Hogwarts Legacy became the elite $1B+ club member; SocialPeta shared Mobile Marketing trends in Q1 2023; The UK Gaming market declined in April 2023.
This week:
- Hogwarts Legacy earned $1B+ in Q1 2023
- SocialPeta: Mobile Game Marketing Trends in Q1 2023
- Tenjin: Hypercasual and Hybridcasual Market in 2022 Report
- AppMagic: Top Mobile Games by Revenue & Downloads in April 2023
- GSD: The UK Gaming market in April declined
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Hogwarts Legacy earned $1B+ in Q1 2023
Warner Bros. Discovery published a report about Q1 2023 results, which shared the game achievements.
- $850M has been earned in the first two weeks after the release. The game launched on February 10 earned more than $1B in the first quarter.
- By the end of March, the number of sales reached 15M copies. 12M of them have been sold in the first two weeks.
- In Q1 2023 Hogwarts Legacy generated 9% of the whole Warner Bros. Discovery revenue.
SocialPeta: Mobile Game Marketing Trends in Q1 2023
- 92.22% of advertisers (48.9k) in Q1 2023 used new creatives.
- 7.8M new creatives have been published in the market in Q1 2023. The share of new creatives was 67.01%.
- The number of creatives in the casual genre increased by 12.33% YoY. Casual games are responsible for 32.68% of all creatives. Puzzles (12.12% – decline by 1.91% YoY) and RPG (9.01% – decline by 2.02% YoY) are next.
- The number of advertisers in casual games increased by 2.29% YoY – to 29.16% in Q1 2023. Puzzles are second (12.07% of advertisers, growth by 0.26% YoY); the Simulation genre is third (9.55% of advertisers, growth of 0.02%).
- The largest amount of monthly active advertisers is in the US – 12.7k. Leaders by a number of creatives for advertisers are Asian countries.
- The number of advertisers on Android increased dramatically in Q1 2023 – from 62% in Q4 2022 to 69.69%. The share of iOS advertisers decreased accordingly from 38% in Q4 2022 to 30.31% in Q1 2023.
- 82.97% of all creatives in Q1 2023 has been videos; 13.56% – images; 2.17% – Playable; 1.3% – other types of creatives. Since Q1 2022 the number of impressions on videos and images is decreasing.
Trends by genre
- The number of advertisers in casual games in all regions increased from 80% to 144% in a year. This comes with the fact that in 2022 casual games dropped in downloads for the first time.
- The “Roguelike + casual gameplay” formula seemed to work for hit games in 2022 and Q1 2023.
- The competition on mobile devices in the strategy genre increased. Growth of revenue slowed, but the number of new advertisers increased by 64% YoY in the US.
- The RPG genre in 2022 has been struggling. Revenue decreased by 16%. SocialPeta thinks that the interest in the genre is cooling down.
- The simulation genre is stagnating in revenue and downloads despite the growth of advertisers by 50%+ YoY in all regions.
- Mobile casinos are growing in revenue but staying on a plateau in downloads. The number of advertisers in Latin America grew by 181% YoY – it might be the next big region for the genre.
Tenjin: Hypercasual and Hybridcasual Market in 2022 Report
The data has been collected from January to December 2022.
2022 trends
- Ad Impressions in 2022 dropped by 10% on Android and by 20% on iOS.
- eCPM on Android declined by 28%; iOS decrease was 35%.
- The number of IAP purchases increased by 37% on Android; iOS grew by 34%.
Ad networks ratings
- AppLovin, Mintegral, Google Ads – leaders by downloads on Android. Mintegral, AppLovin, and ironSource – leaders on iOS.
- AppLovin, ironSource, and Google Ads are ad networks with the highest average D1 Retention on Android. It’s Meta, AppLovin, and Google Ads for iOS.
- The best average D7 Retention on Android showed users from ironSource, Google Ads, and AppLovin. On iOS – users from Apple Search Ads, ironSource, and AppLovin.
- The best users by D7 Ad LTV on Android are from ironSource, Unity Ads, and Google Ads. On iOS – from Apple Search Ads, ironSource, AppLovin.
- D7 IAP LTV rating on Android looks as follows: Meta, Google Ads, TikTok. On iOS – Apple Search Ads, Meta, TikTok.
Country ratings
- Leaders by downloads on Android are India, Brazil, and the US. On iOS – the US, China, and Japan.
- The top countries by ad revenue on Android are the US, Japan, and the UK. A similar picture is on iOS. It’s worth mentioning that #4 on Android by ad revenue is Brazil.
- The US, Australia, and the UK are the top countries by IAP purchases on Android and iOS. The only difference is that on iOS Australia is third, and the UK is second.
Best Ad Monetization sources
- Leaders on both iOS, and Android, by overall ads revenue, are AppLovin, Google AdMob, and Unity Ads.
- The largest average eCPM on Android was provided by Meta Audience, Unity Ads, and ironSource. iOS leaders are ironSource, Unity Ads, and Liftoff.
AppMagic: Top Mobile Games by Revenue & Downloads in April 2023
Revenue
- Genshin Impact moved Candy Crush Saga from second place.
- Homescapes returned to the top 10 titles by revenue on iOS and Android.
- Honkai: Star Rail earned $28M in April, which was not enough to enter the top 10. Now the game is earning about $4M daily with a slight downward trend.
Downloads
- The downloads chart is much more livelier than revenue – in April there were 6 new games.
- MONOPOLY GO! from Scopely has been downloaded 14.1M times in April. 7.5M came from Android; 6.6M – from iOS.
- Drawing Carnival from CrazyLabs – the game in which you need to draw images by contours – generated 12.2M downloads (12M – Android; 0.2M – iOS).
- My11Circle – a fantasy sports app from India – has been downloaded 11.9M times in April. All downloaded were on Android.
- Honkai: Star Rail – a new hit title from miHoYo Games – earned 12.4M downloads in April. The game managed to become #1 by downloads on iOS (7.6M downloads), on Android, it didn’t work to enter even the top 10 (4.8M downloads).
- Tencent released Metal Slug Awakening in China – the game reached #9 place on the iOS chart with 3.2M downloads.
GSD: The UK Gaming market in April declined
GSD is reporting only the fact sales numbers were received from partners. There are partners (like Nintendo), who are not sharing the digital sales numbers, which might affect the overall picture.
Games
- 2.2M games on PC & Consoles have been sold in April 2023. It’s 8% lower than a year before.
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor become the leader by sales – it performed 31% better than Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order after the first week. The digital sales share of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is 66% – the predecessor had 36%.
- Dead Island 2 was second by sales.
- However, even combined, the top two sellers of April 2023 were unable to reach LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga’s results of April 2022.
Consoles & accessories
- 111k consoles have been sold in the UK in April 2023. It’s 20% higher than the last year, but 20% lower than a month before.
- PlayStation 5 is the leader by sales, Nintendo Switch is second; Xbox Series S|X is third.
- Sales of PlayStation 5 dropped by 35% to the previous month but grew by 15% YoY. Xbox Series S|X experienced a MoM decline of 32%, and growth to the previous year by 8%.
- Nintendo is feeling great. Nintendo Switch sales are up by 26% MoM and by 30% to the previous year with the release of a console’s limited Zelda edition (which generated 29% of all sales).
- 487k accessories have been sold in April 2023 – it’s 21% lower than in March, and 6% lower than the last year. The most popular device sold was the white DualSense.
