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State of RPGs

We know role-playing games (RPGs) as the genre that punches well above its weight, having strong revenue despite relatively low downloads. When taking the top 1,000 games by revenue for 2022, RPGs had the highest RPD and were second in terms of average time spent per user. Of course, this isn’t very surprising given how RPGs cater to a purchase-heavy, mid-core audience and enable heavy spending through deep meta systems and powerful monetization mechanics.

It's clear RPG players are some of the most committed and monetizable across all genres, so the question now is how Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) has changed the game for mobile RPG publishers. We’ll be covering this and more as we go through the trends, movements, and highlights of this significant segment.

Downloads

Over 2022, RPG downloads were up 5.2% year over year (YoY), which follows the same pattern of downloads growth we’ve seen in the previous two genres we covered (Shooters and Puzzle). Unlike those two genres, RPGs didn’t suffer the sudden and drastic drop in YoY growth in Q2 of 2021 when ATT was released. Instead, downloads were already in the doldrums even before ATT, but then recovered in Q3. What gives?

A large part of the boost in Q3 of 2021 came from newly released games — those launched in Q3 2020 and later — and their corresponding launch user acquisition (UA) campaigns. Examples include Marvel Future Revolution (Netmarble), the international versions of Ragnarok X (Nuverse), Harry Potter Magic Awakened (NetEase), Punishing: Gray Raven (Hero Entertainment), Shadow Fight Arena (Nekki), and the Android version of Slapstick Fighter (Cybernate). As seen below, downloads of these titles peaked around August, a metric which mirrored the number of paid downloads.

The Q3 2022 download spike is due to a combination of three game launches (Diablo Immortal, Tower of Fantasy, and Dreamdale) and scaled up UA campaigns (X-Hero). Together, these games contributed almost 100% of the quarter-over-quarter downloads growth of 24.7 million. 

While the new game launches and accompanying UA launch campaign make for pretty standard operating procedure, the scaled up UA for X-Hero is an interesting one as it was actually launched all the way back in 2020. We’ll be taking a closer look at this game, and why it suddenly exploded two years later in the upcoming idle RPG section.

While these new game releases explain the download spikes and general growth of downloads, on the micro level, we need to ask ourselves, “What about ATT?” How has it impacted RPG downloads? The chart below tracks the number of paid downloads for the top 100 downloaded RPGs of the past two years, split by platform. Here, we see a pattern: a dip in paid downloads for Android and iOS in Q4 of both 2021 and 2022. 

While the Q4 2021 dip looks particularly bad on Android, percentage-wise, both platforms lost a very similar amount quarter over quarter (a decline of 34% for Android and 32% for iOS). Part of this dip looks to be driven by the end of UA campaigns for the newly released games Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds, Marvel Future Revolution, and Ragnarok X. 

Besides those three games, which were responsible for around 35% of the quarterly dip, there weren’t any big outliers to explain the decline outside the fact that many games also reduced UA spend over that period. That indicates it could be a market-wide effect like an increase in CPI. The same pattern of falling paid downloads in Q4 can be expected seasonal behavior — as according to our UA expert Matej Lancaric, CPI tends to increase toward the end of the year due to greater competition for installs, partly coming from non-game sources like e-commerce and brands. 

This is confirmed using AppsFlyer’s benchmarking tool (unfortunately, we only get Android data that goes back to December 2021). Here, we can see that U.S. Android CPI for the Role Playing category began decreasing in Q1 and Q2 of 2022, and then rose again over Q3 and Q4, an inverse relationship with our paid downloads chart.

Apart from seasonal competition, that Q4 2022 dip was again partly caused by new releases and accompanying UA (Diablo Immortal, Dragon Hunter, Dreamdale), as well as X-Hero’s UA campaign that we mentioned earlier. These campaigns peaked in Q3 and fell off in Q4, accounting for 35% of the QoQ dip. The chart below compares paid downloads for the games on Android and iOS, and what’s interesting there is that the UA campaign for X-Hero didn’t completely stop on iOS. That shows us that the game has managed to find positive ROAS that allows it to keep UA operations running on the platform. 

Otherwise, similar to the other Q4 dip, there were no other major outliers — just many games toning down UA spend over Q4, which makes sense given the higher CPIs that quarter and the one prior. 

Revenue

RPG revenue has been trending down, shrinking 9.3% YoY (2022 versus 2021), which is an inverse relationship to downloads and the opposite of what we’d expect from the introduction of ATT. To investigate this, we’ll look at the top 20 revenue losers of 2022, which make up 85% of the YoY revenue difference for the genre. These games are:

Here, we can clearly see the indicators of ATT-affected performance. Paid downloads halved in Q3 of 2021 (after ATT), dragging along with it downloads and revenue. This explains the inverse relationship we see; as covered in the Downloads breakdown, downloads were boosted by new games being released, but these games did not gain enough revenue to offset the losses from the games here. Of course, we can’t blame all revenue loss to ATT; other factors such as poor live ops and game lifecycle can also impact revenue. We’ll get into those factors as we delve deeper into the subgenres.

What about the top 20 revenue winners for 2022 (responsible for around 24% of RPG revenue)? Did ATT not affect them, or did they somehow manage to find a way to combat the reduced targeting of UA campaigns?

A look at a similar chart shows that for these games, downloads, paid downloads, and revenue have all been growing, giving us a clear indication of the value of iOS players. Besides that, the key insight here is that almost all of these games were either newly released during this time period or had localized versions contributing greatly to revenue (for example, the Korean version of Castle In The Sky). 

So it’s not so much that the top 20 revenue winners were able to circumvent ATT, but rather that new launches need UA and will need to spend to bring in users (and revenue), inaccuracy be damned. 

Top Regions

Downloads

Downloads of RPGs are fairly well spread around geographically, and the top five countries only make up around 38% of all downloads. China takes the lead here, but it’s followed closely behind by the U.S. and other territories. China’s lead is also likely vastly understated here, as data.ai does not track Android third-party app stores in the region. What may surprise you here is Brazil, India, and Indonesia indexing high for RPG downloads.

The situation gets interesting when you see the sorts of games that are popular in each region. While downloads in China and the U.S. match what the big names we typically associate with mobile RPGs, downloads in Brazil, India, and Indonesia are almost entirely attributed to fighting game RPGs because these three countries comprise the biggest market for the fighting subgenre. 

There’s also the fact that many of these games, like Supreme Duelist Stickman and Virtual Gym Fighting, are ad-monetized, making these regions appealing for their low CPI. As an aside, we’ve classified fighting games under RPG because the two biggest revenue generators (responsible for 77% of revenue) are Marvel: Contest of Champions and Naruto Mobile, which both have significant RPG elements.

Revenue

The biggest region for RPG revenue is Japan, followed by China (again, it may be understated here due to the lack of Android data), which isn’t surprising as it’s well known that East Asian countries have always been RPG heavy. Japan, though, REALLY loves RPGS for it accounts for 30% of revenue while only making up 4.5% of downloads. Together, the top 5 countries make up ~85% of RPG revenue.

In terms of the games, we can clearly see that each country has its own preferences for the types of games players spend on:

• Japan: Puzzle RPGS, Team Battle RPGS
• China: MMO/Open World RPGS, Idle RPGS
• South Korea: MMO/Open World RPGS
• U.S.: Team Battle RPGS
• Taiwan: MMO/Open World RPGS

The other point of interest is how Genshin Impact is the only game to appear in the top five across every market with the exception of South Korea, illustrating its cross-border appeal.

Before we get into the subgenre breakdowns, let’s recap our biggest findings so far:

• Downloads for the genre have been trending upwards, bolstered by new releases. 
• Revenue on the other hand has been trending down for a myriad of reasons. 
• One culprit: post-IDFA impacts to user acquisition, which will have hit the high-CPI RPG genre harder than others. 
• More reasons for the lack of revenue growth include an aging roster of games (Monster Strike is a decade old!), promising launches that have fizzled out, and hyper-localized games that can’t scale up beyond their launch territories. 

We’ll get into all this and more as we go into the subgenre breakdowns. 

