The real example for Nintendo going full lootbox was Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s a pure gacha game. Actually viable at the highest end of competition (top tier al

The real example for Nintendo going full lootbox was Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s a pure gacha game. Actually viable at the highest end of competition (top tier all modes) as free to play, but has earned more revenue than not only every other Nintendo mobile game combined, but also possibly the entire 30+ year old Fire Emblem franchise. To summon a hero at maximum competitive scoring capacity (11 copies) with cash on a focus banner was usually $650-750, bit more over $1000 for a Mythic or Legendary - but bad variance could easily double those numbers, if not triple them. But playing the game for free you earned about $175 of that currency per month. Moreover, the game now averages 11 new heroes a month. It launched with 90-something, but now has nearly 850 different heroes. So if you ignored paying, saved your currency, understood the numbers and sat on your hands… you could be right at the top, spending your currency on exactly what you needed for score (and nothing else), and making meta-viable, sufficient scoring units out of the piles of 3 and 4 stars you’d be buried in. After that, play well and you’d be ranked in the same tiers as the biggest whales. But the core monetization model (outside of newer reasonable cost subscription stuff) was basically evil.