Weekly Gaming Reports Recap: October 2 - October 6 (2023)
data.ai highlighted the state of the mobile market in Q3 2023; Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty cost $63M in development; 67% of Steam games are earning less than $5k.
Articles of this week:
The launch of EA Sports FC 24 is one of the most significant moments in EA's history
Reports of this week:
Township celebrates its 10th Anniversary - Playrix shares key figures
data.ai: League of Legends: Wild Rift surpasses $1B in revenue
data.ai: State of the mobile market in Q3 2023
Steam: Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, and Cyberpunk 2077 are the most popular games on Steam Deck in September
Monster Hunter Now has become Niantic's third-highest-grossing game in history
Gamalytic: 67% of games on Steam earned less than $5k
Sensor Tower: Goddess of Victory: Nikke surpassed $500M milestone
CD Projekt RED: Development of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty cost $63M
The launch of EA Sports FC 24 is one of the most significant moments in EA's history
What happened
FIFA and EA were unable to reach an agreement to extend the license for using the FIFA brand. There were two reasons - according to reports from journalists, FIFA demanded a two-fold increase in annual fees (from $150-180 million to $300-360 million) and the removal of exclusivity for using the brand in games.
EA was the largest licensing partner by revenue for FIFA.
EA's conditions upon the name change
The new installment of the football simulator will be called EA Sports FC 24, not FIFA 24.
FIFA is a global leader in its genre. In the 2022 fiscal year, the series generated $2.6 billion in revenue. The net profit from the Ultimate Team mode increased from $26 million in the 2010 fiscal year to $1 billion in 2020.
Ampere Analysis reports that the total Monthly Active Users (MAU) for FIFA games in August 2023 is 31 million users. FIFA 23 has 22 million, while FIFA 22 has 5 million. The rest play older games in the series.
What is happening now
EA Sports FC 24 was released on September 29th. The release became the second highest-selling game in the UK in its first week, following The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. However, the overall physical sales are 30% lower than FIFA 23 at launch.
To draw conclusions, it would be appropriate to wait for complete sales data. We need to look at the distribution of physical and digital versions.
Ending the partnership with FIFA forced EA to remove all previous games in the series from stores. Now, only EA Sports FC 24 is available for purchase.
EA has decided to disable online functionality for FIFA 21 and earlier games in the series. Traditionally, the company maintained servers for 5 years. Thus, the company likely wants to motivate the old audience to upgrade to EA Sports FC 24.
EA's management has stated that part of the "freed up" $150-180 million will be spent on marketing the game.
FIFA has announced that it is actively seeking partners who can develop football games.
Risks
The biggest risk for EA is the loss of the FIFA brand name. Many buyers purchased games from the series because of the familiar abbreviation. EA is likely to lose some "casual" buyers who are not fans of the series. Otherwise, the company still has everything except the brand.
For FIFA, the situation looks much bleaker. The company has lost its main business partner, and there are no developers of football simulators in the market except for Konami and Strikerz. Moreover, surpassing EA in terms of technical infrastructure will be practically impossible.
Township celebrates its 10th Anniversary - Playrix shares key figures
The game's revenue over 10 years has surpassed $2.1 billion.
The total number of downloads has exceeded 600 million, and the game's DAU hovers around 5 million users.
The team has grown from 20 people in 2013 to 130 people in 2023.
Over the course of 10 years of operation, the team has organized more than 50 unique events.
Township - Playrix's first global hit. Initially, the game was released on Facebook and was later ported to mobile devices.
data.ai: League of Legends: Wild Rift surpasses $1B in revenue
The game was globally released in December 2020.
League of Legends: Wild Rift has reached the 4th position among the highest-earning MOBA games in history. Honor of Kings, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and Arena of Valor are ahead of it.
In terms of active users, the game is behind the games as mentioned above as well as Pokemon UNITE.
The game has been downloaded more than 111 million times to date. In the past year alone, 22.4 million users joined, most coming from China, Vietnam, and Brazil.
In the first half of 2023, the game earned $188 million, securing the 3rd place in its genre. $141 million came from China and $8.2 million from the United States.
data.ai: State of the mobile market in Q3 2023
Overall Figures
The mobile app market continues to recover from 2022. Revenue from mobile apps (both gaming and non-gaming) reached $33.6 billion in the third quarter of 2023.
However, the share of games is decreasing. In the third quarter of 2023, games earned $20 billion, which is $0.3 billion less than the same quarter in 2022.
The iOS gaming segment declined from $12.5 billion in the third quarter of 2022 to $11.8 billion in Q3 2023. In contrast, Google Play showed growth, increasing from $7.8 billion to $8.2 billion during the same period.
❗️ data.ai may underestimate the revenue of the mobile gaming market since it does not track payments outside of the App Store and Google Play. Many large companies are now diverting some payments from these platforms to reduce commission fees.
