This is an expanded version of last week’s Mobilegamer.biz newsletter. If you’ve not subscribed already, do so below – and if you find my work useful, you can contribute monthly or yearly.
I asked over 40 well-known mobilegamer.biz readers to pick their favourite game of the year earlier this month, and the results were published throughout last week.
It wasn’t a particularly scientific or comprehensive study, sure – but the results were fascinating. The top pick by a distance was Monopoly Go, and rightly so: it’s an absolute smash.
Scopely seems to have a great deal of goodwill across this business, and 2023 feels like the year it finally landed the mega-hit it has been working towards all this time.
If you’ve worked in mobile for any number of years, you’ve probably either worked at Scopely at some point, or are friends with someone who has, so that helps gather a few votes. And if you’re going to build a breakout hit, it’s another plus that you have a proven success like Coin Master to build upon, a terrific licence and an influx of cash from a new Saudi owner for a beefy UA spend.
So bravo, Scopely – imagine, at this point, some rousing music swelling in the background as a besuited exec strides onto a stage, picks up a gong, thanks their hard-working team, and departs to a standing ovation.
We’ve covered Monopoly Go’s spectacular rise extensively in the past year. First, just as it was breaking out, we asked some game design experts to take a look at if Monopoly Go could beat Coin Master at its own game – and currently, the answer appears to be a resounding ‘yes’.
Then, we spoke to Scopely GM and product VP Massimo Maietti about Monopoly Go’s genesis, its big pivot and the three years of iteration that followed.
And finally, we managed to cause quite a kerfuffle with our story about Monopoly Go’s UA spend. We asked around and got estimates ranging from $300k per day up to a wild $4.5m, with one commentator questioning whether any of this was profitable. Scopely responded by telling us that “Monopoly Go is currently one of the most profitable mobile games” and that its UA spend is “smart, not unfettered”. Read more here.
The next most popular games among our esteemed panel of readers were Century Games’ Whiteout Survival and Blizzard’s Warcraft Rumble.
The former, Whiteout Survival, is frankly not a game that has hit the headlines all that much. But its smart, subtle evolution of some tried-and-trusted idle and 4x strategy mechanics clearly won a lot of you over this year – we’ll endeavour to take a closer look at this one in 2024.
Warcraft Rumble got just as many votes, and seems to be the top choice from a pure gameplay perspective. There are plenty of old-school WoW fans in this business, so that helps, but as the folks at Naavik recently pointed out, the game has perhaps not caught fire in the way its developer would have wanted.
We’ve also covered this game’s launch a fair bit; you can read more about whether our panel of game design experts think it’s a hit or a miss here, which preceded a decent first week that earned Blizzard $8m, according to Appmagic estimates.
But of the 40-plus people that cast a GOTY vote, why just the one nod for Honkai: Star Rail? It has had a wildly lucrative launch year, just like Monopoly Go, and is a much richer game experience overall.
A quick theory on this: perhaps it’s because Mihoyo’s games are effectively in a league of their own? They’re so vast and expensive to make that no western developer is able to compete, and so perhaps they don’t give those games that much thought – or even see themselves as playing in the same space.
Whatever the reason for its lack of votes, Mihoyo isn’t about to stop pumping out these kinds of games, despite Star Rail’s apparent cannibalisation of Genshin Impact earlier this year.
In 2024, Zenless Zone Zero will take that formula into more stylised sci-fi territory – and could well be among the top earners of next year.
There’s also Activision’s Warzone Mobile coming in the spring, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Jade will be a fascinating launch. As for the rest of 2024’s contenders, will King go global with Candy Crush 3D? Will Supercell finally take Clash Mini global? Or indeed Mo.Co or Squad Busters?
Mobilegamer.biz will be there reporting on it all throughout 2024 with our unique and exclusive insights (and maybe even an expanded team of writers). So subscribe to the newsletter now to ensure you keep up with what’s going down in the mobile game business.
