Tower of Fantasy has played a major role in leveling the playing field by competing against HoYoverse in open-world RPGs. Between exciting combat and an immersive terrain to freely explore, these games have unlocked imagination and freedom for this type of game style. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sort of pioneered this style of open-world climb ‘n glide gameplay and inspired many renditions to try and recapture the global phenomenon that it still continues to uphold. But how does Tower of Fantasy stand today in the wave of competitors? And will it manage to survive once the newer larger ones roll out?
Is Tower of Fantasy Dying?
In the months leading up to its global release, Tower of Fantasy garnered a lot of attention through ads and sponsors praising the game and hyping it up for when it would be available to a wider audience. Beta testers loved the diverse combat and the gacha community was more than thrilled for the chance to customize their own character that would run around in the world, performing all the amazing feats instead of having an assigned character’s play style.
For its time, Tower of Fantasy broke records by achieving $34 million within its first month and overtaking Genshin Impact during that quarter. At first, the game had all but stolen HoYoverse’s thunder, but the game devs began to suffer hit after hit by way of nasty allegations about the IDs of the deceased being distributed within the game, stolen assets from other games that run in its genre, and using bots to boast their game’s ratings to a much higher percentage.
For the players who weren’t driven away by such rumors and troubling practices, Tower of Fantasy couldn’t seem to keep up as the game only seemed to frustrate those dedicated to the its success. Some of the most common issues voiced by these players stated that the game didn’t need as many servers since it only took away from the MMO aspect of the game when it separated so many people. Upon release, Tower of Fantasy didn’t allow players to transfer their data to other servers at the time. Another was that there were many time-gated chests and activities that wouldn’t allow for players to properly explore and complete the area which was one of the main functions of the game, to be explored once the rest of the content expired.
While the game did have an interesting range of combat material between the types of weapons being used and the switching mechanics between them, there were just a few untidy ends to the builds that left players frustrated. Some players found that Simulacra just wasn’t worth it unless plenty of money was spent getting repeats of that Simulacra to build up their strength.
There were a couple of smaller grievances such as poor translation on occasion, but even some of the bigger games like Genshin Impact run into that. At the same time, the largest problem Tower of Fantasy faced were game-breaking bugs, some that appeared in the open-world combat against powerful enemies and others that reflected poorly on the exploration of an expansive world that feels empty due to its lack of players being divided among dozens of servers.
So where does the game stand now?
Although Tower of Fantasy started off strong, its numbers have tapered since then to an average of making around $1.2 million a month with numbers fluctuating slightly depending on the game’s story updates. While it does continue to generate new content, it hasn’t seen numbers reach nearly as much as it did when it first came out. Even when the game celebrated its first anniversary, it didn’t see as many returns as Genshin had when its first anniversary swung around.
This does not mean that the game is dead, however. Tower of Fantasy continues to see thousands of players on its server every day and still continues to make good revenue in comparison to other gacha games in its category. Tower of Fantasy does have exciting gameplay and endgame content for when the story and exploration are over. To this day, it continues to spin out beautifully designed areas that players get to immerse themselves in.
There is the question of whether the game will survive in light of new games that are now stated to come out within the next year. HoYoverse has already broken its own records with its new release, Honkai: Star Rail, NetEase has just released their game demo trailer in the works, Project Mugen, and Kurogames have been beta-testing their game Wuthering Waves for the past year now with more updates coming out month by month.
Although Tower of Fantasy saw its success, will it be able to stay that way in the wake of bigger and better games coming out?
