Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most influential and important anime franchises of all time, so its collaboration with the popular video game Goddess of Victory: NIKKE was expected to be a resounding success. However, the results of the developer’s financial statement have shown that it was a failure.
Was Neon Genesis Evangelion’s collaboration with Goddess of Victory: NIKKE a failure?
It is worth noting that this collaboration saw the smartphone video game Goddess of Victory: NIKKE climb a few positions on the top of the app shop download charts in Japan during August. However, developer Shift Up’s third quarter 2024 financial results have recently been released and show a broad picture of what went on inside the company.
According to Shift Up’s financial report, Goddess of Victory: NIKKE suffered a decline of 4.3 billion South Korean won during the third quarter of 2024 (corresponding to 1 July to 30 September). To be clearer, Shift Up’s Q3 2024 global earnings were below Q2 global earnings of 38.5 billion South Korean won. However, it is important to note that 34.2 billion South Korean won in revenue is not a negligible figure, although it represents an 11% decrease from the previous quarter.
While there may be a number of reasons for the decline in Shift Up’s revenue, the company attributes much of the failure to the collaborative event with the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise. Recall that this controversial collaboration began on 22 August, and for a very limited period, players were able to obtain such iconic girls from the franchise as Rei Ayanami, Asuka Langley Soryu, Mari Makinami Illustrious and Misato Katsuragi as playable characters.
In the words of the studio, the collaboration with Neon Genesis Evangelion did not have that much of an impact on players, although this does not mean that people did not spend large sums of money to get the 3 main female characters with their corresponding repeat copies. We can say that there simply wasn’t enough impact to cause more gamers to dabble in Goddess of Victory: NIKKE for the first time and make the pre-established user base spend more money.
Lack of willingness may have been the cause of the financial failure.
Shift Up CEO Hyung-tae Kim stated that the initial Neon Genesis Evangelion character designs for the game were considered ‘too explicit’. Therefore, the more conservative appearance of the female cast of Neon Genesis Evangelion, compared to NIKKE’s usual revealing outfits, could be one of the reasons why the collaboration’s financial performance did not meet Shift Up’s expectations.
However, it’s not all bad, as based on the bad experience the studio has had with the Neon Genesis Evangelion collaboration they have indicated that they will further analyse the feedback from active and tentative users to implement improvements for the collaborative events to be held next year 2025. So we can expect a wave of surprises that will benefit players even more, considering that NIKKE is one of the smartphone games that rewards active users the most.
It should be noted that NIKKE has previously collaborated with such high-impact anime franchises as Chainsaw Man and Re:Zero, as well as the global phenomenon of NieR: Automata. Therefore, we can expect high-impact collaborative events during the year 2025.