Downloads of all types of apps have plateaued. In the third quarter of 2023, there were 38.4 billion app downloads.
Games, in terms of download numbers, even increased by 0.1 billion in the third quarter of 2023, reaching 15.1 billion downloads. Downloads increased, albeit slightly, on both iOS and Android.
Top Games of the Q3 2023
Royal Match became the highest-earning game by the end of the third quarter. Dream Games managed to surpass Candy Crush Saga, Honor of Kings, ROBLOX, and Monopoly GO.
Leaders in terms of downloads are Garena Free Fire, Subway Surfers, and ROBLOX.
ROBLOX, Garena Free Fire, and Candy Crush Saga are the largest games in terms of Monthly Active Users (MAU).
Steam: Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, and Cyberpunk 2077 are the most popular games on Steam Deck in September
The higher a game is in the rankings, the more hours users spend playing it.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the leader by a significant margin.
Interestingly, the list has quite a lot of recent releases. Let’s note that Steam Deck only delivers 30fps on low to medium graphics settings, and in the case of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, there are control issues. It seems people are willing to tolerate poor graphics or technical shortcomings to play anywhere.
Monster Hunter Now has become Niantic's third-highest-grossing game in history
According to data.ai, the game has already earned $21.5 million. It has surpassed Pikmin Bloom ($19.7 million) but lags behind Harry Potter: Wizards Unite ($39.4 million) and, of course, Pokémon GO ($5.12 billion).
Nearly 70% of the revenue comes from Japan, followed by Hong Kong (11.5%) and the United States (6%).
Monster Hunter Now was launched on September 14th.
Within three weeks of its release, the game was downloaded 8.58 million times.
In terms of downloads, the United States is leading (accounting for 51.5% of all downloads), followed by Japan (10.6%) and Taiwan (3.8%).
The share of paid traffic increased after the first week, despite a drop in organic traffic.
Gamalytic: 67% of games on Steam earned less than $5k
Currently, more than 71,000 games are on sale on Steam. 67% of them earned less than $5k; 17.2% earned between $k and $50k; 6.9% earned between $50k and $200k; 8.9% earned over $200k.
Over the past 3 years, over 41,000 games have been released on Steam, which accounts for 58% of the current total. Approximately 40 new games are released each day at the moment.
If we only consider games released in the last 3 years, the situation looks even worse. 76.5% of these games earned less than $5k; 13.4% earned between $5k and $50k; 4.5% earned between $50k and $200k. Only 5.6% generated revenue exceeding $200k.
Half of the games released in the last 3 years (excluding free ones) did not surpass the $700 mark. If you exclude very cheap games priced under $5, the median revenue will increase to $4k. If you remove projects priced under $10, the revenue will rise even higher, up to $17k.
However, the number of games, in absolute numbers, that earned more than $10k in the first 3 months, is increasing each year. In 2019, there were 1,271 such projects, in 2020 - 1,649, in 2021 - 1,850, and 2022 - already 2,067.
77% of games on Steam are sold for less than $10, and only 5% of all games on the platform have a price higher than $20.
Survival games with open-world crafting, colony simulators, 4X strategies, city builders, and management games have the highest median revenue.
Sensor Tower: Goddess of Victory: Nikke surpassed $500M milestone
It took just under 10 months from its release in November 2022 to reach this significant milestone.
Japan leads in revenue, accounting for 60.5% of all earnings. Following are the United States (14.9%) and South Korea (12.1%).
Goddess of Victory: Nikke has become the most profitable Squad RPG in terms of cumulative revenue from November 4, 2022, to September 3, 2023.
Developers actively utilize intellectual property in promoting the project. Collaboration with Chainsaw Man increased sales by 136%, and thanks to cooperation with Nier: Automata, daily revenue soared by 215%.
The game has made a significant contribution to Tencent's (Level Infinite) international revenue. Goddess of Victory: Nikke accounts for approximately 7.5% of the company's total revenue outside of China.
CD Projekt RED: Development of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty cost $63M
Marketing added an additional $21.7 million to the budget.
Sales of the expansion have already surpassed the 3 million copies mark. In terms of profitability, it seems that the Polish studio only needs to recoup the marketing expenses.
67% of Phantom Liberty expansion sales were on PC; 20% on PlayStation 5; 13% on Xbox Series S|X.
Reportedly, 360 employees from the studio worked on the development of the DLC, and slightly over 3,000 people were involved from outsourcing companies.
Total sales of Cyberpunk 2077 have exceeded 25 million copies. The last 5 million were sold after June 2022.
❗️The company plans to continue making games in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. A new project with the codename Project Orion is in the concept stage.
Alongside the success of the expansion, CD Projekt RED announced that they are working on a live-action film set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Previously, the company released Cyberpunk: Edgerunners in collaboration with Netflix.