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, PUBG Mobile and Free Fire dominate the shooter space
A recent GameRefinery report on the shooter genre says that just three games have cornered 80% of the US iOS market: COD Mobile, PUBG Mobile and Free Fire.
The data firm also estimated their respective average revenue per download (again, based on US iOS data), stating that Free Fire is way out ahead with around $29, followed by PUBG Mobile’s $12 and Call of Duty: Mobile’s $7.30. Why? Because Free Fire is more pay-to-win, offering character and weapon buffs. The other two mostly monetise cosmetics.
There are some good stats in the games section of MobileAction’s hefty 54 page report on mobile ad trends.
To start, there’s a breakdown of the top ad networks on both the App Store and Google Play. Facebook, Facebook Native, Messenger and Instagram Native are dominant on both:
It’s worth noting the huge difference between the number of creatives on the App Store versus Google Play – on iOS the largest number of creatives is 163k, while on Android it’s 453k.
There’s also a breakdown of the number of creatives by individual game on each platform:
Block Blast Adventure, 1945 – Airplane Shooting Game and Evony lead the way on iOS, while on Android Mighty Party is way ahead of closest rival Evony, which itself is just ahead of Lost Fortress: Underground.
There’s also a split of games by impressions. MobileAction says that on iOS Royal Match is over 2m impressions ahead of second placed Evony, while Lords Mobile leads the list on Google Play. The only game in the top five on both platforms is Evony, one of the most aggressive advertisers in the business.
Evony’s ‘pull the pin’ and Royal Match’s cascading match three ad creatives are noted for their success and use of ‘humorous failure’. The fact that the ad shows a player failing is part of the appeal – the viewer is confident they can do a better job.
UK firm Sumo Digital is dipping its toe into mobile with the acquisition of Knighthood and Plunder Pirates maker Midoki. So of course, we immediately went on Appmagic for estimates of how much those games have earned Midoki over the years.
Plunder Pirates, a Clash of Clans-alike, has generated around $7.4m from 3.2m downloads since it was launched way back in 2014. March 2020 release Knighthood has done pretty well, having generated over $20m from 7.9m downloads to date.
Monopoly Go’s ‘face-melting’ tech stats
We’re not going to pretend to understand most of this deep techy stuff but Scopely cofounder and CTO Ankur Bulsara has got a lot of traction on LinkedIn with a post about some of Monopoly Go’s operational stats. He says the game has:
– 2.1m DynamoDB writes per second during co-op
– 17m matchmaking queries per minute
– 30k segmentation requests per second
– 400TB of content downloaded per day over CDN
– 324GB per min through the load balancer during peak
Bulsara added that he’s proud to say this was achieved without ‘devops engineers, DBAs and sysadmins’, because of Scopely’s “you build it, you run it” culture. Again, we’re not 100% sure what all of this means, but it seems to have impressed folks in the comments.
Space Ape’s Chrome Valley Customs hits $10m
According to a LinkedIn post from Space Ape boss Simon Hade, the UK studio’s latest title Chrome Valley Customs is officially the UK studio’s biggest launch in 11 years, and has already raced past $10m in lifetime revenue. It was also the top grossing car game globally in August, says the post.
It got completely lost in the noise of Gamescom, but Lilith announced that its strategy game Warpath has reached 30m downloads across PC, iOS and Android. According to Appmagic‘s data, mobile downloads are at nearly 27m to date, and the game has earned Lilith $185.7m so far.
Hoyoverse tops mobile coverage at Gamescom
As you’d expect, the specialist press largely ignored mobile titles at Gamescom, with only Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero making it into the top 20 games by column inches, according to data firm Fancensus. Even Marvel Snap’s cameo during the Opening Night Live event wasn’t enough to boost it into the top 20 list.
Data and consultancy firm Niko Partners recently put out a report on Japanese players aged between 6-18.
It says most younger players are on console (72%) followed by mobile (64%) and then PC (15%).
Parents prefer kids to play on console because they feel they have greater visibility and control over the games. Younger Japanese players spend longer on mobile, though, compared to other formats – an average of eight hours per week on mobile, compared to 6.5 hours on PC and console.
