Sensor Tower: Card Battler in 2021 Report
Sub-genre is rapidly growing and Hearthstone is on the second place.
Card Battler is a sub-genre of strategic titles, based on Sensor Tower methodology. It’s responsible for 5% of Strategy genre revenue. As for the downloads, it’s responsible for 6% of overall Strategy genre downloads.
Users have spent $380M in H1 2021 in Card Battler games. In Q1 2021 sub-genre showed 17% growth YoY.
As for the downloads, it’s the fastest-growing Strategy sub-genre. In Q2 2021 downloads increased by 23%, compared to Q1 2021.
Sub-genre popularity is growing in the US. 18% of revenue was coming from this region in 2019, while in H1 2021 the US market was responsible for 27% of the whole sub-genre revenue. The Chinese region is enlarging too - from 14% in 2019 to 17% in H1 2021.
RPD Metric (Revenue Per Download) in Card Battler is resulting in $17 in the US. On average, this metric is $9 across all genres worldwide. Card Battlers is the fastest-growing Strategy sub-genre by this metric (+53% YoY). Only shooters (+54% YoY) and Action games (+74% YoY) are showing better growth.
The top growing sub-genre game is Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. In H1 2021 it got $110M - 33% of this sum came from Japan, 27% - from the US.
6 out of 10 top-grossing Card Battler projects are earning the majority of revenue from the Asian markets.