Blue Archive’s Monstrous 2023 Growth is Unreal

Blue Archive has earned over $250 million dollars since its Global release back in February 2021, and has gone on to become one of the most popular Gacha games currently available. But that hasn’t always been the case. On the contrary, Blue Archive did quite poorly in its first year, and suffered repeated scandals – censorship, mishandling.
And while there were numerous setbacks for the game, in its current form, it is one of the most consistent, quality Gacha games. 2023 has been its best year yet, with January and February being 2 months where it has successfully eclipsed almost every other game in the Gacha genre, bringing in over $20 million dollars for each month respectively.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at how Blue Archive is currently doing, and compare it to how it was doing in 2022.

2022 was a pretty good year for Blue Archive, but has been entirely eclipsed by 2023.
In January 2022, Blue Archive earned $8.2 million dollars. This – and all future earnings are going to combine both Global and Japan. In January 2023, however, Blue Archive earned $20.7 million dollars. Unreal, right? That’s more than a 250% increase in total gross earnings a mere year later.
In terms of downloads, most of 2022 saw anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 downloads each month. 2023 seemed to follow along similarly.

In February 2022, Blue Archive earned $6.8 million dollars, a $1.4 million dollar decrease over January, as opposed to February 2023, which saw earnings exceeding $23 million dollars. An increase of $2.3 million dollars over January, and setting a record for the highest grossing month to date.
This was an overhwelming increase of almost 350% since the same point in 2022.

March is when earnings really saw a noticeable decrease in both 2022 and 2023 respectively, but not to a large extent.
In March 2022, Blue Archive earned $4.7 million dollars. Down from $6.8 million in February. In March 2023, Blue Archive earned $15 million dollars, down from $23 million dollars in February 2023, yes, but still almost more than the first quarter of 2022 combined.
March is also when we see the largest difference between months: March 2023 saw an overwhelming increase of 375% over March 2022.

In April 2022, Blue Archive earned $3.3 million dollars, quite the significant decline from its January earnings, but much closer to other Gacha games like Azur Lane, Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights. However, in April 2023, Blue Archive earned a significant $12 million dollars.
Yes, both months continue to show a decline – a stable decrease in total earnings month after month, but even at its lowest point, 2023 still remains significantly higher than 2022 at its peak.

The stable decline changed a little bit in May, however.
In May 2022, Blue Archive earned $4.9 million dollars – an increase from both March and April. Much like 2022, May 2023 saw an increase from $12 million dollars to $13 million dollars. Not a substantial increase, sure, but an increase by almost the total earnings of Tower of Fantasy each month.

Blue Archive is an incredible Gacha game that continues to show that it has the staying power, and growth potential far beyond the vast majority of its competition.
This is partly due to the fact that the game is genuinely good – it’s got a cute graphical style, fun combat, some incredible looking Waifu’s, and an actual story. A combination of features many Gacha games are lacking.
And it seems as though the studio responsible for it care about its long-term success, otherwise they wouldn’t have made 2 separate versions of the game – 1 for younger audiences, and 1 for cultured gamers who are a fan of more plot and no censorship.

If Blue Archive continues this trajectory, I daresay 2024 will be even more successful than 2023. Blue Archive continues to retain a spot in the top 10 most played Gacha games each and every single month – which you can actually find the full list of if you check out my monthly financials series on-screen right now.