Subgenre Breakdowns

Based on subgenre download and revenue volumes, we’ve classified RPG games into four main subgenres (plus an “Other” category). Below, you can find both breakdowns of revenue and downloads by subgenre: 

1. MMO/Open World RPGs: Genshin Impact, Lineage W, Fantasy Westward Journey
2. Team Battle RPGs: Raid: Shadow Legends, Cookie Run, Dragonball Legends
3. Puzzle RPGs: Monster Strike, Puzzle & Dragons, Empires & Puzzles
4. Idle RPGs: AFK Arena, Idle Heroes, X-Hero
5. Other RPGs: Arknights (Tower Defense RPG), Honkai Impact 3 (Action RPG), LifeAfter (Survival), Shadow Fight 3 (Fighting)

MMO/Open World RPGs

First, some context on the bundling of MMORPGs and Open World RPGs: it boils down to one game, Genshin Impact, which lives in a category of its own. MiHoYo’s hit game has the open world exploration aspects of MMOs, but not the massively multiplayer aspects. Yet, to classify it as an Action RPG feels too limiting and would have put it into the Other RPG bucket and not expose its movements. To address this, we’ve combined Genshin Impact with the MMORPG subgenre to make sure we don’t miss out on analyzing this massive and influential title.

Downloads

The downloads story for MMO/Open World RPGs (MMORPGS) is an interesting one. Downloads are down 9.3% YoY, but it’s the rise in YoY growth in Q2 and Q3 2021 and the subsequent crash that is interesting.

To understand that growth, we must look at the wave of new releases and international releases of Eastern RPGs during that Q2/Q3 2021 period, which came with launch UA campaigns as well. Games like Ni No Kuni, Marvel Future Revolution, Ragnarok X, My Hero Academia, and Douluo Continent all contributed to the spike in downloads. These games were almost entirely responsible for the Q2 and Q3 2021 growth, and as we can see in the chart below, once UA ended, downloads trended down, too. 

Looking at the five-year downloads trend, we see that downloads for 2018 and 2019 were flat, but a big spike occurred in 2020 due to Genshin Impact, and the 2021 spike was due to the new releases we mentioned above. Genshin Impact is single-handedly raising the baseline for downloads for this subgenre and we’ll be talking about it more in-depth in the game-level analysis next. 

But suffice it to say Genshin Impact is nothing short of a unicorn in the subgenre. The game's astronomical rise is all the more amazing given that our data does not fully encapsulate its worldwide success without taking into account Chinese Android data, especially considering Gensin Impact’s cross-platform nature. No other game has been able to crack 20 million downloads in a single year save Genshin Impact and Legacy of Discord, which did so for one year in 2017. 

While we’ll no doubt see new games releasing on a continuous basis and leading to an increase in downloads, it's unlikely we’ll see a Genshin-level bump for the subgenre for the foreseeable future. Neither Tencent’s attempt with Tower of Fantasy (read our deconstruction here) nor Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal (read our deconstruction here) have managed to replicate its sheer global appeal. Given the lighting-in-the-bottle that is Genshin Impact and the failure of new releases to continue to attract players at a similar scale, it’s likely that downloads for the subgenre will begin a slow decline over the next few years.

Top Games By Downloads

Regarding games, the top 10 by downloads make up 38% of market share, making it a highly fragmented market. This is in part due to region-specific preferences and the hyper-localization of these games. The top regions for MMO/Open World RPG downloads in 2022 were China, South Korea, Thailand, the U.S., and Vietnam. The image below shows the top 10 downloaded games in each country.

We can clearly see that a large portion of games are only popular in one country, with Vietnam in particular showing a big affinity for locally developed titles. There is one exception to the region-specific preference though, let’s say it all together… Genshin Impact!

Genshin Impact’s cross-border appeal means that it dominates the downloads chart, with almost three times the downloads of the second-placed Diablo Immortal. (To be fair, Diablo Immortal was released midway through 2022.) Besides Genshin’s continued dominance, the other interesting movement was four new games appearing in the top 10: Diablo Immortal, Dragon Hunter, Tower of Fantasy, and Doula Continent. 

Diablo Immortal enjoyed a great launch, accumulating 10 million downloads within its first two months. This pace has slowed considerably, though, and based on its current trajectory the game is likely going to end 2023 with less than 10 million downloads. The game launched with an immense amount of hype and yet also landed with considerable controversy around its monetization methods. That in turn gave the game a fair amount of press and content creator exposure, though of course some of it was negative (perhaps no news is bad news right). 

The exposure would have contributed to that spike of organic downloads, and as the fuss (and UA spending) died down, so have downloads. 

It’s perhaps an indicator of Blizzard’s higher expectation when, in Activision Blizzard’s Q4 2022 earnings release, the company had only this to say of the game: “Diablo Immortal on mobile and PC also contributed to Blizzard’s fourth quarter year-over-year growth. Engagement and player investment trends for the title were stable at the end of the fourth quarter and into the new year.”

As for Tower of Fantasy, its international version launched in August 2022. Unlike the gentle descent we see with Diablo Immortal, the game suffered an extremely abrupt reduction in downloads.

For Tower of Fantasy, it was a case of launch UA and featuring that resulted in that spike, which died off pretty quickly. In Diablo Immortal’s case, it had the advantage of the Chinese release a month after the global launch, which helped prop up its downloads and without which it would have seen a sharkfin downloads pattern similar to that of Tower of Fantasy (albeit at a higher scale of downloads).

Douluo Continent is an MMORPG based off the popular Xianxia series of the same name. The source material was a web novel written by Tang Jia San Shao (唐家三少), which has gone on to spawn an animated series, drama series, and games. Suffice to say, it’s a popular IP in China — it recently had a promotion featuring Jackie Chan. 

Despite the IP’s popularity, Douluo Continent doesn’t seem to have blown up in China. It was released in July 2021 and only has about 7.4 million downloads to date (a paltry figure for the market). Despite its apparent failure, the Xianxia literary genre is one that remains very popular in China and has now even gained traction in the West. We’ll be looking at this more in the Idle RPG section later on.

Looking at the top 10 by downloads market share reveals some interesting movements. First, we can see that Diablo Immortal did not cannibalize downloads from either Ni no Kuni or Genshin Impact, with Diablo clearly attracting a different audience. 

Ni no Kuni, on the other hand, has stolen some of Genshin’s share, indicating some audience crossover. (Looking at their similar aesthetic, this makes complete sense). But it’s also clear that Ni no Kuni has not been able to sustain its downloads market share the same way Genshin Impact has, which just goes to show how important product differentiation is when trying to create a long-lasting games business. In other words, why would players go to Ni no Kuni if they already enjoy Genshin Impact?

If you’re wondering why Ni no Kuni has those odd pulses of downloads, it's because the Korean version was launched in June 2021 (first pulse) while the international version was launched in June 2022 (second pulse).

So what are the key takeaways for MMO/Open World RPG downloads? First, regional preferences are strong, leading to hyper-localized games that succeed only in that one country. This makes intuitive sense, as the whole premise of an MMORPG is player-to-player interaction and communication. 

Later in the revenue section, we’ll uncover some advances developers  have made to reduce the friction of cross-language communication. Second, Genshin Impact is one of the few games in this subgenre to transcend cultural borders. This is partly because it’s more of a single-player open world RPG, meaning the language barrier is less significant. But it’s also a testament to the quality of the entire Genshin Impact package, from its AAA presentation to its engaging core mechanics and strong live ops. New releases in the subgenre from big publishers like Tencent, Netmarble, and Blizzard/NetEase behind them have all failed to reach the same heights of this trailblazer. 

What would it take to dethrone Genshin Impact, if it can even be done? The key would be to solve for the fragmentation and regional affinities — a developer would need to somehow overcome language barriers and, if using established IP, create something appealing to an audience that encompasses Vietnam to South Korea. That’s no small task. 

There is one IP we believe could do the trick, and that’s League of Legends. It’s huge in China, the U.S., and South Korea (while less so in South East Asia, to be fair), and even non-players have exposure to the lore of Riot’s IP via the excellent Arcane series on Netflix. An MMORPG set in the world of Runeterra would be very compelling indeed, and it so happens that Riot thinks so too, as the company has had an MMORPG in development for some time now. Not much information is known about the title, or whether it will even be available on mobile. But given Riot has begun working on cross-platform development in the case of Valorant’s mobile port, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think this upcoming RPG may also be cross-platform. We’ll be watching closely!

Revenue

MMO/Open World RPG revenue has been on a slight downwards trend, declining 2% YoY. The interesting element about this chart are those big spikes of revenue in Q1 2021, Q3 2021, and Q1 and Q2 2022.

These spikes came from new game releases, with four games in particular contributing significantly: Douluo Continent, Fantasy New Jade Dynasty, Harry Potter Magic Awakened, and Lineage W.

The other point of interest was the big drop in YoY growth in Q4 of 2021. The two big culprits here are Lineage M and Moonlight Blade.

Lineage M is a mobile port of NCSoft’s Lineage PC MMORPG, which gave way to Lineage W, a new cross-platform MMORPG. Moonlight Blade was an MMO launched by Tencent in November 2020 that launched really well, accumulating $84M in revenue in its first two months but has since dwindled.

