Destiny Rising Is Here, But Where Are the Downloads?

[Music] Okay, Destiny Rising is out. If you remember, this is the game from Netis. It is out globally. It is based, of course, on Bungie's fabled franchise, which we have yet to hear much about in the wake of Marathon. And so, what is going on with this game? What is happening? So, I think the first thing you have to do to kind of really understand where this game is at is to figure out where the US shooter market is. And that means pulling the top games from Sensor Tower. And so, we're looking at that chart right now. And as you can see, in the US gaming market, shooters are irrelevant except for Call of Duty. So, very quick analysis. This game is irrelevant to the West, which is why they ship it out to Netis. Call of Duty Mobile, just as a quick refresher, has 7 million MAU in the United States. And the next game is Delta Force at 950. And I'm sure that's still on fumes from the initial launch. And everything else is basically just hyper casual trash except

for number nine, which is Warframe, which if you remember was another dual skew product and is also irrelevant because HD Studios don't know how to do user acquisition. So then the question is like why is this game relevant? Why would you go out and make this? Well, the answer is very simple. China loves mobile shooters. In fact, they love shooters
more than Germany. potentially potentially and so shooters on mobile in China have been on absolute tear if you remember PUBG Mobile is one of the biggest games in the world really run out of China by 10 cent Delta Force has had a enormous level of success in China it's hard to understate it it's it is hard to get good numbers by the way again I want to do our usual asterisk that when we're looking at China numbers we're only looking at iOS which does not paint the whole picture even in the slightest nartners does a lot of further analysis on a lot of these numbers You can see there's usually pretty big gaps, but we do the best we can. If we do launch over launch comparisons in China on iOS between these top shooters, looking at Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG

Mobile, Delta Force, there's also Valerant Mobile. Remember we were talking about that last week, which is another big launch. You can also compare it to Destiny Rising, and we can see how these games stack up. Well, Call of Duty Mobile has been in a league of its own. I just want to say this is one of the biggest launches of all time, and I don't think we did enough analysis on it. 80 million downloads after one month in China on iOS alone. PUBG Mobile was at 23 million. Delta Force at 12. Valerant at five, which seems very low to me, especially. I think they reported around 70 million pre-registrations. Pre-registration is just complete number by the way. This has basically become wish lists. People are just pumping up these numbers.
And Destiny Rising is in last with 900,000 downloads. Again, it's just one small, you know, part of the picture, but I think this at least gives you a sense of the level of capital that's being invested. Now, Tensa did come out and say they're investing a ton of money into Valerant Mobile, which I think is a very smart play. If you remember Crossfire, right, the Chinese knockoff of CS:GO, which has kind of become its own thing, its own IP, still is really successful on HD and mobile in

China. And so, I think this is Valerant's attempt to go after the same thing they did in the US market, which was Counter-Strike Go. And remember, they didn't really take market share from Counter-Strike Go. They increased the share of the pie. And so, I'm really curious if they'll do the same here. But so far, I don't know. It just feels kind of lackluster.
On your first chart, when we when you talk shooters, do you count the BR games, battle royale games, like so Fortnite,
okay, Knives Alowl, Freef Fire,
I mean, I just didn't see any of those, which are US,
remember this is US. Those games are usually big. Like Garina Freefire is really big in LAM, although they're making they had a huge ship in crossover, Naruto, Shipin crossover. I mean, that was another collab we didn't cover that we should probably talk about next week. was an enormous success. And only that, you got to remember Brazil has a small Japanese population. I mean, there's a million things we talked about. They love
Where's Where's PUBG on this list, though?
Yeah. I thought like PUBG, even though it's US, I thought they still ranked by
Oh, by Dio. All right. Well, and

Fortnite's back, maybe it just hasn't come back enough yet. Is that because it's still
Well, in the US, it won't be here in the US.
Could have been how it's categorized on Sensor Tower. We can we can do a double check.
Yeah. No, just I'm just curious. First person versus third person is also another disambiguation that can happen here. We're looking at first person.
Although Warframe doesn't really count. Uh there's a lot we could go over with some of this.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if you guys have downloaded the game. It is absolutely visually stunning. Like it is insane. And actually the gameplay is really good. Like for a shooter it's auto fire. I mean if you choose to. I'll be honest. I only played like the first like 30 minutes. So I I didn't get into it. All I really wanted to do was download it on PC and play it with keyboard mouse. I was like, I love Destiny, dude. I'm a huge huge fan. I just don't think there's a market for this in the West. And I think I agree with your assessment that if it does well, it's going to do well in the East. And so far, it's not doing anything. It almost feels like they put this out to die. Like, they did not support this the same way they have other shooters in the past and other

