I see a lot of people thinking that SOC made a lot of money, but the truth is much deeper and darker. Here's financial reports that reveal what is truly up with the game, why does it feel as if the gacha part was tacked on and why the devs are so stingy.

Part 1: A Premature Birth, Latched To To A Sinking Ship
Sword of Convallaria was launched for Taiwan (This included Hong Kong and Macau, and mainland Chinese were able to play too) on the 8th of August 2023 and the news [reports](https://www.taoguba.com.cn/Article/5163544/1) that it made over 1.5 million USD over 10 days. This report also mentions that XD Entertainment made a profit of 70 million to 130 million yuan after previously suffering losses in 2021 and 2022 totalling up to 1.49 billion yuan (About 210 million USD) and that XD Entertainment was able to recover somewhat due to cutting costs related to R & D.

XD Entertainment has made number of online and premium games with Sausage Man being one of the prime money makers in spite of its age, and it's worth noting that the R & D budget for Sword of Convallaria has [skyrocketed to the hundreds of millions](https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1783973834809185475&wfr=spider&for=pc). Comments during the game's initial launch centered on how the game's direction leaned towards being a single-player game, only to be turned into a gacha at the boss's will, and reviews praised the game's single-player direction while most reviews against brought up the gacha mechanics. Indeed, TW was off to a rocky start as the pity for a banner used to be at 200 pulls (Now revised to 180), there was no guaranteed random legendary pulls and the dual banner's rate-up used to be at 50/50 instead of the 75/75 presently; it's not hard to imagine why some already chose to reject the game.

That said, tactical games are niche and it is unlikely that Sword of Convallaria would have recouped its development costs without the gacha component, and XD Entertainment was further forced to terminate game projects on top of laying off staff, facing severe problems from the failure of their self-developed projects, decline in Taptap performance and flagging revenue from previously established games. Of the games that XD had hopes for, only Sword of Convallaria remained with Torchlight Infinite and T3 Arena failing to deliver, effectively being stillborn. What began as [one man's dream to recapture the nostalgic retro era](https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20231123A07VZE00) became the Chosen One, for the sake of the company's future.

Part 2: Uncertainty, Doubt and Hope
I was unable to find further articles relating to Taiwan's revenue, but [the complaints on Taiwan's Facebook page](https://ibb.co/c1jF5BT) do not paint a good picture. It's now been three months and players not only wanted for new content, they did not even have a new character in this period. Their complaints would go unheard though as Sword of Convallaria finally launched in the Mainland China server on the 23rd of November, 2023 and it made [around 9.6 million USD](https://ibb.co/RNyCTYZ); the game would go on to make 20 million USD within the tail end of November's launch and December. Though CN players had some misgivings owing to the stagnation of TW they were nevertheless pleased with the functionality of the characters, the gameplay and that they weren't necessarily pressured into rolling for SSRs. Everything seemed fine as the game was new back then, and it was understood that the devs were pressed for time. Yet those sweet, idyllic days would not last long...

Part 3: For Love or Money?
Sword of Convallaria's revenue was doomed to plummet in China's hypercompetitive market owing to many problems:
1) The game stagnates once you reach level 60 and you have nothing else to do
2) The developers are still stingy, and releasing characters every two weeks is unsustainable by CN's low spenders
3) Promised content has not emerged
4) Langrisser is still popular in China unlike in Global, and there's many other strategy games available for CN players

Aside from this issue, Sword of Convallaria has now been set aside for Gogo Muffin, XD's upcoming game that has been shown to be a big hit in initial testing. [The article is very long](https://news.sohu.com/a/763935867_100136645) but the relevant passage is the two paragraphs below the Sword of Convallaria's image: `At present, the two old products "Sausage Party" and "Ragnarok M" are still the main revenue products of X.D. Network, but the new products have also brought certain income to the company. According to the best-selling list ranking and past financial reports, "Sword of Lily of the Valley: For This Peaceful World" is the one that contributes the most to the performance of these new products, but the upper limit of the income of the retro pixel-style war chess mobile game will not be too high, so X.D.'s strategy of spending a lot of money on self-developed products in recent years has not been successful.

