Why Grand Sphere Failed

Brief article and speculation on why the mobile gacha JRPG "Grand Sphere" had to shut down despite relatively good playership.

Why Grand Sphere Failed

The mobile turn-based gacha game Grand Sphere: Legend of the Dragon had a brief run for little over two years before shutting down completely. I was a big fan of this mobile game and I was upset to see it go, however, I do believe there are many reasons why it failed. 

For one, the game wasn’t that well marketed, I saw no ads for the game prior to my installation and only came across it by chance when it was on the app store. Most games that start don’t have a lot of ads early on, but even after it’s first year anniversary, I didn’t see much, if any, ads for it after that. 

Furthermore, after the first anniversary and moving onto the second, the game decided to implement the function of giving new players a gacha pull with a guaranteed SSR rank character, sometimes multiple. This was more of an annoyance for me as an “older” player who didn’t have any SSR characters starting out. However, I think this could have further attributed to it’s failure. 

The main means of mobile games gaining revenue is by in-app purchases, and in gacha games like Grand Sphere, Genshin Impact, and Cookie Run to name a few, the main draw is getting all the characters and spending money to get those gacha pulls. Supposedly the drop rates in Grand Sphere are very bad (and I don’t think they have a pity system like Genshin), which just leads to people not really pulling often, a group I was also apart of. But the biggest issue it had was the pricing of those in game currencies for gacha pulls. It cost ten dollars to get the amount of gems you can farm by doing daily tasks and increases from there. Such as spending twenty dollars to get 60 primogems in Genshin Impact (another JRPG gacha game). It’s just not a good deal and most players see that, resulting in very few people buying gems from the in-game store. I believe that, combined with the lack of ads and horrible drop rates led to Grand Sphere’s downfall. 

Honestly, even with the “horrible” drop rates, you can level up the characters just fine and get through most of the game’s content without SSR tier characters. So I think a combination of all those factors, along with the fact that the artwork of Grand Sphere and story telling is likely very expensive… they didn’t make enough to keep things going. I still love the game and the world it built, but it is a shame to see it vanish into obscurity.