releases. So, I'm not really quite sure what is going on on this one, but the amount of money and effort and time and manpower to make something like this is insane, right? The fidelity is insane. I mean, it is crazy. So, God, I love Destiny. I wish I wish they were doing better in terms of execution, but yeah, I don't know.
And Bungie and Sony wouldn't carve out minimum guarantees
an MG overall or marketing spend.
Minimum marketing spend for a game like this. Typically there would be a marketing spend commitment. People are hearing about it. I mean when I talk to people people are talking about so that's what I'm saying like there's a little bit of a buzz and I don't know I looked at sensor tower after 4 days which is nothing right but it was was only 840k downloads and I did see crest however 2.3 million in revenue in 4 days. I was like uh
yeah but that
I know it's so difficult when a game first launches for those numbers to be solid. So you agree it's too early. You know, Phil, to your point, a 10 million

prerege, which in today's world, prerege actually, I haven't been seeing as many people pump prerege like the Squadbuster year, like uh when was that, 2024, 2023 when it was like 40 million prerege, and we all know that between, you know, only 10 to 20% of those actually download when you when you get there.
Let me step take a step back. When we talked about the Call of Duty Mobile launch, because we were like really on top of that because we're covering on the podcast. They spent a gajillion dollars on this game launch and they had no monetization in this game. Like absolutely none. Like the numbers were pathetic, right? And they put it in later, right? That is an example of an Asian launch in which they're super supporting it. Bring the audience in, they'll come and pay later when we add a bunch of right? Like like that's what happened with Call of Duty and it worked. And I was goddamn dead wrong on that one because I I was seeing the early numbers. I'm like this is terrible, right? This is the exact opposite. They are not supporting this thing at all. The only downloads they're getting are from people

that love Destiny. You know, the pre-g people, the people that are fans of Destiny, and that's probably why you see the revenue numbers are a little bit higher than the downloads and and the RPIs look good. But this is a pathetic number in terms of downloads. And that number is relatively accurate because you're comparing it against companies that they have. So, this feels like they're leaving it to die, right? Like they just want to get this thing out. It's like part of their devesture out of like all the games that are being built west for the west type or things.
Yeah, this was built in the west. Are you sure about this though?
No, no, I sorry. They're devesting a lot of the the deals that they have put in place over the years unwinding all the work from the net perspective. So, you're right. this definitely build in the east but they probably want that team to be focused on other things you know like
but Chris is this a case where so Call of Duty was 2018 2019 I think I was at Riot when that launched and we were planning to launch all of our Riot mobile games and we're like holy how much did they just spend and it it was it was difficult to look at what they were spending versus what I had in

my pocketbook but in this case you know we've talked many times that the way to launch a game is different now that it's slow when study wins the race that you have to make sure you don't have a leaky bucket that you are going to kind of grow over time and you're not going to launch huge and I don't know you know the Asian games the Chinese games launch like that anymore are we just seeing a new kind of launch
maybe that's
it blaze it baby no I think this is this is blaze it I don't know if this is a new launch strategy I mean Scopi was doing soft launch get the KPIs right into mega ultra mega numero uno it is true like
it is different, but I think it's it's important to to to point out why it's different is that people are going global much earlier. Like all in hole is a really great example where it was launched in the United States in a more immature form and then it grew over time. We're going global in launching things over time rather than keeping them gated in soft launch. So with Scopley, I mean it's a very different strategy. It was soft launch but then when it decided to go US it was hu like

it was all guns blazing to hit number one. What I'm saying is people aren't seemingly doing that anymore where even when they launch in the US. Now, let's put Squad Busters and everything else aside. You are Monopoly Go. Monopoly Go was slow and steady wins the race, right? Which is we're going to soft launch it. We're going to make sure the KPIs are good. Now, we're going to incrementally launch each country. I didn't look back at, you know, what the beta or the soft launches were for Destiny Rising, but maybe this is what we just need to come back and check in on is are we seeing a new way that games are launching and that we are seeing slow and steady versus pop and drop. Just a thought. All right,
but the last thing that I'm surprised that Philip didn't mention is that the monetization design on this thing is insane. Like pay to win stuff. Like it is actually really egregious, you know? Like
nitties, right? So that's to be
expected. I know it's ironic because like the Destiny guys, the bungee guys are terrible at modernization, right? They don't know

how to monetization to save their lives. All they are doing is expansion model really. Like the monetization in that game is all cosmetic right? This game is like insanely designed. And what my biggest worry is is that the Destiny guys, the takeaway from this is that oh no, this game didn't didn't succeed because of all the gross monetization things. And that's they're going to in influence how they build the next Destiny, you know. But um
but Adam is screaming at you right now from somewhere in podcast.
Dude, this is the way the game should be designed. Like dude, this is the way they should be building Destiny, dude. Like anyway, whatever. Actually, this one's interesting. I'm going to keep looking at it. I I'm hope I'm wrong. I think the game is amazing. I just don't think there's an audience for this type of game in the West. So,
Got it. Yeah. I think, you know, Phil, if you're on shooter watch, you know, Val Mobile in China, this one from a mobile perspective, and then obviously you've got your uh PC console, shooter watch, you're going to be a busy dude the next few months.

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