Top Games By Revenue

The top 10 games by revenue make up 60% of market share, with Genshin Impact way in the lead as it is in downloads. We can also see that new releases we saw in the downloads section — Lineage W, Diablo Immortal, and Tower of Fantasy — have managed to enter the top 10 of revenue as well, with Lineage W impressively claiming second place. It was released earlier than those other two games, but even when comparing revenue aligned by launch, it is the better monetizing product.

In fact, the Lineage series have all been incredibly lucrative and boast pretty wild 2022 RPD numbers, all in the 3-digit range!

Looking at its top five countries by revenue reveals even more bonkers numbers, with Lineage W’s home country of South Korea boasting a staggering RPD of $475. Usually, RPD numbers can get pretty strange in markets with very few downloads. But in this case, South Korea is also the No. 1 country by downloads. It truly is a regional phenomenon. 

An explanation for these high numbers is that South Korean MMOs are known to have strong pay-to-win mechanics, with South Korean publisher NCSoft infamous for its aggressive monetization tactics. In fact, at a showcase of Lineage W, the head of NCSoft’s Lineage W Group, Lee Sung-gu, specifically said Lineage W would have a less egregious monetization model compared to its previous games. “We will make sure that all players will be able to enjoy the game, regardless of how much money they spend,” he said. 

What does the release of Lineage W mean for NCSoft’s older products, Lineage M and Lineage 2M? From the look of their revenue trends, it doesn’t appear that the new product has cannibalized its older siblings. 

The likely scenario here is that players who have already sunk significant time and money in these older games are less inclined to leave their investments behind and start from scratch at the bottom in a new experience. 

The other interesting note here is how Ragnarok Origin managed to grow revenues by 160%!

That’s explained by the fact that a traditional Chinese version of the game, which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, was released. It has performed very well in Taiwan in particular, bringing in $62 million of revenue in the four months after it launched in September 2022.

Looking at the market share movements, we can see how the four new games — including one we haven’t talked about yet, Kakao Games’ Odin Valhalla rising — carved out a nice portion of the revenue pie to end 2022 with a combined share of 31.5%. Still, that lags behind Genshin Impact.

Speaking of Odin, prior to Lineage W’s launch, it was the top revenue dog in South Korea, wresting away the throne from Lineage M. It in return was relegated by the appearance of Lineage W for a game of cat and mouse. Based on the trends shown in the last quarter of 2022, Lineage M and Odin are making a resurgence once again, marking a truly fascinating battle for the top spot in the country. 

But the true winner will have to be Lineage W based on how it has managed to diversify its revenue away from being South Korea-centric, much more than its competitors.

One factor may be Lineage W’s AI-translation system, which can translate between nine different languages, a feature NCSoft believed in so much that it released a trailer for it. A look at the top 10 countries for revenue does show a diverse number of countries and languages, whereas the other two games only feature Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

A Game of Publisher Musical Chairs

Looking at the top 10 games by revenue for 2022, you may have noticed that many games were new releases, and the revenue trends show that revenue growth is strongly correlated with new game releases. Is this a sign of a new golden age for MMORPGS, or are players fickle and simply flock to the newest thing?

A look at the top 10 MMORPGS by revenue over the past five years reveals a few key findings.

One, it’s a game between a few powerhouses: NCSoft, NetEase, Tencent, and Netmarble. You’ll see these names appear again and again, but with different games. This makes sense because MMORPGS are incredibly complex and require serious development muscle and development time. Second, the size of these publishers mean that they can release several MMORPGS in a very short amount of time. Netease released six games that have hit the top 10 over the past five years, Tencent has seven, and NCSoft and Netmarble each have three. Third, only a few titles have stood the test of time — games in the Lineage series and Fantasy Westward Journey. 

What conclusion can we draw from all this? Well, it’s a game of musical chairs for a piece of that sweet, nearly $7 billion revenue pie. Besides the Lineage series and Fantasy Westward Journey, players haven’t found something worth sticking around for, and publishers are trying everything to find something that’ll stick. Yet this is a market that requires deep pockets and a big barrier of entry.

Genshin Impact: Refocusing On China

We’ve mentioned several times now that Genshin Impact is remarkable in its ability to transcend regional affinities and attract players across the globe. That was very much the case when the game launched and throughout its early life, but the story is starting to shift.

When looking at Genshin’s downloads split by platform and app, it’s clear that downloads of the international versions of the game have been trending down over the past two years. In contrast, downloads of the Chinese version have more than doubled in 2022, accounting for much of that year’s growth. 

An interesting development also occurred in 2022: the light gray line that appeared is a cloud version of Genshin, which streams assets on demand so players with storage constraints don’t need to download the entire. According to Videogamer.com, Genshin can take up a whopping 17.9GB on smartphones. 

Back to Genshin downloads, while data.ai’s user acquisition data from China is spotty, it did record a spike in paid downloads in January. That’s exactly when downloads of the Chinese version began to rise.

Comparing this with the downloads trend of the international version of Genshin, we can come to the conclusion that miHoYo has shifted its UA budget toward China.

Why would it do that? A comparison of the RPD of the Chinese version of Genshin in 2021 (the final row in the table below) gives us the answer: that version had a 45% performance upside compared to the international one.

In fact, the rise of Chinese revenue was entirely responsible for Genshin’s revenue growth, as seen in the table below showing the YoY change in revenue for 2022. Keep in mind that Chinese Genshin’s numbers are for iOS only, so the actual revenue numbers are likely to be much, much higher. 

Considering Genshin is among the first Chinese game IPs to become a global hit, it has been interesting to see HoYoverse pull back on international UA to refocus on China in 2022. Whether it continues this strategy for 2023, or if it restarts international UA again, we’ll have to see. We’ll be tracking this for the next RPG report. 

Looking Forward

This subgenre is dominated by Genshin Impact, both in downloads and revenue. It’s truly one of the best mobile RPGs ever made and a testament to miHoYo’s vision and execution. Can there be another Genshin? There certainly have been attempts, such as Tower of Fantasy, but nothing has been able to put a dent in its reign. But as we’ve seen in this breakdown, you don’t need to be a global hit to be successful, as there are hyper-local successes, particularly in South Korea. 

What can a developer entering this subgenre do to increase its chance of success? My suggestion would be to focus on Taiwan. Half of the top 10 games by revenue are MMO/Open World RPGs, and even smaller games like Ragnarok Origin and Dragon Hunter have seen success there. What about Asian developers who want their games to gain popularity in the West? Besides Genshin Impact, we haven’t seen any Asian MMOs achieve significant success in the region. 

Perhaps Odin: Valhalla Rising from Kakao Games, a Norse-themed MMORPG, may resonate with Western gamers? It’s slated to be released in North America and Europe in Q4 of this year and is another one to watch closely. 

Team Battle RPGs

Downloads

Team Battle RPGs have not enjoyed the past two years, with negative growth every quarter (except for Q4 2021). It’s also the worst performing RPG subgenre of 2022, shrinking by 19% YoY.

First, let’s get that Q4 2021 spike in YoY growth out of the way. It came from Cookie Run: Kingdom, which was released in January 2021 and enjoyed a large spike in downloads in Q4 2021 driven by a paid downloads campaign.

This extended UA campaign was to support several updates focusing on different territories.

• September 2, 2021: This update featured Japanese voiceovers. Along with a UA push in Japan, this update shot the game up to No. 1 in the games category. Downloads of the game went from around 200 a day to about 9,000 a day.
• September 17, 2021: This marked a Sonic crossover event, with the U.S. being the target territory. It had a one-day downloads peak there of 99,000 versus an average of around 3,000 before.
• October 8, 2021: English voiceovers, which had been hyped for a long time, finally arrived in the game with this update. 
• October 29, 2021: A new gacha-based skin system was introduced, along with a new currency (Rainbow Cubes) for said gacha boxes.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s find out what’s behind this downloads slump? There aren’t any obvious telltale signs. The loss is roughly evenly distributed between Android and iOS, and almost all of the top 10 countries saw a contraction in downloads.

By investigating on a game level though, we find nine games that contributed to 83% of the reduction in 2022. Looking at the downloads over three years, we can see there was a very spiky pattern of downloads occurring in 2021 that is completely absent in 2022.

So that explains the 2022 shrinkage, but the question is why? By looking at the paid downloads, we see almost a mirror copy of the downloads pattern.

The reason for the paid downloads can be split into two buckets. Bucket one are games that were released in 2021 (or the end of 2020) that performed a launch UA campaign. These would be games like Cookie Run: Kingdom, NieR Reincarnation, Re:Zero, and Blue Archive.

