s co-developer Cygames is notorious for rebooting it’s games so maybe we’ll see something after the game dies, but for now, all we can expect is another death in Nintendo’s pocket.