GameRefinery shared IP collaboration results for various titles. Talking Tom & Friends is the most popular franchise of the last decade based on data.ai research. Pokemon Scarlet & Violet setting record after record.
This week:
- Niko Partners: Asian Market in 2022 and its future (without mainland China)
- Pokemon Scarlet & Violet are the fastest-selling games in Nintendo’s history
- GfK: Pokemon Scarlet & Violet set a record in the UK retail
- data.ai: Talking Tom & Friends is the most popular mobile franchise of the last decade
- StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg: Streaming market in October 2022
- GameRefinery: How Halloween events helped downloads and revenue of mobile titles
- God of War Ragnarok became the best-selling first-party title in PlayStation history
- GameRefinery: IP-collaborations effect on Mobile Games Downloads & Revenue
- AppsFlyer: D30 Retention in games is declining for 3rd year straight
- Apptica: Paid Promotion trends in mobile games in Q3 2022
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Niko Partners: Asian Market in 2022 and its future (without mainland China)
The research is covering Chinese Taipei, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
- Ten mentioned Asian countries will generate $35.9B in 2022. The revenue will increase to $41.4B in 2026.
- 77% of revenue comes from two countries – Japan and South Korea. In 2022 the revenue of Japan declined by 2.6% YoY, while South Korea’s revenue was flat.
- India (+31.9% YoY), Indonesia (+10.5% YoY), and Thailand (+9.5% YoY) are the fastest-growing countries in the region by revenue.
- The number of gamers is increasing faster than revenue. In 2022 in mentioned countries will be 788.7M gamers. In 2026 their amount will reach 1.06B.
- 50.2% of gamers are in India. It’s 396.4M players.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet are the fastest-selling games in Nintendo’s history
- Two versions of the same game (this is the Nintendo strategy) sold 10M copies in just 3 days both physically and digitally.
- Just in two days games earned more in the UK more, than any other Pokemon franchise in the country.
- Despite financial success, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet has its problems. Players are complaining about bugs and graphics.
GfK: Pokemon Scarlet & Violet set a record in the UK retail
- The game managed to sell in the debut week 4% better than FIFA 23.
- By retail copies sales, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet is in second place after Pokemon Sun & Moon. But money-wise it’s first (Scarlet & Violet price is £48 versus £35 for Sun & Moon).
- Pokemon Violet is responsible for 52% of sales, Scarlet – for 42%, and double-pack has been bought by 6% of users.
- The successful launch of Pokemon Scarlet & Violet increased the Nintendo Switch sales by 62% compared to the previous week. It’s helped Nintendo to set a new weekly record for console sales.
- God of War Ragnarok sales dropped by 73% to the previous week. The game is now in the 4th place on the UK chart.
data.ai: Talking Tom & Friends is the most popular mobile franchise of the last decade
- Talking Tom & Friends games have been downloaded more than 10 billion times from 2013 to 2022. They’ve been leaders every year by downloads.
- Candy Crush Saga, PUBG, and Angry Birds were other leaders over the years.
- Outfit7 was the leader in the number of games in the top 100 by MAU in 2021. The company had 7 projects on the list.
- The company’s MAU is increasing from year to year. Now more than 470M users play Talking Tom & Friends games monthly.
StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg: Streaming market in October 2022
The number of views on Twitch in October 2022 reached 1.79B hours. Two months before the pandemic Twitch set a record of 1B hours. It seems that even if there is a decline to March 2021 (2.2B hours watched), post-COVID results are much better than in 2019.
Facebook Gaming increased the number of hours watched in September and reached 342M hours. YouTube Gaming is declining third consecutive month with 272M hours watched in October.
Overwatch 2 made a debut in Twitch charts in 3rd place (133M hours) behind “Just chatting” and League of Legends categories. The best result of the first game was #5 in the rating.
GameRefinery: How Halloween events helped downloads and revenue of mobile titles
tal
- Hallow’s Wake event helped to spike the revenue at the moment. However, it didn’t help to change the overall trend of declining revenue of the title.
Mario Kart World Tour
- Halloween Tour helped get 2x more IAP revenue on launch day. Moreover, after the launch, the overall revenue was higher than before the event despite the usual inflation effect.
Gran Saga
- The Mirage Nightmare event helped the game to get 400%+ revenue at the launch. The trend normalized only in the first days of November, after which an additional event was launched, that helped to increase the revenue.
More about updates can be found in the GameRefinery material.
God of War Ragnarok became the best-selling first-party title in PlayStation history
- The game sold 5.1M copies in the first week of sales.
- It’s the best result in both series history and PlayStation first-party history.
- The previous record was set by The Last of Us: Part II. Naughty Dog’s game reached 4M copies in the first week.
- The previous God of War franchise record was set in 2018, by… God of War (2018). 3.1M copies have been sold in 3 days back then.
GameRefinery: IP-collaborations effect on Mobile Games Downloads & Revenue
zzle & Dragons + One Piece Film Red
- After the beginning of the event, daily downloads increased by 8x times (from 2.5 thousand to 20 thousand per day).
- Revenue increased by 11.5x times – from $80k to $920k per day. It’s important to mention that the high revenue was stable during the whole collaboration event.
Mobile Legends Bang Bang + Kung Fu Panda
- Collaboration results were much worse than with Hello Kitty (March) and Transformers (June). The revenue increase was barely noticeable.
GameRefinery explains it with two critical moments:
- Kung Fu Panda IP is overall weaker. The last film was released in 2016.
- The event performance was weaker due to several game design changes.
PUBG Mobile + Evangelion
- Downloads increased by 2.5x times (from 10 thousand to 25 thousand per day).
- Daily revenue increased by 2x times (from $200k to $400k) and was high during the event.
Cookie Run: Kingdom + BTS
GameRefinery tracked the collaboration effect in the US market.
- Collaboration with a boys’ band from Korea helped the game to increase daily downloads by 4x times (from 2.5k to 10k).
- Revenue increased by 8.3x times (from $18k to $150k).
Analytics are mentioning, that IP collaboration can bring significant positive results even in non-target markets.
AppsFlyer: D30 Retention in games is declining for 3rd year straight
- The average D30 Retention in games declined from 3% in Q3 2022 to 2.4% in Q3 2022. It’s the 20% downgrade.
- Android Retention of all days is decreasing in all categories. iOS is much more stable in these terms.
- Countries with the highest D30 Retention (not only games) are Japan (5.3%), Canada (3.7%), and South Korea with Australia (3.6%).
Apptica: Paid Promotion trends in mobile games in Q3 2022
Android
- 26 out of the top 30 games have used paid UA.
- On average, each advertiser is using from 4 to 6 ad networks.
- 41.6% of ads in the top 30 are using Meta. Unity Ads (20.8%) and Admob (13.1%) are next.
- 7 out of 26 advertisers in the top 30 have used only images as creatives.
- 9 out of 26 advertisers in the top 30 have used all 3 types of creatives – images, videos, and Playable ads.
- 78.1% of all creatives in the top 30 are videos. Playable Ads have a share of only 4.8%.
iOS
- 23 out of the top 30 games used the paid UA.
- 86.8% of advertisers in the top 30 have used Meta. It’s the main channel. The second place has Unity Ads (4%), and the third is Chartboost (2.9%).
- 90.8% of all creatives in the top 30 are videos.
- Only 1.08% of creatives in the top 30 on iOS are Playable Ads.
- Advertisers on iOS are making about 4.5x more creatives than on Android.