The second bucket of games are those that were already live, but saw localized releases. For example, the Korean versions of Re:Zero and One Punch Man and the international release of KonoSuba. The final bucket is games that had been live, but performed a big UA campaign in 2021. That would be Hero Wars, Heroes Charge, and Looney Tunes. 

The biggest culprit here is Hero Wars, which performed a really big UA push in the beginning of 2021 and we’ll get into the “why” later on.

The top 10 publishers make up 49% of subgenre downloads, with most of them reflecting the subgenre trend of losing downloads.

The most badly hit of the bunch are Devsisters, Nexters, and Scopely. Both Devsisters and Nexters have only one game in the subgenre (Cookie Run and Hero Wars, respectively), but Scopely has three (Marvel Strike Force, Looney Tunes World of Mayhem, and The Walking Dead: Road to Survival). While all three shrunk in downloads over 2022, it’s Looney Tunes that was hit the hardest.

The reason is that Scopely ran an Android UA campaign in the summer of 2021 that resulted in a big influx of Android users, but it has since gradually turned off the UA tap.

Why? The users it was acquiring just weren’t spending, as we can see that revenue continued its downwards slide despite the surge of downloads. 

In terms of the winners, Bandai Namco grew by a very healthy 31.6%. Out of its nine-game portfolio, the biggest contributors to its growth were Dragon Ball Legends, Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle, and My Hero Ultra Impact.

Out of these three games, My Hero was a new 2022 international release (the Japanese version launched in 2021), while the two Dragon Ball titles have been out for quite some time (Dokkan Battle was released in 2015, Legends in 2018). As both Dragon Ball games are also two of the top performing games in the subgenre, we’ll be investigating them more in the game-level analysis below.

The other big winner here is Tencent, and it’s entirely thanks to Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which was only released in November 2022 and yet contributed 6.7 million downloads in just two months, That’s very good by Team Battle standards, as the top dog by downloads, Dragon Ball Legends, only received 17.3 million downloads over 2022. 

The final movement of note here is Lilith Games, which launched Dislyte in May 2022, and is the sole reason the publisher appears in this chart. We’ve previously published a deconstruction of Dislytem covering Lilith Game’s attempt to make the game an active, accessible, and more successful version of AFK Arena. 

The market share chart helps highlight some of the movements you might miss when looking at pure numbers. We can see how Lilith Games took up a huge chunk of the downloads pie in 2022, but it ended the year with just 1.5% market share. As always, the sudden explosion of downloads followed by a steady decline to almost nothing indicates the combo of launch UA plus featuring, as is the case here.

What also stands out here is Nexters’ big surge of downloads in Q1 of 2021 and the subsequent steady decline of its market share. If you recall, this was due to a big UA campaign in the beginning of 2021, but we’ll be digging into that further below.

The top 10 games hold 38% of market share, with Dragon Ball Legends and Hero Wars nearly tied for the lead. That’s where the similarities end as they have had a very different year in terms of downloads.

First, Dragon Ball Legends had a big summer downloads bump, and there were a couple reasons for it. First, there was a surge in UA during the summer months, which occurred around the time the game held its 4th anniversary event.

Second, a Dragon Ball movie, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, was released in Japan in June 2022 and worldwide in August and September 2022. The film was immensely popular worldwide — it is the second-highest grossing Dragon Ball film to date — and that would have sparked interest in the game as a result. The other Dragon Ball game, Dokkan Battle, also benefited from the release of the movie, and we can see that searches for the term “Dragon Ball Dokkan Battle” peaked during the movie release period. The top related query during this time was “dragon ball super super hero.”

The other big loser here was Cookie Run: Kingdom, which lost 65.6% downloads compared to the year before. As mentioned above, developer Devsisters performed two big UA campaigns in 2021, but since then has not run any big UA campaigns, perhaps finding the ROI of those big pushes to be unsustainable.

Looking at the games by market share, we can see Hero Wars continual decline in downloads after Nexters’ big marketing spend, though we can see the metric begin to trend back up towards the second half of 2022. 

The other striking movement is something we noted under the publisher-level breakdown, and that is Dislyte’s big burst of downloads that dwindled to a trickle by Q4 2022. This may be a result of poor monetization efficiency when compared to its peers. 

A comparison of Dislyte’s RPD with the competition that released around the same time shows Dislyte not performing up to subgenre norms. Accordingly, Dislyte has seen its revenue dwindle along with the downloads.

Revenue

The revenue story for Team Battle RPGs isn’t a positive one, as the segment shrunk by close to 20% YoY, almost an exact mirror of the downturn in downloads.

Before we go to the game-level breakdowns, let’s take a look at the top 10 publishers, which make up 63% of revenue. Here, we can see that besides Bandai Namco, Tencent, WFS, and Lingxi Games, the rest have all faced big revenue losses YoY.

Most of the publishers that have seen revenue contractions have also experienced reduced downloads, so their revenue losses make sense. The one exception to this rule is Aniplex, which has a single game that is nonetheless absolutely huge: Fate/Grand Order. We’ll be doing a quick overview of that title later on for those of you who have heard of it but don’t know much else.

Back on the Team Battle revenue front, the publishers that did see revenue growth, Tencent and WFS, owe it to new game releases, including Nikke: Goddess of Victory and Heaven Burns Red. 

Lingxi games, which grew revenue by an eye-opening 316%, has a single game in its Team Battle portfolio: Three Kingdoms Fantasy Land, which was actually released in China back in June 2020. So what was behind its recent revenue boom? It’s due to the release of a traditional Chinese version of the game that became popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Finally, Bandai Namco saw downloads grow by 31%, but the publisher was only able to grow revenue by 2%. The reason is that the Bandai Namco’s games largely responsible for those downloads — Dragon Ball Legends and Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle — also saw revenue contractions. 

The game that was responsible for the revenue bump was Mobile Suit Gundam U.C. ENGAGE, which was released in November 2021 and contributed $27.9 million in 2022 versus the $4.6 million it contributed in 2021. 

The market share chart shows how Tencent and Lingxi were able to end 2022 with a pretty significant share of revenue despite only launching their new games (in Lingxi’s case, the Traditional Chinese version) in Q4 of 2022. 

As for the game-level data, it’s not looking good in terms of finding a Genshin competitor. The only game to see revenue growth was Three Kingdoms Fantasy Land, and we’ve already established the growth came from the release of a new traditional Chinese version. The other two games that didn’t lose revenue were the new releases, Goddess of Victory: Nikke and Heaven Burns Red.

For those unaware, Goddess of Victory is a team-based cover shooter with heavy RPG elements. (You can see a gameplay video here.) It also features what you might call waifu characters, or in Nikke’s case beautiful, young, and scantily clad anime girls with impossible proportions. Where Nikke really stands out from the crowd is its action-based gameplay versus other Team Battlers, which are typically turn-based RPGs that require minimal player interaction during battles. The game has only been out for a few months, so time will tell if this strategy for more action-oriented combat continues to find success.

Heaven Burns Red is a Team Battle RPG that looks like any typical Japanese Team Battler. What it does have is the unique selling point of popular visual novel creator Jun Maeda as its main scenario writer. Maeda’s previous work includes the visual novel Clannad, which became a huge success and spawned a manga, anime, and movie.

Fate/Grand Order has had a strange situation in that its downloads have grown by 100%, yet shrinking revenue has shrunk by 18.7%. The first part of the equation has an easy answer: there was a big UA push for the English version of the game on Android in Q3 of 2022 that resulted in a downloads spike. The second part of the answer is that these downloads came mainly from the Philippines and Thailand, which, with an RPD of $5 and $7.6 respectively, is very far from the three-digit RPDs of the game’s best territories.

With the games-level market share chart, we can see Nikke ending 2022 very strongly, with 20.7% of the Q4 share. The question is if it can sustain that revenue growth without a big UA campaign to boost downloads. 

Unfortunately, we can see the answer is no, as revenue declined significantly once UA spending was cut. Still, it is early days for the game and we look forward to analyzing its performance in another six months’ time. 

The Curious Case of Hero Wars and Nexters’ IPO

Hero Wars saw a substantial decline in downloads of 47%, which by itself isn’t all that strange. But based on the chart of paid downloads below, we see that the “decline” in 2022 was more the result of a large and temporary bump in UA in the first half of 2021.

According to Nexters’ Q4 2021 earnings press release, this was a company-wide strategy, with the report stating, “Selling and marketing expenses in 2021 increased by $104 million, or 63% year-over-year, and amounted to $270 million. The increase was due to higher investments made in the acquisition of additional players starting from the second quarter of 2021.”

