On October 12, the world release of the MementoMori mobile battler took place. The project immediately entered the top ten box office games of Japan, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. And this is at relatively modest marketing costs.
MementoMori is a battler that stands out from a host of other projects:
- graphics (the game seems to be drawn entirely in watercolor);
- the focus of the player’s attention is on the heroes-vayfu (they are here on every screen, sometimes it feels like this is not a game, but a gallery of anime characters);
- music (a separate music track was written for each character)
- the maximum simplification of the gameplay (first of all, simplification of the visualization of the battle) relative to other representatives of the genre.
Thanks to all this, the project looks fresh. And, apparently, he has a nice sundress. The developers claim that they spent ¥200 million ($1.3 million) on promoting the game before the launch. After the release, they have not invested in the promotion yet.
The available budget was enough for the game to reach the threshold of one million downloads (400 thousand of them were in Japan, another 120 thousand — in South Korea, 100 thousand — in Taiwan and 70 thousand in China).
And with this million users, the game was enough to earn ¥1.8 billion ($12.2 million) in less than a week. It figures unveiled the publisher — Bank of Innovation, a major hit which up to this point was a Battler under the name of “a Contract with the Ghost Beast” (幻獣契約クリプトラクト), earned in 2015 more than $100 million.
According to AppMagic, MementoMori has now reached a plateau of $2 million in revenue per day. Given that the game began to be scolded for its primitive gameplay (some call it almost a music player), it is unclear how long the game will be able to stay at the achieved level.
By the way, the success of the game affected the publisher’s stock quotes. The market value of Bank of Innovation on the Tokyo Stock Exchange jumped by 135% — from ¥12 billion ($81 million) to ¥28 billion ($190 million).