There’s a deluge of new data and research to wade through every week.
So every Wednesday we’re here to break it all down into digestible chunks: data drop has just the numbers you need to know about, minus the fluff.
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COD: Mobile hits $3bn, King grows 9% in Activision Blizzard financials
Activision Blizzard’s Q2 2023 financials were announced just after last week’s data drop.
Total mobile revenue (including King) for Q2 2023 was $943, comfortably the biggest segment. PC was $594m and console was $556m.
- Lifetime worldwide spend in COD: Mobile passed $3 billion (It was launched in October 2019)
- Overall net bookings for mobile grew 4% YOY
- Mobile was around 40% of total net bookings in the last 12 months
- “Over half of all engagement” with the COD series is on mobile
- Warzone Mobile “continues to progress through regional testing”, but no date was given
- Diablo IV boosted Diablo Immortal in June, its highest month of net bookings since January
- No date on Warcraft: Arclight Rumble, but it “continues to progress through testing ahead of its regional soft launch.”
As ever, the King portion of the business was broken out, and as ever, it is quietly a massive earner for the Call of Duty maker. More King highlights here:
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- King’s revenue grew 9% year-over-year to a new quarterly record
- Candy Crush Saga was the top-grossing game franchise in US app stores for the 24th quarter in a row
- King’s MAU was down YOY slightly from 240m last year to 238m
Sensor Tower’s 2023-2027 forecasts
The data firm’s latest report paints a rosy picture of the next few years in the general apps and games market, with its headline projection of a 8.4% compound annual growth rate in global user spending.
It’s less fun for games, though. Sensor Tower predicts that the proportion of revenue generated by games on the iOS App Store will drop from 58% in 2022 to 47% in 2027. TikTok and other entertainment and photo and video apps are expected to squeeze games’ market share in the next few years, as this graph outlines:
Sensor Tower also expects Brazil to overtake the US in terms of downloads, with Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines also expected to leapfrog more established markets like Russia, China and Turkey.
There are also some interesting regional breakdowns of predicted gross revenue across apps and games:
…and downloads:
Ketchapp’s new game Rider Worlds hits 1m
This casual platform racer passed 1m downloads in 10 days, says publisher Ketchapp, which seemed particularly pleased to have been featured by Apple, a rare thing for a label of its type. The game itself is published by ChimpWorks, a studio based in The Netherlands.
Dumb Ways To Die gets 4m TikTok followers
Around six months after a meme-ready CapCut template sent it viral, Dumb Ways Too Die developer Playside put out some stats about its social media presence.
- It’s now got over 4m followers on its TikTok
- There have been 5.6 billion views of the Dumb Ways To Die trend
- There are over 180k different takes on the Dumb Ways To Die CapCut template
- 350m+ views for the brand’s own social channels
Stillfront bookings flat YOY in financials
Net revenue for the owner of Erepublik, Goodgame, Kixeye, Nanobit and many more was flat YOY at 1.8bn SEK, or $174.3m.
The firm said it is now more profitable, though, with adjusted EBITDAC up by 32% to 516m SEK ($49.7m) and adjusted EBITDA rising by 11% to 708m SEK ($68.2m). These are all-time highs for both metrics, it said.
The increased profitability was driven by “an increasing share of direct-to-consumer bookings, continued cost optimisation, and lower levels of user acquisition and capitalised development costs.”
Niko Partners and Appmagic collaborated on a report that outlines the top games in each genre across Asian and MENA markets combined.
Why? Because RPG, strategy, MOBA, puzzle and battle royale games “cumulatively accounted for nearly 80% of mobile game spend in the Asia & MENA region during 2022.”
Other big takeaways from the report:
- Biggest genres are RPG by revenue and Puzzle by downloads
- RPG is the most diverse genre, with very loyal and highly monetisable players
- Strategy gamers are more willing to try new genres, games and mechanics
- MOBA gamers are the most fiercely loyal over the long term
- Puzzle gamers are open to trying new games and download multiple games
- Battle Royale gamers are highly engaged with esports
And here are 2022’s splits by genre:
Ubisoft hypes Tencent deal in financials
The proportion of mobile revenue by net bookings at Ubisoft was down a little from 12% to 10% YOY, so hardly headline-grabbing stuff. But Ubisoft was very keen to talk up its partnership with Tencent for Assassin’s Creed: Codename Jade:
“It is one of the biggest publishing deals ever signed in the industry,” said the company. “It reflects the strength of our brands in a context of scarcity of high-quality IPs and, as such, our capacity to increasingly value our IPs. With Tencent being one of the industry’s leaders of the massive mobile segment, it also confirms our brands’ potential in the free-to-play market.”
Netflix barely even mentioned games in its financials
Not even a namecheck for its growing triple-A dream team or new comedy social game studio. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