This big push to acquire players across its portfolio may have been related to Nexters’ listing on the Nasdaq exchange in the second half of 2021 via a SPAC. In its prospectus, the company gave this overview for Hero Wars: “Our core product offering, Hero Wars, offers a suite of games across mobile, social and web-based platforms and has, since its launch in 2016, evolved into a well-recognized global gaming franchise in the RPG genre, with 5.5 million MAUs across more than 75 countries in 2021.” 

As we can see in the chart below detailing Hero Wars’ active users from 2020 to 2021, that big UA campaign in the first half of. 2021 had a big part to play in the 5.5 million MAU figure, as MAU had been trending down throughout 2020.

Fate/Grand Order — In Decline, But Still Number One

Fate/Grand Order is the single biggest game in the subgenre, and it has been since 2016, the year after it was lauched. For those not up to speed, here’s a quick overview. 

Fate/Grand Order is based on the very popular Fate/Stay Night IP, which began life as an adult visual novel from Type-Moon released in early 2004. Its popularity spawned a media empire that encompasses manga, anime, music, and video games. 

The premise behind the series is that there is a grand battle for the Holy Grail of legend, and “Masters” command “Servants” to fight in bloody and violent battle royale to remain the last pair standing. The Servants are typically historical or mythological figures conjured from cultures around the world, including Arthur Pendragon (although the series gender-swaps the character, named Artoria) and Gilgamesh. The popularity of the IP and its great fit with Team Battlers (collect all the Servants!) has helped Fate/Grand Order become one of the most successful products based on the Fate IP.

It’s also mainly been a one-country game, with Japan making up 82% (or $4.2 billion) of its lifetime revenue on just 9.2 million downloads. The game sits in sixth place as the biggest mobile game by revenue of all time. 

The game reached its revenue peak in 2018, bringing in $943 million in revenue during that period. Since then, however,Fate/Grand Order’s revenue has been steadily declining.

Still, these metrics show how utterly dominant Fate/Grand Order remains. With 2022 revenue of $471 million — more than half off its peak in 2018 — the game is still topping the subgenre revenue charts. Based on its trajectory, it may soon face a fight with Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle to be crowned the champion of Team Battlers.

Looking Forward

Team Battle RPGs have had a horrid year, with both downloads and revenue shrinking by 19%. Three of the top 10 games of 2022 were released in 2015 or earlier (Summoners War, Fate/Grand Order, and Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle), and those games, in particular Fate/Grand Order, have rarely loosened their grip on the top revenue charts. 

That said, these games are clearly on the decline and it’s only a matter of time until they get dethroned. Newcomer Goddess of Victory has started very strongly and displaced Fate/Grand Order at the top in November and December 2022. We’d need to see more sustained performance from the game before we can declare a new leader for Team Battle RPGs though. As a Tencent game, Nikke certainly has all the resources it needs to wage that fight. 

Puzzle RPGs

Downloads

Puzzle RPGs are down 13.2% YoY, so it isn’t a surprise to see that the quarterly growth numbers are almost all negative as well. 

As the subgenre has relatively low downloads, a small handful of games can often cause big movements in download trends. In this case, the five newly released games below are largely responsible for the quarter-over-quarter movements:

• Puzzle Combat (Zynga)
• Call of Antia (FunPlus)
• World Flipper (Cygames)
• Wandering Ark (Shenzhen Changyu Space-time Network Technology Co., Ltd.)
• Magic Dragon Match - Puzzle Land (Regard GB)

Each of these games came accompanied by launch UA campaigns that boosted their downloads while the campaign was active, but declined shortly after the campaign was turned off.

Downloads in Puzzle RPG are also concentrated in just a few hands, with the top 10 games making up 68% of all downloads. Here, we can see that almost all the games that have been live for two years or more have seen a reduction in downloads, with Monster Strike’s 1% of growth as the sole outlier.

Of all the games here, Puzzle Combat has the biggest loss at a decline of 64.7%, so we’ll be taking a closer look at it when we examine the market share charts. Other interesting points here are those two new games — Call of Antia and Wandering Ark (流浪方舟) — so let’s give them a quick overview.

Call of Antia is developed by FunPlus of State of Survival fame. It’s a team-based RPG with a Match 3 core, similar to Empire and Puzzles although with a slicker look (see a gameplay video here). For those of you not familiar with either game, you basically make matches to attack enemies, which also charges up your character’s mana bars. Once full, you can use powerful attacks via special abilities. 

Call of Antia is obviously aiming for the same audience as Empire & Puzzles. Its more modern look — Empire & Puzzles looks dated in comparison to the sheen of FunPlus’ — appears part of the strategy to attract players. FunPlus is also doing something interesting here, as they’ve released another game called Call of Antia: Fusion Master that, based on the store page, looks nothing like a Puzzle RPG and more like a Hypercasual Merge game based on Homa’s Merge Master. 

When you actually install the game, however, you’ll find that Fusion Master is indeed the regular Call of Antia. This is an example of what our UA expert Matej Lancaric calls “fake core gameplay.” This is a trend many companies are now incorporating as part of their overall UA strategy. 

I have to say that FunPlus’ implementation of this is more of a bait and switch. After personally installing the game, I did not see any Merge minigames at all. After reading some of the store reviews and watching this video showcasing a first fake level, it seems like FunPlus did at one point provide at least one minigame level on launch, but has since removed it.

A game that I do think has done the fake core gameplay trend well is X-Hero (aka Epic Heroes), and we’ll go over its strategy in the Idle RPG section. 

The other new game, Wandering Ark, takes the physics-based puzzle combat of Monster Strike and combines it with a post-apocalyptic theme and pixel art graphics. See an example gameplay video here.

With the market share chart, we can see that Puzzle Combat, published by Zynga, received a big boost in downloads over Q2 2021, but has since dwindled down to close to zero.

These sorts of patterns — a big burst of downloads followed by a trickle — are typical of a big UA campaign and we can see the same pattern with both Call of Antia and Wandering Ark. In the case of all three games, the shoe fits like a glove. 

Actually, you might have noticed that Wandering Ark doesn’t appear in the paid downloads chart above, but that is, again, because data.ai doesn’t have insight into alternative Android app stores in China. Using SocialPeta, we were able to find evidence of a UA campaign by searching for creatives for the game during its launch period in July to August.

Revenue

Puzzle RPG revenues are down 5.9% YoY, and we can see that revenue has been trending down pretty consistently as well. The growth numbers are similarly bad, although there’s some recovery (or rather a deceleration of losses) in 2022 compared to 2021. 

The first thing we’ll investigate here is that big dip in YoY growth in Q2 2021. The big culprit is Monster Strike, which only managed $128 million in Q2 2021 versus $207 million in Q2 2020. That makes Monster Strike almost single handedly responsible for the subgenre’s YoY drop.

What’s happening here is that Monster Strike performed a big UA push over Q3 2020 to Q1 2021. This boosted revenue, albeit with a lag time of around two quarters (depending on its LTV curve). Once UA spending ended, revenue came down along with downloads.

Will Monster Strike be able to get back to its previous highs? Unfortunately, given its age, it’s unlikely the game can return to its former glory, as it's been on a steady decline for about five years now.

As mentioned above, this subgenre is mainly the story of Monster Strike, Puzzle & Dragons, and Empires & Puzzles, which together hold a market share of 74% while the remaining seven games in the top 10 contribute to 13% of subgenre revenue.

Most games here are posting double digit contractions. Monster Strike posted a slight recovery of 8.9%, which we have to keep in mind was only because it had such a bad 2021.

Tower of Saviors is the other game to see revenue growth in 2022. It’s a Match-based Puzzle RPG by Hong Kong-based studio Mad Head, but it has a really innovative take on the Match mechanic. Instead of swiping to make a match, you can actually drag a board piece anywhere on the board, which then pushes the other pieces around so you can reorganize the board to your advantage and make a bigger match. See an example of gameplay here.

Tower of Saviors also focuses its major updates on anime crossovers with popular properties like One Punch Man, Spy x Family, Digimon, and Attack on Titan to name a few.

Because the big three in the Puzzle RPGs subgenre are so dominant, they tend to drown out the movements of the smaller games in the subgenre. So we decided to have a look at the top 10 games, not including Monster Strike, Puzzle & Dragons, and Empires & Puzzles. 

This best-of-the-rest view does show us that Marvel Puzzle Quest grew 11% YoY, which is not bad for a game that’s a decade old! 

