Top News

#1: Sony Plans To Grow Aggressively Into Mobile

In a business briefing to investors, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) Jim Ryan outlined a plan to greatly expand SIE’s efforts in Mobile as part of its audience expansion initiative. SIE is targeting for mobile to make up 20% of its releases by FY 2025. To help accomplish this, the team created a three-pronged plan consisting of co-development, internal production, and publishing.

This push into mobile was foreshadowed in SIE’s 2021 business briefing when Ryan spoke about taking “steps to bring Playstation IP to mobile,” but nothing about the scale of its current ambition was hinted at. Since then, SIE has been on a hiring spree to build up its mobile division. It started with the hiring of Nicola Sebastiani, former head of content at Apple Arcade, as VP of Mobile in July 2021, followed by the additional appointment of executives like Kabam veteran Kris Davies as Head of Mobile Business Development and former Zynga Director of Product Oliver Courtemanche as Head of Mobile Product.

Notably, this isn’t SIE’s first attempt at tackling the mobile market, as it has released some of its Playstation IP with unsuccessful mobile games like Run Sackboy! Run! and the now discontinued Uncharted: Fortune Hunter. In fact, failed mobile games featuring console and AAA IP is the norm, as the player base is just too different from what console and PC publishers are used to. The key for SIE will be to leverage co-development with mobile-first developers and learn from them what works for this segment.

In terms of its most popular IP, I believe a game with a lot of potential in the mobile space is Gran Turismo. The mobile racing segment has been stale, with no new entrants over the past few years; a fresh new entry with such an established name could do very well. We’ve also seen that AAA Sports IPs like FIFA, Madden, and Need For Speed can cross the console/mobile divide easier than action games like Tomb Raider or Hitman.

It looks like SIE has finally woken up to what its peers like Microsoft, Take-Two Interactive, and EA have already realized and are paying much more attention to the mobile market. The growth plan and the people that have been appointed to lead the charge look solid, but the mobile market is a challenging one and SIE will have to learn from industry leaders if it's to make this a success.

#2: Apex Legends Mobile Makes Almost $5 Million in Week 1

Apex Legends Mobile (ALM), which released on May 16th, has quickly racked up a revenue of $4.8 million in its first week and was the most downloaded iOS game in 60 countries, according to PocketGamer. This is a solid start for EA and Respawn, but there is still a long way to go in order to compete against the top apps in the Shooter genre - Call of Duty: Mobile (CODM), Free Fire, and PUBG Mobile. For context, CODM raked in $6.6 million, Free Fire $9 million, and PUBG Mobile brought in a whopping $38 million ($14 million even if you discount China) during the same period (of course, we concede that these games are in a much different period of their life cycle).

This is a good beginning for ALM, and though it falls short of CODM’s incredible launch (to be fair, that was one of the best mobile game launches ever), it is a promising start and it seems like a good time to take a quick look at ALM to see where it can go from here.

The hype about ALM (it acquired more than 10 million pre-registrations) ensured that when it launched there would be many downloads, which the chart above confirms by showing a peak of 4 million downloads on May 18th. Since then, though, downloads have trended down and it lost its crown as the daily most downloaded shooter on May 23rd, a week after its launch. That said, it was never expected that it would come in and completely dominate the genre that already had three very strong contenders. The question is: how well can it compete against the other titles?

One thing we can look at is where ALM is most popular and where its spenders come from.

The two charts above show a clear trend that the US is the key player base of ALM, accounting for 21% of its downloads and 42% of its revenue. That puts it right into the crosshairs of Free Fire and CODM, as the US is also their most profitable region.

While most of Free Fire’s players come from regions like Southeast Asia and Latin America, the US accounts for 37% of its revenue for the year. CODM’s most important territory has always been the US, and it currently represents 42% of CODM’s revenue. For PUBG Mobile, China is by far its largest market, accounting for a huge 63% of the revenue pie, with the US playing second fiddle at only 8%. That said, while the US is only a small part of PUBG Mobile’s revenue makeup, in terms of raw numbers, the $58 million it made from the US in 2022 so far is comparable to the $85 million and $63 million in revenue that Free Fire and CODM earned during the same period.

All this is to say that ALM’s most valuable region already has three well-fed fish who will not relinquish their audiences without a fight. The signs do look promising for ALM, though, as it has gotten off to a good start in terms of acquiring users in the US; the game quickly outpaced PUBG and is on par with Free Fire in terms of active users.

Note that the decline you see from Free Fire is a result of the shedding of its Android players while its iOS user count has been keeping steady. From our previous deconstruction of Free Fire, we know that Free Fire’s US active users over-index to Android (80%). The split is reversed when looking at revenue, however — 41% from Android and 59% from iOS.

Both CODM and PUBG are heavily iOS-focused in the US, as ~70% of their users and revenue are from iOS devices. This fits much more closely to ALM’s profile, which makes 75% of its US revenue from iOS so far. Unfortunately, we could not get any per-device usage data for ALM, but iOS also makes up a huge portion of its downloads at almost 79%, and we can expect its usage split to follow that trend.

This means that all four games are competing for the same player base (iOS players in the US) as a major source of revenue. Currently, Free Fire leads the overall revenue race in the US, closely followed by CODM and PUBG. If Respawn can build on top of the good launch with a solid live services plan, ALM may have a chance to overtake PUBG’s position as the No.3 shooter in the US. It will be much tougher to take on CODM and Free Fire, though, and Respawn will need to have something special up its sleeve in order to dislodge those two games.

