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Who Are the 'Game Subscription' Believers & Non-Believers?
The video game industry is currently divided regarding the long-term viability of premium subscription services.
- Major publishers like Electronic Arts are aggressively pursuing subscription models to secure direct player relationships, with EA reporting over 6.5 million paid subscribers.
- Industry leaders remain divided on monetization, as publishers like Take-Two argue that traditional premium ownership models offer superior economics compared to the uncertainty of subscription catalogs.
- Independent developers face a highly saturated market where they must compete against both high-budget AAA titles and a massive volume of hobbyist and semi-professional games.
Call for Data: Steam Game Revenue Over Time
The primary objective of this initiative is to gather anonymized revenue data from Steam developers to analyze long-term sales trends and revenue scaling.
- Steam wishlist-to-sales conversion rates for the first week declined from 10% in 2019 to 7.3% in 2020, indicating a trend of decreasing conversion efficiency.
- Games released on Steam in 2020 averaged 41 sales per review, with a typical performance range between 20 and 60 sales per review.
- The current data collection initiative aims to establish benchmarks for the 'long tail' of game revenue by analyzing performance from launch through the first three years.
Vacation-Based Dividends: Time Off in the Games Industry
The games industry operates on a seasonal cadence driven by major events and product deliverables, yet many organizations fail to align their labor practices with these natural fluctuations.
- Institutionalizing time off as a predictable dividend rather than a reactive measure is essential for retaining the highly specialized talent whose departure can cause eighteen-month recruitment and training setbacks.
- Major publishers like Riot Games and Epic Games have historically implemented company-wide breaks only as reactive responses to intense expansion or public scrutiny regarding crunch culture.
- Rapid valuation growth, such as Epic Games tripling its value to nearly $18 billion in two years, frequently leads to management errors that prioritize scale over employee well-being.
Rainbow Six Siege Hits New All-Time Concurrent Peak Players Record on Steam
Rainbow Six Siege achieved a significant milestone in February 2020, reaching a new all-time concurrent player record on the Steam platform.
- Rainbow Six Siege reached a new all-time concurrent player record of 178,419 on Steam as of February 23, 2020.
- The record-breaking player count for Rainbow Six Siege was achieved prior to the release of the 'Operation Void Edge' season, which was active on test servers at the time.
- The Steam concurrent player figures for Rainbow Six Siege do not account for the additional player base accessing the game through the Uplay platform.
Top Game Genres by Revenues and Downloads
This analysis examines the performance of mobile game genres by evaluating the 1,000 most downloaded and 1,000 highest-grossing titles over a 30-day period.
- The Asian mobile market (Tier-1 East) exhibits significantly higher average Lifetime Value (LTV) across game genres compared to Western markets, with top-performing titles like Fate/Grand Order reaching an LTV of $430.
- High-LTV genres are typically characterized by high production costs, requiring substantial content, complex mechanics, and premium technical quality, making them difficult to enter without significant investment.
- Tencent dominates the Tier-1 East market, with its title Honor of Kings accounting for 95% of the MOBA genre's performance and generating approximately $5 billion in revenue on iOS in China alone.
Playrix Annual Revenue to Surpass $1 Billion for First Time in 2019
The mobile game publisher Playrix is projected to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue from in-app purchases for the first time in 2019.
- Playrix is projected to surpass $1 billion in annual mobile revenue from in-app purchases for the first time in 2019.
- The company's core revenue is driven by four titles—Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Township, and Fishdom—each generating over $10 million monthly.
- Gardenscapes and Homescapes have achieved lifetime revenue milestones of $1.4 billion and $1 billion, respectively.
Paid Game Revenue Falls to All-Time Low on the App Store: Is Apple Arcade Having an Impact?
The premium mobile gaming market on the Apple App Store has experienced a sustained, long-term decline, reaching an all-time low in revenue share by late 2019.
- As of September 30, 2019, revenue from paid games on the iOS App Store fell to an all-time low of 1.8% of total game revenue.
- Annual premium game revenue has experienced a steady decline from $641.9 million (5.4% of total revenue) in 2015 to $337.3 million year-to-date as of September 2019.
- The volume of new premium game releases has dropped significantly, falling from 39,705 releases in 2014 (26.1% of all new games) to 3,255 in 2019 (7.3% of new launches).
How GameRefinery Helps Guide Decisions at Rovio
The primary purpose of this case study is to illustrate how mobile game developers utilize market intelligence platforms to inform product development and strategic decision-making.
- Rovio utilizes GameRefinery’s market data to inform product development decisions, such as validating the inclusion of gacha mechanics by confirming their high revenue impact in top-grossing titles.
- Product managers use the platform's Market Share tools to monitor competitor activity and identify viable categories for new projects within the mid-core segment, including 4X and RPG genres.
- The studio leverages visual analytics to determine optimal art styles for new games by benchmarking against the aesthetic choices of current top-grossing competitors.
This Time It’s Different: Why the Obsession?
The gaming industry frequently experiences cycles of hype surrounding new technologies, often characterized by the belief that a specific innovation will fundamentally disrupt the market.
- The gaming industry remains in robust health, evidenced by a 5% increase in spending on network full games during the first half of 2019.
- Cloud gaming is not a new concept, as the industry has seen previous attempts like OnLive (which failed in 2015) and existing services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce NOW.
- Stadia’s business model faces significant hurdles because, unlike Netflix, it requires users to purchase games individually rather than providing a comprehensive library for a flat subscription fee.
Game Stores: You Need More Real-Time Charts
The primary thesis of this analysis is that digital game storefronts should adopt more agile, real-time charting mechanisms to improve game discoverability.
- Steam’s algorithm-driven, real-time charts effectively allow games to gain visibility based on sales velocity, contrasting with the editorial-heavy models of console storefronts.
- Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation rely on manual curation and traditional publisher relationships, which often prevents independent titles from breaking out organically.
- As of August 2019, console storefronts largely operate under a legacy retail-first model rather than the data-driven, engineer-led approach utilized by Steam.
How Futureplay Leverage GameRefinery to Make the Right Games at the Right Time
Futureplay utilizes data-driven market intelligence to align game development with current industry trends, ensuring their titles achieve product-market fit.
- Futureplay utilizes a four-step market research framework—mapping, segmenting, positioning, and competitor analysis—to reduce the role of luck in game development and ensure product-market fit.
- The company successfully transitioned from idle games like 'Idle Farming Empire' (2015) to IAP-based titles like 'Battlelands Royale' by using data-driven insights to identify new growth opportunities.
- Market mapping involves filtering out segments that fall short of revenue goals or do not align with a studio's specific domain expertise and development capabilities.
It’s Time to Retire the LTV Metric
The traditional Lifetime Value (LTV) metric is increasingly obsolete for modern mobile marketing, as it fails to account for the complexities of the current mobile ecosystem.
- The LTV (Lifetime Value) metric is an anachronism in the modern mobile economy because long-term projections are fragile, unreliable, and difficult to validate against frequently updated products.
- Mobile marketers should shift their focus from abstract, long-term LTV calculations to managing cash flow and optimizing for specific payback windows.
- Advertisers are better served by buying traffic against early-stage ROAS benchmarks and iteratively adjusting bids as more data is accumulated to prove later-stage performance.