Data Dump Friday
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β’ Strinova hits 400k Steam Wishlists
β’ Waifu 3rd-person shooter w/nearly 4M web pre-registrations
β’ From iDreamSky, a Chinese Studio
β’ Has Tencent Money
β’ ~$500M market cap; publicly traded on the Hong Kong Exchange
β’ Previously published Western Games in China (e.g., War Robots, Subway Surfers)
β’ With the rise of Steam China, this could be a considerable cross-region game.
β’ Remember, Nikkie and Genshin were hits in the U.S. (25% rev share)!
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β’ Bigger than Monopoly Go!
β’ ~$700M over 6 months; iOS only
β’ $88 Revenue Per Download!
β’ But downloads are crumbling, far below Honor of Kings (10-20k v.s. 500k Weekly)
β’ Something doesnβt smell right; this limited appeal? Data error?
β’ The total revenue curve is bending inward, too.
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β’ Huuuge Games: In H1 2024 DTC revenues accounted for 10.1% of total revenue (up from 4.2% in H1 2023), βexceeding their expectations.β
β’ The variance in webshop adoption is tied directly to in-game economics.
β’ Maximizing the per-dollar return on spend is a competitive advantage (e.g., 4x) or large LTVs where even small rebates to the consumer overcome the fixed transaction cost to use the web versus IAP (e.g., social casino) have 70%+ adoption rates.
β’ Casual is stuck in a sub-30% paradigm
β’ Genre ceilings? Make more leadersboards? More Space Race in Royale Match? Bigger Social?
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β’ COVID hit hard, but it helps contextualize the recent red ocean.
β’ I.e., Spectre Divide, The Finals, xDefiant, Halo Infinite
β’ How do extraction shooters survive and grow in this reality?
β’ Still tons of subgenre action: Hunt: Showdown and Enlisted continue to do exciting things.
β’ De-duplicated: how many players in a month have played at least one game within the defined list.
β’ So, a player who plays Valorant and CoD in the same month is counted only once.
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β’ Rollic X Zynga is launching a new Barbie Merge game, but a closely related match3 is precisely who they thought they were according to Sensor Tower demographic info: 40+ Female.
β’ Interesting how the themes are not overtly female.
β’ Top match games are old balding dudes, candy, and
β’ BTW, Chrome Valley Customs is WAY down.
β’ ~$20m run-rate from over $50m in 2023
β’ Merge seems to lean more into the female demo (murder mystery skews female)
β’ A possible sign of market maturation: targeting smaller and smaller subsegments.