However, good news about self-developed products has come recently. X.D. Network's self-developed placement casual game "Let's Go Muffin" has achieved results beyond expectations after it was launched in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but it has not yet been launched in the domestic market and needs to be tested. In terms of TapTap, X.D. has achieved a significant increase in revenue and a decrease in costs at TapTap against the background of a decrease in monthly active users, and the results of cost reduction and efficiency increase are obvious.`

Here's a [capture of February's 2024 revenue showing that it only made around $300k USD](https://ibb.co/RNyCTYZ).

Sadly, powercreep and cashing out are commonplace in gacha and the [the Spring Festival](https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1794279215363587509&wfr=spider&for=pc) that brought both uncomfortably high levels of difficult stages and powerful characters showed CN players what the devs had decided on, and this was only made worse with the launch of Tower of Adversity, a high-difficulty mode where you need to prepare twelve complete characters to compete against the score of other players. Though CN is known for having many meta and competition-oriented players, [this move to prioritize powercreep and rolling over enjoyment](https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1795090484954720375&wfr=spider&for=pc) only resulted in even less revenue with Tower of Adversity being the final straw for many players who were already unhappy with the game.

Part 4: The Waverun Riots of Taptap
The second story update called the Crimson Night was released at the end of June in Taiwan. Pamina was one of the characters released during this patch and she was instantly derided for being weak, owing to factors such as how she can only counterattack once at base and a long cooldown was attached to her ultimate. This was met with the usual amount of negativity until Taiwan posted an update [with a time-limited signature weapons banner](https://tieba.baidu.com/p/9077464360) on the 5th of July, which also coincided with a live PVP event (Live PVP was already available between friends before this, but this event provides some rewards and a Pamina with a maxed signature weapon can do back to back ultimates among other things, which makes her overpowered in PVP). Needless to say, neither TW nor CN was happy with how greedy the devs were when they had practically given nothing back to the players and those who complained at the official forums found themselves being [swiftly removed](https://ibb.co/MN3P9TV), if not [banned](https://ibb.co/jfvg3Br) for [legitimately being worried about the game](https://ibb.co/b3NCC5W).

Though the devs later backtracked and allowed people to earn some signature weapons from the Tower of Adversity, this selection is random and it does nothing to address the issue of the game being inaccesible to newcomers and actively hostile against its active players. And of course it has to be said that a game that is doing well [won't take measures](https://tieba-baidu-com.translate.goog/p/9087229762?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp) such as pressuring people to roll for signature weapons when it has already failed to provide meaningful content in a year.

The game has only earned $550k in China this month according to Sensortower's reports as a result of being unable to live up to people's expectations and betraying them, which brings us to...

Part 5: The Fool's Fate
Global, Japan and Korea, which seemingly made a lot of money for a niche strategy game (Some 12 million versus CN's 20 million). Some concerns are already apparent among players as the devs have announced their intention to speed up the game until it's six months behind China and they have removed eight banners as a result which translates into around 4 months of savings and character shards (It takes about 3 months and change to get a character to 5*). Not only have the rewards not been exclusive to these three regions (Voyage Momento was added in Taiwan a few months back as an example), Japan and Korea have already suffered a severe server problem at the end of August that forced devs to roll back the server by a few hours, people have complained about not receiving their gems and the Tower of Adversity is set to be coming soon even though this only happened a few months later in TW and CN.

Conclusion
Sword of Convallaria cost too much to create and its rapid loss of revenue is second only to its lost hope and goodwill. This positive opening will do nothing for the game's enormous problems; on the contrary, people will wake up swiftly if the plug isn't pulled first as a last ditch attempt to get money the same way Aniplex promised Magia Record Global players that they were going to catch up to JP only to terminate the game after launching back to back meta banners during its anniversary. Just as the Sword of Convallaria is quickly destroyed by the Darklight Faction if it fails to get support from the three main factions, so will the game end without prospects as players leave and realize the game was never meant to work out...isolated and helpless.