Developer Demiurge Studios has done this with some well received updates (mapped to revenue above), particularly its 9th anniversary update in October 2022. It featured an anniversary vault (gacha pool) that included five-star items, something new and surprising for its fan base considering previous anniversary vaults only included up to four-star items. 

In the market share chart, the most notable move here was the emergence of Call of Antia, which has cemented its place as a top-tier contender. It’s telling how few new entrants this subgenre has, and it may be a case of the big three scaring off competitors. 

Puzzle RPG — In Need of Innovation

If you were to tell someone you were working on a Puzzle RPG, 99% of the time they’d say, “Oh, are you doing a Match 3-RPG?” The outsized success of Monster Strike, Puzzle & Dragons, and Empire & Puzzles has had a detrimental effect on the variety of games in the subgenre, as most new titles tend to follow the lead of the big three. 

This seems to be more of an issue for Western developers, as they almost always go for the Match 3-RPG formula. It makes sense that there are very few new and successful entries here — why would a player swap a Match 3-RPG they enjoy for another one that looks and feels very similar?

There are some developers who are experimenting with the core mechanic. For example, World Flipper, which actually was 9th for revenue in 2021, takes the Monster Strike formula and innovates by using a pinball mechanic. Instead of tapping and dragging your units to attack, you use pinball flippers to push your units to attack the enemies (hence the name World Flipper). See an example of the gameplay here.

While the game hasn’t exactly set the subgenre alight, particularly in the U.S., that may be because the presentation and art style are aimed at an Eastern audience. 

Pinball is still very popular in the U.S, as seen in the Google trends chart above for the search term “pinball,” and a pinball-themed Puzzle RPG with an art style more suitable for a Western audience could gain traction. At the very least, it would stand out from being another Match 3 RPG.

Looking Forward

Monster Strike and Puzzle & Dragons are two of the biggest names not just in Puzzle RPGs, but across all genres. They are in the top 5 of the most successful games of all time, with Monster Strike in second place after Candy Crush Saga, and Puzzle & Dragons in 5th place, behind Honor of Kings. Unlike those two other top games, though, they have been in a period of decline for a while. As we’ve discovered, there aren’t many new successful entrants in this subgenre, but the continued decline of those two games could open up more opportunities for new games to succeed. 

The big question is what kind of game? To truly be a success, it’ll need to appeal to the Japanese Puzzle RPG market, which no non-Japanese studio has been able to crack. However, that’s not to say that it can’t be done, as it's something that Genshin Impact accomplished (it’s #4 by revenue in Japan), although in a different subgenre. My bet will be on another Chinese studio to be the first non-Japanese studio to do it. Here, NetEase could be in pole position as it has tasted success in Japan with Knives Out and released a pretty successful Team Battler in Onmyoji. The only knock on the Chinese publisher will be its lack of casual titles or puzzle games. Still, it has recently expanded to CCGs with Harry Potter: Magic Awakened and entered the casual space with party royale game Eggy Party, so a move into Puzzle RPG wouldn’t be too far-fetched.

Idle RPGs

Downloads

Idle RPGs are the silver lining in the genre's overall downloads slump, growing 58.2% YoY. How has this subgenre been able to grow its base while all other RPG subgenres took steps back? When we look at the top 10 Idle RPG games that grew in downloads in 2022, and were responsible for about 70% of the subgenre’s downloads growth, we can see two big points.

First, as the chart above shows, only one game was even live in January 2021. A staggering 90% of the top 10 games by downloads have been live for less than two years. Besides X-Hero, four more games were released by the end of 2021, and the rest were staggered across 2022. Why were there so many new releases, and what makes Idle RPGs more attractive for developers versus other subgenres?

A big part of it is that Idle Games in general have become more popular. This Google Trends chart of the term “Idle Game” shows that we’re currently in the peak of interest for that search term.

The other part of the equation is that Idle RPGs were just less saturated. Back in 2018, Idle RPGs were the smallest subgenre, holding only 8.75% of the downloads pie.

That share jumped significantly, growing by 68%, in 2019, partly driven by the releases of AFK Arena and Mobile Legends: Adventure. A developer aspiring to enter the genre could either choose to go into the bigger but heavily contested battlefields of Team Battle or MMO/Open World RPGs, or the smaller Puzzle RPG segment to pick up scraps from Monster Strike and Puzzle & Dragons. In comparison to those options, Idle RPGs would be a more attractive option, considering the track record of new entries entering the scene and finding success (at least downloads-wise). 

We can see this in action when looking at the top 10 downloaded Idle RPGs of the past five years. There is a lot of movement here, and no single game has entrenched itself as the Idle RPG.

The top 10 downloaded games here comprise just 35% of downloads, so it is quite fractured. The big difference compared to other subgenres is just how many of the top 10 are from new releases. For Idle RPGs, it’s seven, while MMO/Open World is in second place with four new releases in the top 10. 

Besides the glut of new releases, the two eye-popping numbers are X-Hero’s and Saint Seiya’s respective 951% and 378% downloads growth.

X-Hero had a big downloads explosion in the second half of 2022 that itself contributed 25% to the subgenre’s overall downloads growth. It has an interesting story, beginning life as an Android game called X-Hero: Idle Avengers back in 2020. That game was a Team Battler with Idle mechanics and had an attractive art style inspired by Western comics. 

That said, it wasn’t a hit. It crawled along with a monthly average of almost 86,000 downloads and $161,000 in revenue for its first two years. Then something happened in Q3 of 2022. As reported by Mobilegamer.biz, the game hit on a very successful UA strategy: fake ads. In particular, the “Save the Doge” type games that were trending on TikTok at the time.

X-Hero developer Glacier even went so far as to release a new Android app called Epic Heroes- Save Animals and retired the old Android version of X-Hero (the iOS version is still called X-Hero). It was a massive success, as we can see from the spike in downloads in the below chart. 

Our UA expert Matej Lancaric details its experimentation with UA creatives, storefront, and more in this blog post that is well worth reading. One thing that’s changed since is that the company has moved away from the “doge” theme, and the minigame now features a generic Hypercasual look. 

As we can see above, the usage of the “fake” core game ad strategy carries over to X-Hero’s storefront, which is also populated with screenshots featuring gameplay nothing like the real deal. 

The chart of downloads market share looks pretty outrageous, and the reason is the wave of new game releases. Three of the games here are by Glacier (released under various developer accounts): X-Hero, 超能世界 (Super World), and Hero Clash. All three of them use the fake ads strategy, and why not when it has worked so well? We’ve already covered X-Hero, but what about the other two?

Super World uses a traffic minigame as its bait: 

While Hero Clash has three different minigames: 

While this strategy does indeed work, it's confusing to come upon a storefront page that looks nothing like the real product. At least in the iOS storefront, scrolling to the right reveals actual screenshots while the Play Store versions only feature images of the minigames. 

While technically these games are not breaking store rules (and I can’t fault developers from leveraging every advantage they can), it feels like this will come back to bite the industry in the long run when players lose even more trust and believe, rather rightfully so, that developers are out to trick them at every turn.

Revenue

Revenue growth is looking healthy and trending upwards, with 2022 growing by 11.2% YoY. The growth chart shows some spiky action though, first jumping up in Q2 of 2021, then dipping in Q3 of 2022 only to leap back up in Q4 2022.

The reason for the Q2 2021 jump was the release in February 2021 of “一念逍遥” — romanized as Yi Nian Xiao Yao, with a separate English version called Overmortal. 

Overmortal

This game was immediately successful and earned $37.9 million in Q2 of 2021 (82% of subgenre YoY growth). We can also see that it peaked in March of 2022 and has been on a steady decline, mirroring subgenre growth (except for the Q4 burst).

But first, a little introduction on the theme of Overmortal: Xianxia Cultivation. This is a literary genre about the adventures of martial artists who pursue power by training and “cultivating” their body, spirit, and mind to gain immortality. For an example, check out the Coiling Dragon series. Typically, the characters begin as mortal and need to go through many tribulations and meditation in order to climb the ranks.

There is a power scale to each rank, with the next tier in the rank bestowing immeasurable power. So far, it sounds exactly like an RPG right? The other kicker is that cultivators often need to spend years, decades, and, in the latter stages, hundreds of years meditating to find the “dao” to ascend to the next level. All of this to say that the cultivation theme seems almost purpose-built for Idle RPGs.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because cultivation novels and games are rising in popularity, as we can see in the Google Trends chart below. There’s also an uptick in Western writers in the genre — the most prominent being New York Times and No. 1 Kindle Best Selling author Will Wight’s Cradle series. It may not be too long in the future that a Western developer creates a cultivation game.

