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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Blood Knight boosts Diablo Immortal downloads 400%
GameRefinery notes that Blizzard didn’t monetise the addition of this new character class in Diablo Immortal when it was introduced on July 13, which resulted in a 400% rise in downloads.
Maybe they should have found a way to do so – revenue was completely unaffected. The stat and above graph are based on US market data.
Monopoly Go event doubles daily revenue
Also from GameRefinery’s monthly trends round-up: a note on Monopoly Go’s recent coop event, Baking Partners, which doubled daily revenue in the US on iOS and kept trending upwards from there. The event ran from July 4-9, and involved players teaming up to bake cakes for rewards.
Rovio’s “soft quarter in a declining market”
Rovio chose to headline its own financial report using the term “Soft quarter in a declining market” – a refreshingly straightforward assessment.
In particular, it noted that Angry Birds 2 and Angry Birds Journey had a weaker than expected quarter, though Dream Blast is up significantly. There was some decline in its performance on the US market, too.
The Angry Birds maker is in the final stages of officially being bought out by Sega, and mentioned that two games, Moomin: Puzzle & Design (a match-and-build game) and Wizard Hero (a Vampire Survivors-alike) are coming soon. It also said that its Toronto team is building a new Angry Birds game for Apple Arcade.
This excellent graph in the financial report gives us a handy snapshot of Rovio’s games business as a whole:
More top-line numbers here:
- Rovio’s group revenue declined by 7.4% YoY to €72.6m ($79.2m)
- Group EBITDA was down YoY by 30.8% to €9.9m
- EBITDA margin decreased to 13.6% from 18.2 a year ago
- Games’ gross bookings declined by 8.1% to €140.8m ($153.5m)
- UA investments decreased to €45.2m from €52m, representing 31.3% of games’ revenue
Rovio also provided a snapshot of its DAU and monthly unique payer numbers. For Q223 it said it had 5.8m DAU and 446k monthly unique payers, but both metrics are broadly trending down:
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened hits $5m
This Warner-published edition of the CCG/RPG has been a hit in China but hasn’t made the same impact upon its western release. Released at the end of June, according to Appmagic it has now earned Warner $5m in total from 4m downloads.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to compare, but it’s worth noting that when the same game debuted in China in September 2021, it earned published Netease over $80m in its first month.
Applovin posts strong financials
Investors liked Applovin’s latest results – its share price shot up from ~$29 to ~$39 and has continued to hold since the results, announced last week.
The firm continues to focus on its ‘software platform’ business (read: marketing) rather than game publishing – the two divisions’ contrasting fortunes are clear in the graphs below, starting with its software platform:
And here’s its apps business:
More figures here:
- Q223 revenue was $750m, a YoY decrease of 3%
- Its ‘Software platform’ revenue increased to 54% of total revenue, up YoY from 41%
- Adjusted EBITDA increased 24% YoY to $334m
- Adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 44% from 35%
Block Blast Adventure Master hits 100m installs
A quick shout-out to the folks at Hungry Studio – its Tetris-inspired block puzzler has been a fixture in our regular monthly top downloads charts and it has just passed 100m lifetime downloads, according to Appmagic.
It is ad-based so it’s hard to discern how much money it’s making, but in terms of downloads it has been getting over 8m installs per month since March, and is most popular in India, US, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico.
Investors were underwhelmed by Roblox’s latest earnings – it was trading at around $37 before its Q223 financials arrived on August 9, but is now at around $30.
In short, revenue is trending upwards, but rising costs are causing uncertainty. This revenue graph shows Roblox’s continued revenue growth – up 15% YoY to $680.8m:
And DAU continues to broadly trend upwards, though it’s down a little on the previous quarter to 65.5m:
There’s actually a plethora of demographic and revenue data in the full report for those interested in more details.
Krafton invests $150m in India
Not long after India lifted a ban on Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India, the South Korean PUBG maker has announced it’ll be investing $150m in the Indian gaming ecosystem over the next two to three years.
It also announced its financial results in the last week, showing year-on-year declines across the board:
- Revenue was down 8.6% YoY to KRW 387.1bn ($290m)
- Operating profit was down 20.7% YoY to KRW 131.5bn ($90m)
- Net profit was down 33.7% YoY to KRW 128.5bn ($88m)
