Nintendo’s original mobile gacha game Dragalia Lost is shutting down

Dragalia Lost, one of Nintendo’s increasingly dwindling stable of mobile games for iOS and Android, is shutting down. The company announced today that the game’s main campaign will be ending in July and that it’ll cease adding new characters or content updates (outside of the main campaign) at the end of March when its final set of characters is introduced.

Nintendo hasn’t said when exactly Dragalia Lost will be fully shutting down. The company only says that “after the main campaign has concluded, service for the game itself will come to a close at a later date. Further details on the end-of-service schedule will be provided in a future notification.” The announcement does note that players will still be able to summon new characters and enjoy event revivals up until the game fully shuts down, however.

Dragalia Lost debuted back in 2018, on the heels of Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (both of which had debuted the year previously.) Unlike Super Mario Run — Nintendo’s first foray into mobile gaming, which launched with a $9.99 one-time price tag in 2016 — Dragalia Lost was a free-to-play “gacha” style game developed in partnership with Cygames (best known for creating Granblue Fantasy) that relies on players summoning random characters to use in the game.

It’s an idea that makes sense on paper. Gacha games can be huge moneymakers. Take Fire Emblem Heroes, for example, which dominates as Nintendo’s most lucrative mobile title — as of 2020, a Sensor Tower report tallied it as generating over $650 million in revenue, more than all of Nintendo’s other mobile games combined.

But Dragalia Lost never quite reached that level of success. As the rare modern Nintendo title that was a completely original IP, it didn’t have decades of beloved characters for fans to collect (something that Fire Emblem Heroes has been able to capitalize on extensively).

Dragalia Lost will join Dr. Mario World — arguably the least successful of any of Nintendo’s mobile titles — on the list of fizzled out mobile titles whenever Nintendo does shut service down for good in the coming months.