Returning to the subject subgenre trends, why did revenue in Q4 2022 jump back up? The answer comes down to two games: X-Hero and MementoMori. As we mentioned in the downloads section, X-Hero exploded in downloads in Q3/Q4 2022, and this brought along with it a big uplift in revenue. MementoMori, on the other hand, was a new game from Japanese developer Bank of Innovation. 

Combined, these two games contributed $70 million to the subgenre’s Q4 2022 YoY growth of $78 million. We’ll talk about MementoMori a little more in the games-level breakdown later.

One final thing to cover here is why revenue, which grew at 11.2%, hasn’t fully followed the downloads, which grew at 58.2%. The reason is that several games, led by AFK Arena, had big reductions in revenue, which muted subgenre revenue growth.

The reason for their revenue slump? Paid downloads were toned down, bringing along with it downloads and revenue.

The top 10 games by revenue make up 49% of the subgenre’s market share, and here we can see that while the subgenre itself is up 11.2%, many of the games are facing declines. AFK Arena and Idle Heroes were the two biggest losers in the top 10, and as we covered above, it's because they have reduced UA activities, which resulted in a decline in downloads and revenue. We’ve also covered 一念逍遥 (YiNianXiaoYao) and X-Hero, so let’s instead take a look at the new entrants, MementoMori and Attack on Time.

MementoMori bills itself an “AFKRPG” and comes with an absolutely beautiful artstyle that fuses watercolor and anime. The developers must have loved their art so much that they’ve eschewed the traditional battle screen (screenshot below). In a battle, you see your team lined up on the left and the opponents on the right. Normal attacks are just effects flying from side to side, while triggered skills show the character with some animation. See an example of battle gameplay here. While the art is great, it feels too abstract and really reminds you that this is just a numbers simulator.

That said, it was only released in October 2022 and yet has already earned $41.9 million in just the final three months of 2022, with its biggest territories being Japan (65% of revenue), South Korea (12%), and Taiwan (10%). 

The other new game, Attack on Time, is from Chinese developer Onemt and is very overt in attracting a thirsty male audience. 

Attack on Time was released in China and Japan in mid-2021, but it didn’t really make a revenue impact until the traditional Chinese version of the game was released and got picked up by gamers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with Taiwan now the number one territory by revenue.

Here, we can see AFK Arena’s continual decline. It started Q1 2021 with 34% market share, but that’s now dwindled down to 13.4% in Q4 2022. It’s actually been steadily declining ever since that massive spike in January 2020, when the Chinese version launched.

Speaking of decline, the once mighty Idle Heroes too has fallen onto tough times, and in Q4 2022 holds just 4.6% of revenue market share. That said, it’s a lot older than AFK Arena as it was released back in 2016 and it may be a case of the game’s lifecycle.

Finally, we can see two big winners at the end of 2022: MementoMori and X-Hero, both with different go-to-market strategies (fake ads vs “traditional” UA). It’ll be interesting to see which one comes out on top in 2023, and we’ll certainly be keeping track.

X-Hero Leads the Way in “Fake” Minigame Integration

The integration of “fake” minigames into the actual game is a trend that’s gained traction over 2022 and will likely become even more prevalent in 2023. Typically, these feel shoehorned in, with the minigame appearing as the first few levels on launch before you get to the “real” game. Once the real game begins, you play the minigames less frequently and they almost feel like the interstitial playable ads hawking Hypercasual games, in the sense that they appear unexpectedly.

X-Hero breaks new ground here as it introduces an entire progression path using the line minigame (called Line Escape) which gives you resources on the main campaign.

The difference between the art styles is quite jarring, but the minigame does add to the gameplay variety. They even make you want to play the minigames more by gating the progression there to the progression of the “main” game. This interweaving of the minigame with the main progression (instead of being a “break” level”) is, in my opinion, a better way of integrating minigames that will likely become more and more widespread in 2023. It resolves the bait-and-switch aspects of fake ads and provides some gameplay variety that is meaningful.

As to fake ads, how will it evolve moving forward? Well, for one, they are no longer completely fake. These minigames exist in the application and are increasingly more integrated in the actual experience. The next evolution could be the presentation of the minigames itself. Much like how Hypercasual visuals have evolved greatly throughout the years (read our research essay on the evolution of Hypercasual here), the look and feel of these minigames will improve, with gains in fidelity and more aesthetically pleasing visuals (and, imagine this, perhaps even matching that of the host game!). Wherever it goes, it’ll be fascinating to see what happens.

Looking Forward

Idle RPGs were the only RPG subgenre to post growth in both downloads and revenue. It’s also a very volatile market, particularly in the realm of downloads as new entrants come and go. The pace of new releases is still looking healthy, so we could see downloads grow again in 2023. Revenue-wise, AFK Arena’s crown has been usurped by newcomer Overmortal. Will it be able to hold onto its top spot just by relying on the Chinese market? Its revenue has been trending down which doesn’t bode well for it, and the competition in 2023 will be red hot. 

Already there are new 2023 entrants, like Eversoul and Mosaic Hero, that have gotten off to a flying start, with Mosaic Hero topping the revenue charts for the first two months of 2023. Those two games, as well as a lot of the other new releases, are geared towards the Asian audience. But what about Western Idle RPG players? For them, I think a Western-developed Idle RPG cultivation game (perhaps using Will Wight’s Cradle IP) could be the game no one knew they wanted until it’s made. Any takers?

Other RPGs

Other RPGs consist of six individual subgenres, plus a catch-all “Additional RPG” segment for those games that just didn’t fit in another subgenre. The breakdown is thus:

• Fighting: A game where the player controls a character and engages in real-time one-on-one combat (Marvel Contest of Champions)
• Action RPG: An RPG where the player has direct control over character movement and combat (Marvel Future Fight)
• Survival: Games where you need to survive in the wilderness, scavenging and crafting gear while developing your character’s abilities (Last Day on Earth: Survival)
• Sovereign Game: Players need to rule and manage an empire or kingdom; Sovereign games include RPG, narrative, and simulation/management elements. They can be seen as similar to 4X Strategy games, but Sovereign games place the emphasis on characters and leveling them up (Game of Sultans)
• Idol Training Sim: Players recruit and train Japanese-style idols (Uma Musume Pretty Derby)
• Tower Defense RPG: A combination of a Tower Defense core plus RPG elements like character and item progression, as well as narrative. (Arknights)
• Additional RPG: Games that don’t fall into either subgenre above (Girl Adrift).

Downloads

When looking at this category on a subgenre-level, we see that Fighting games make up a big portion of its downloads, followed by Action RPGs and Survival games. As a whole, the category has seen a growth of 12.4% YoY with the most interesting movement being a two-quarter acceleration in downloads growth in Q1 and Q2 of 2022 (as seen below).

The reason for that bump? Fighting game downloads, as we can see in the subgenre downloads trend. 

More specifically, these were downloads of Stickman Fighting games. For those that don’t know what Stickman fighting games are, these are games featuring the namesake in 2D combat. A big difference with regular fighting games is that movement is typically physics-based and you have no direct control over the limbs. Instead, you have to maneuver the characters, which can be tricky due to the physics system, so that your attacks will land. See an example of the gameplay here. 

The biggest such game of the past few years is undoubtedly Supreme Duelist Stickman from developer Neron’s Brother of Swaziland. It launched in 2019 and really blew up, attaining 23 million of pure organic downloads and finishing 2019 in 4th place for Fighting game downloads, just behind Marvel Contest of Champions). Since then, it has secured the No. 1 spot on the Fighting game downloads chart, putting it in the crosshairs of new challengers. 

It's these new entrants that were responsible for the bump in Q1 and Q2 of 2022, and the top seven challengers were behind 78% of the Q1 2022 downloads growth. Unlike Supreme Duelist Stickman, they had to rely on paid downloads to make their charge for the no.1 spot (which they’ve failed to do).

Let’s now move on to some of the notable movements across the other subgenres. Due to the size of Fighting game downloads, we’ll have to split up the remaining subgenres into two separate graphs to reveal the movements within. We’ve bucketed Action RPG and Survival as they have similar download numbers, and the remaining subgenres will be looked at together.

Here, we can see that downloads of Action RPGs are trending up, growing by 20.8% YoY. Three newcomers to the subgenre were big contributors to this growth, making up 70% of the 36.4M increase in annual downloads). Dreamdale (9.9 million), Ninja Ryuko (9.6M million), and Disney Mirrorverse (7 million) all saw global launches in 2022 that contributed to the subgenre’s growth.

Of these three games, Dreamdale is an interesting one because it was created by Hypercasual publisher SayGames. 