Game Launch Radar

#1: EA Sports Tactical Football

• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• State: Early Access
• Territories: India
• Classification: Sports & Driving - Sports - Realistic Sports

• Quick thoughts:

  • Unlike regular FIFA Mobile, matches in Tactical Football are played on a top-down map with the team moving autonomously. The player can only directly command their players during certain moments of the game. See an example of gameplay here.
  • For players of Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team (CTDT), the gameplay looks extremely familiar. The game was developed by Klab (makers of CTDT), who previously announced a collaboration with a major IP from EA. CTDT has been fairly successful for Klab, amassing lifetime revenue of $265 million since launching in 2017.
  • This is one of EA’s first non-FIFA branded football games, but I don’t believe it will hurt them much, as you still get all the most recognizable footballers, which is what matters to players in the end.

#2: Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds

• Publisher: Netmarble

• State: Launch
• Territories: Global
• Classification: Midcore - RPG - MMORPG

• Quick thoughts:

  • Gameplay is a typical mobile MMORPG, but it stands out due to its gorgeous Ghibli-inspired visuals.
  • The gacha is focused on familiars which are creatures you can summon to fight in battles. In the console game, these familiars had to be tamed after defeating them in battle, and collecting them was part of its charm. While taming still exists in Cross World, it requires a consumable biscuit to do so, and it is likely that taming the rarest familiars will be extremely difficult in order not to cannibalize the gacha.
  • Netmarble recently launched its own blockchain ecosystem Marblex, and Cross World includes two tokens: 1) Territe which is earned from PVE play, and 2) Asterite which is earned from PVP.

Other Game Announcements

• Mobile Legends hit a peak of 2.2 million concurrent views during the 31st SEA Games. Link
• 10% of Free Fire players purchase in-game items. Link
• Aim Lab, an aim-training game for shooters, is coming to mobile. Link
• Leaked images show that Battlefield Mobile is getting a significant graphics upgrade. Link
• NetEase’s 2v4 stealth action game Mission Zero begins technical testing on July 8th. Link
• Diablo Immortal will not be released in Belgium and the Netherlands. Link
• Alchimerge, a hybrid merge and crafting game by PocApp, is set to release on June 7th. Link
• A new game from Tilting Point, Terragenesis: Landfall, is open for pre-registration. Link
• Casual PVP baseball game Super Baseball League is now available globally. Link

Company Announcements

• Take-Two Interactive’s acquisition of Zynga is now complete. Link
• Gameloft is pivoting into multi-platform AA games. Link
• Netflix’s Geeked Week will reveal its upcoming slate of Netflix Games, including one based on the popular Money Heist. Link
• Huuuge Games announced revenue of $84 million for the quarter, a YoY decrease of 12.2%. Link
• Roblox announced that former Zynga CTO Nick Tornow is now its VP of Engineering. Link
• Bigfish Games appointed Larry Plotnick, former GM of Gaming of Amazon Prime, as President. Link
• Companies interested in acquiring Ubisoft will need to pay 60 EUR per share. Link
• Callum Godfrey, a former King and Wargaming exec, joins Kwalee as Head of Casual Games. Link
• Supercell acquired a majority stake in Trailmix for $60 million. Link

Ecosystem Announcements

• Match Masters developer Candivore secured a $10 million funding round. Link
• Three mobile studios win accolades in the Finnish Game Awards. Link
• Mobile is poised to take over 60% market share of the gaming sector. Link
• Economy and systems prototyping tool Machinations.io raised a $3.3 million Series A. Link
• Employees from Activision Blizzard’s Raven Software studio vote to form the first major gaming union. Link
• Liniad, a UA and creative production company, revealed a Power Dashboard to quickly make playable ads. Link

Content Worth Consuming

• Advertising Strategy In A Recession (MobileDevMemo): “...contractions in advertising spend tend to be more severe and pronounced than changes in real GDP because advertising budgets can be adjusted quickly. For that reason, advertising is one of the first expense line items to be adjusted in the face of an economic downturn. That reactivity can help a company to preserve precious cash in a deteriorating economy, but it can also steal revenue from the future: a more productive approach is adapting measurement and predictive analytics to new consumer spending habits and eliminating inefficient advertising expenditure.” Link
• Why EA is not for sale / TikTok’s push into gaming / Snap’s lower guidance (Deconstructor of Fun): “Eric Kress dismantles the rumors of EA being for sale. Eric Seufert analyzes Snap's multiple lowered guidances. Laura Taranto looks into TikTok's push into gaming. Team also discusses recent two big mobile launches: APEX Legends from EA and Dislyte from Lilith. And what would be a TWIG episode without hearing the latest of Kress' son's basketball life…” Link
• Music licensing in games: trials, tribulations, and what's next (GamesIndustry.biz): “Licensing music in games brings about many challenges, but the three below are perhaps the most common: The copyright for songs and recordings are separate. Publishers looking to secure the rights to a song need both the song license and the recording. This is why the early Guitar Hero games featured covers of some iconic songs; the publisher only needed a license for the song, not the recording. Song rights can also be co-owned -- meaning all the owners need to agree to the license, making renegotiation a more difficult process. Copyright laws differ by country, making the licensing process more challenging in an increasingly globalized world and games market.” Link