There’s a deluge of new data and research to wade through in the mobile games business. Our regular data digest column breaks it all down into digestible chunks.
Read on for the numbers you need to know about minus the fluff.
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Best Fiends at 10: 100m downloads, 1M DAU
Playtika-owned studio Seriously has released a couple of datapoints to coincide with Best Fiends’ 10th anniversary, stating that the puzzler has now passed 100m downloads and has over 1m DAU.
Appmagic’s estimates show a similar lifetime download figure (97.8m), with the game’s estimated lifetime revenue at over $530m. Monthly IAP revenue stands at around $3.5m on average, but it appears to be in decline over the long term, as you can see in the chart above. As ever, these estimates do not include platform fees and chunks of China’s Android ecosystem.
Mobile Legends and Free Fire lead mobile game streaming charts
As spotted by GameDevReports, Stream Hatchet has put out some estimates on what’s getting streamed on mobile by hours watched.
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Garena Free Fire are way out in front, with 229m and 226m hours watched respectively during H1 2024.
PUBG Mobile (136m) and its Indian SKU Battlegrounds Mobile India (97.1m) are in third and fourth, followed by Arena of Valor, Brawl Stars and Clash Royale.
13% of US hypercasual ads are playable
In the United States, 13% of adverts for hypercasual titles are playable. That’s according to Mintegral’s State of Games Media Buying 2024 report for the US, which shows that video ads are still the dominant format across nearly every genre covered.
When it comes to playable ads, hypercasual leads the way with 13%. Shooting titles come in second place, with 9% of ads in this genre being interactive.
On average, ad pushes for sports games ran the longest at 47 days, while social titles generally lasted 41.9 days.
Ads for puzzle games saw the highest impressions of any genre, up one place year-on-year, switching places with match titles. Shooting and sports titles rose up four and six spots respectively to chart in eighth and ninth.
Infinity Nikki passes 14m pre-registrations
As reported by PocketGamer.biz, Infold Games’ ‘cosy open world game’ has now passed 14m pre-registrations. But there’s no official release date yet for the game, which is also coming to PS5 and Epic’s Games Store.
Indie darling Vampire Survivors passes $1m in IAPs on mobile
This breakout indie game arrived on mobile in December 2022 without any IAPs, and was initially monetised through ads.
But since then, developer Poncle has added four bitesize DLC packs for ~$2 a pop. That recently pushed the game past $1m earned in lifetime in-app purchase revenue, according to Appmagic.
Layer ad revenue on top – which is difficult to calculate – and this mobile port has been a quietly lucrative sideline for solo dev Luca Galante, who recently appeared on The Sunday Times’ gaming rich list with an estimated fortune of £40m.
Mobile games firms spend 25% of revenue on marketing
New research from Bain shows that mobile games companies spend around a quarter of their revenue on marketing. That’s much higher than other software firms, which spend just 15% of their income on promotional activity. The company does argue that this spending is “misdirected” due to a lack of communication between marketing and development teams.
Bain also reports that between 55% and 70% of mobile games companies fail after just three years. That is much higher than the software and retail businesses, whose average fail rate is between 10-25%.
Wings of Heroes partially offsets Ten Square bookings dip
Polish games firm Tensquare has reported PLN96.2m ($24.9m) in bookings for the second quarter of 2024. That’s a slight dip year-on-year thanks to declines from both Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash (2.6% and 6.8% respectively), though the firm notes that Wings of Heroes’ performance helped to mitigate this decline with a 19.6% revenue increase year-on-year.
Fishing Clash represented PLN59.6m ($15.4m) or 60.8% of the company’s revenue. Net profit clocked in at PLN22m ($5.7m), a 193% increase year-on-year.
Doomsday and Viking Rise drove 9% revenue spike for IGG
Revenue rose up 9% at Hong King firm I Got Games (IGG) for the first half of 2024. The company brought in HK$2.74bn ($351m) for the six months, driven by strategy titles Doomsday: Last Survivors and Viking Rise.
IGG reports that these titles raked in HK$500m ($64.1m) and HK$300m ($38.5m) respectively for the period.