Like SayGames’ Squad Alpha and My Little Universe before it, Dreamdale is a Hybridcasual game that makes a much more significant portion of its revenue from IAP. The image below shows SayGames’ (we cover SayGames’ pivot into Hybridcasual in greater detail in our March 2nd Weekly Update) top five games of 2022 by revenue, and you can clearly see the RPD differences between its Hypercasual and Hybridcasual games. 

Dreamdale still has a ways to go to compete with its elder Hybridcasual siblings (particularly Squad Alpha), and a view of their RPDs aligned by launch date shows that Dreamdale hasn’t been able to increase its RPD the same way Squad Alpha was able to, indicating a weakness in Dreamdale’s monetization strategy. It’s undoubtedly something that SayGames is aware of, so we’ll need to see if the team continues making improvements to this area.

Now, as for Survival games, downloads have grown modestly, with the subgenre up 6% YoY. The biggest game by downloads here (making up 14% of subgenre downloads) is Raft Survival by U.K. developer Treastone, and it’s a first-person Survival game which takes place on a raft. 

Treastone itself is a Survival game specialist, having four different Survival games with different settings. Speaking of settings, unlike what one may immediately assume — that Survival games are mainly zombie-themed — there is quite a bit of variety on offer. The top 10 downloaded games offer settings such as ocean (Raft Survival), zombie (LifeAfter), and several different “Island + X” combos.

This makes sense as Survival game mechanics are pretty consistent (looting, crafting, combat, building, etc.) and the setting is often the main differentiating factor. But perhaps there may be another way for a developer to differentiate itself, by introducing a “casual” Survival experience. The majority of the Survival games feature hardcore presentation and mechanics and a more casual take on the subgenre would stand out. There have been attempts before, such as Castaway Hero, but it may have gone too far in the other direction. It was more about resource collection to complete tasks (usually building things in predetermined spots) and lost the sense of exploration and ownership.

Either way, it’d be good to see some innovation in this subgenre as it does contain very compelling core mechanics that may just need some refinement to make them more palatable for a more mainstream audience.

Alright, let’s move onto the final batch of subgenres, and here we can see a big change in fortunes for Sovereign RPGs, which is down 28% YoY. There was a big drop in downloads in Q4 of 2021 from which it hasn’t recovered.

The game responsible for that drop is Call Me Big Boss (called Trading Legend in its English version), which was released in Taiwan back in 2020 but saw localized South Korean, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese versions released in Q1 to Q3 2021, leading to a downloads spike. As expected, this was due to launch UA campaigns, and once UA was scaled down, downloads followed.

The final notable movement over here is Tower Defense RPGs, which saw strong growth of 52% in 2022. Again, with these smaller subgenres, a single game can generate big movements, and here it's due to Path to Nowhere, which is essentially an Arknights clone with a slightly different aesthetic.

The Chinese version was released in August 2022, while the international versions were released two months later in October 2022. As always, these came with launch UA pushes, leading to the downloads growth we see in 2022. That’s a wrap for Other RPG downloads. Next up, revenue!

Revenue

In terms of revenue, Idol Training Sims are the largest subgenre, despite making up only 2% of the downloads, truly punching above its weight. We can also see that almost all of the subgenres have seen a contraction of revenue in 2022.

Looking at the revenue trends, we can see the downwards slide that began from Q2 of 2021 from which it hasn’t recovered. Why has revenue suffered even while downloads have been growing?

A large part of this is because of Idol Training Sims. As mentioned earlier, it has minimal impact on category downloads but an outsized one in revenue, so while the subgenre itself shrunk in both downloads (down 10.1%) and revenue (down 19.3%), the impact is much more prevalent in revenue numbers.

To see why Idol Training Sims have impacted the revenue so much, we need to look at the download trends for the three biggest subgenres, as seen in the chart above. Here, we see that Idol Training Sims mirror the movement of the category – namely the big peak in Q2 of 2021, followed by a steady decline. This big movement was due to one game: Uma Musume Pretty Derby. You might have heard of the game, but do not know much about what it’s about. 

The premise of the game is that race horses have been reborn as girls and idols (yes, it’s pretty out there). The core mode of the game is Training Mode, where you pick one of the girls and guide them over a training season, which lasts around 70 turns. 

During each turn, you have several actions you can do, such as training to increase stats, racing, or even going out on dates. Every girl you take through a training season has goals that they must achieve, and failing a goal ends the season meaning you’ll have to begin again. At the end of a season, if all goals are achieved, the player then gets to keep that character and use it in other game modes.

Back to its performance, Uma Musume launched in February 2021 and amassed an astounding $188 million in its first three months. 

In fact, over its first year, it occupied the same rarefied air (revenue-wise) as mega-hits such as Candy Crush Saga, Genshin Impact, and Pokemon Go, despite being Japan-only.

Since then, however, revenue has steadily been declining, despite active users remaining pretty stable (ignore the June 2021 dip in active users, which is a result of missing data for iOS).

It looks like the game has incredibly loyal players (it has a lifetime RPD of $140) who’ve consumed everything the game has to offer, and revenue is now rate-limited by the content updates. The only way for revenue to grow would be to get a new influx of users, which is what Cygames tried to do in June 2022, when it released the Korean and Traditional Chinese versions of the game. Unfortunately, the game hasn’t resonated as well with the audiences in those countries, and the game has continued its downward revenue trend.

This may be a case of the game lacking spend depth plus being too localized for a Japanese audience, ultimately stunting its growth.

Looking at the revenue trends of the remaining subgenres, there’s a couple interesting movements. First, Tower Defense RPGs recovered in revenue in 2022, as Path to Nowhere took off, which we covered in the downloads section above. 

The other big movement in this segment was the spike of Fighting game revenue in Q4 of 2022. One of the biggest contributors to this spike was Marvel Contest of Champions (MCOC), which had a revenue increase of $13 million quarter-over-quarter (48% of the overall subgenre quarterly growth) driven by a particularly strong update in Q4 2022.

Update v37.0.0 (released November 8th, 2022) included the usual event quest, this time featuring Shuri, the new Black Panther, and a tie-in to the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever released in October 2022. But the big thing in this update was a new feature, Relics, which are items players can equip to boost a Champion’s power in battle. The feature also came with an accompanying side quest (The Reliquary), in which players can earn Relic Crystal Shards to open crystals that reward Relics. 

While we can’t directly attribute this introduced feature to the revenue spike, MCOC has released updates at the same time over the past few years. These follow the same formula: new event quests that have typically peaked at the $2.5 million per day range. We can see that in 2022, the update peaked at a much higher $4.5 million per day, so unless the event quest featuring Shuri was a lot more compelling than usual, it's likely Relics that have given MCOC that revenue bump.

How Marvel Contest of Champions Stands the Test of Time

Since we’re talking about MCOC, it would be interesting to see how its fairing for a game that was released in 2014. Layering it's all-time revenue, downloads, and active users on the same chart shows us that it’s doing pretty well for a game that’s almost 10 years old.

Revenue has been in a slow but steady decline from its 2018 peak, but it hasn’t faced the same steep drop like we’ve seen with Uma Musume. One thing MCOC has tried to do to stop this decline is to increase the frequency of live-ops, and we can see that evidence with the frequency of big revenue spikes increasing from 2019 onwards. We’ve previously done a deconstruction of MCOC that’s well worth reading if you’d like to delve into the details of its live ops strategy, core loops, monetization, and more.

While MCOC’s effective live ops has helped stem the decline, the main problem it faces now is the consistent shrinking of its player base, meaning that MCOC will need to squeeze the remaining players ever-harder for more money. It’s gotten pretty good at that, seeing as the game has lost 38% of its active users from 2019-2022, while revenue only declined by 15% during the same period. 

An example of Kabam’s expertise in squeezing more from less is the new Relic feature we mentioned above. Having equipment that can boost combat immediately makes it a must have for competitive players, and as this video shows, equipping a maxed out relic can make a big difference in combat power, making Relics a “need” more than a “want.”

Looking Forward

Dreamdale is one of the first Hybridcasual games we’ve seen in the genre, but it won’t be the last. As we mentioned when talking about Survival games, a casual Survival game could open up the subgenre to new audiences, and perhaps the best way to do that would be with a Hybridcasual take. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an explosion of Hybridcasual games across the subgenres in RPG (watch an ad to replenish your team’s HP!).

The Stickman fighting genre is also a potential avenue for growth. It’s right now filled with ad-based and frankly, quite unattractive, games, yet has become very popular. Taking the physics-based combat from these games and creating an IAP-based title with better presentation could open it up to audiences in T1 countries and their greater revenue potential.