Good afternoon! Did you catch The Last of Us on HBO? A massive wave of television and film content based on video game IP is coming, and hopefully, it’ll be as good as The Last of Us. Sony alone is working on ten movies based on video games.

Final reminder “Building a Live-Ops Feature Roadmap” webinar with data.ai x SciPlay coming up this Wednesday, Feb 8, at 10:00AM PST/1:00PM EST.

• Sign up here: http://bit.ly/3YqPOlP

Got a ton of subs from last week’s Market Wire which had a singular news focus on Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile closure. As an experiment, I’ll try to swing a balance and focus on 3 news items but go deeper on each.

As part of the news coverage, I’ll also continue to give you guys some of the insider “word on the street” as well. Just don’t let people know you heard it from me. Lol.

Market Data

Top 10 Charts

• Clash of Clans +15 ranks to get into Top 10 revenue. What happened there?

• Attack Hole attacking the US market and generally doing a great job of downloads not only in US but worldwide.

Top 10 Publishers by Rank

Top 5 Trending Downloads & Revenue

Top 3 News

#1. The AAA games industry is doomed (NME)

Author Jake Tucker argues that the AAA games industry is heading for disaster and will be pretty hard to avoid.

You should go and read the full article, but a summary of his thesis:

• Before: “If you worked on, say, Goldeneye 007 for the N64 all the way back in 1997, you were part of a tiny team. When the game shipped, the carts went out, the team (presumably) went out for a beer, and then prepared to start work on the next project. Development cost around $2.5m for the entirety of its two and a half years in development. The game set you back around £60 at launch, and it ended up selling 8m copies.”

• Today: “Uncharted 4, the third best-selling PlayStation 4 game, sold 16million units… Many people who worked on the game left after development, but those who remained stayed on to keep patching the game and cleaning up bugs. 18m sounds like a lot of copies, until you consider that Uncharted 4 also cost £60 to buy. The exact budget has never been revealed, but press estimates suggest an eye-watering figure.”

• Game Concentration: “A title now needs to be played by more people and make more money to be profitable, but there are now more games clamouring for people’s attention these days and data seems to suggest that players are spending more time with games than ever before. While before someone on the first PlayStation might have played 20-30 games a year, it’s now feasible for one player to play Fortnite and nothing else, putting a few quid into cosmetics a month, while they clock hundreds of hours.”

The net effect of this is to make game development especially difficult to find success for AAA game publishers. And especially publishers who aren’t known for being efficient/productive like Ubisoft.

Jake notes this tweet about the decline in market value of Ubisoft:

The solution? Jake believes you either have to go for the massive Fortnite like hit, or for the industry to shift to support “AA” rather than “AAA”:

By the way, I won’t say who, but I hear so much criticism of Ubisoft from people in the games industry and from former Ubisoft employees. There may be more to the decline in Ubisoft than just macro industry issues.

But are we really in that much trouble here?

I overheard a game industry exec suggest a few months ago that there has never been as much Steam playtime outside of the top 50 as ever before. Further, Steam concurrent players reached all-time highs in January 2023 and hardware availability is starting to loosen up, which should help sell additional units on console.

Is AAA doomed?

#2. The mobile games that have made more than $1 billion in lifetime sales (PocketGamer.biz)

Insights from Success

Looking through the list of 56 $1B mobile games (although they state there are over 60), a few thoughts:

• Some of these games are essentially the same game e.g., King of Avalon, State of Survival, Guns of Glory, Game of War, Mobile Strike. Also the Battle Royale games: Knives Out, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, Fortnite.

• Four companies have 3 or more games in the $1B club: FunPlus, King, Playrix, and Supercell. However, Supercell is alone in developing $1B mobile games in different genres.

  • FunPlus (3): Guns of Glory, King of Avalon, State of Survival

  • King (3): Farm Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga

  • Playrix (4): Fishdom: Deep Dive, Township, Homescapes, Gardenscapes

  • Supercell (4): Clash Royale, Boom Beach, Clash of Clans, Hay Day

• Overall, I believe too many people aren’t studying the success of these $1B mobile games carefully enough to understand what it takes for commercial success. Further, I think people are sleeping on some potential target games to develop by studying these games.

My Experience on King of Avalon

To be honest, I was fairly surprised when King of Avalon hit #1 top grossing and then went on to generate over $1B in life-of-product revenue.

Note that two other games - State of Survival and Guns of Glory - were reskinned by King of Avalon. Hence I had a direct or indirect part in 3 of the 60 $1 billion dollar mobile games. Lol, yeah, I’m bragging.

Interestingly, when we were working on King of Avalon, most of the team didn’t really believe it would be as successful as it became. Many didn’t believe it would be successful at all. It’s only later, and many of you who have worked on top games likely have seen a familiar phenomenon. But so many doubters often rewrite history and, after the fact, talk about how they always believed in a successful outcome.

When I first joined the team, I heard a rumor that someone told Gabe Leydon, the CEO of MZ, that a “super team” was being developed at FunPlus to take on Game of War. I laughed at that, and I distinctly remember saying to folks at FunPlus: “If he actually knew what was going on here, he wouldn’t be worried at all.” It took a few talks from Andy Zhong, the CEO of FunPlus, to convince me we would ultimately prevail. He told me: “Look, we are making tons of money from our other games. We’re going to just keep investing in this game until we’re successful. Whatever it takes.”

Andy believed from the beginning and would often state: “this game will be a top 3 game.” It wound up becoming true:

#3. Apex Legends Could Come Back To Mobile If It's Unified With Main Game, EA CEO Suggests (Gamespot)

There was a lot of heat on last week’s post on Apex Legends Mobile + Battlefield shutdown.

Since there seems to be a lot of interest, I decided to continue coverage here with this post about how EA CEO Andrew Wilson is explaining the news.

Gamespot notes that Wilson gave 3 reasons why they decided to shut down Apex Mobile:

1. Gameplay Mismatch: “There is a level of immersion and complexity to Apex gameplay in particular, which is very much about what Apex is about, verticality of gameplay and team-based play, that didn't translate quite as well to mobile devices as we had hoped."

2. Inability to Retain Casual Users: "It didn't retain the more casual user at the rate that we needed it to. And in a game that relies a lot on team play and competitive play, liquidity of the overall player base is really, really important."

3. Challenging Mobile Market: Wilson referenced a “challenging” mobile market and further stated, “as we look at the mobile market, the biggest new launches that are seeing the most success are the ones that are deeply connected to the broader franchise where there's not always cross-play, but there's certainly cross-progression and a feeling that they're part of a single unified community and a single unified game experience."

Hmm… I mean, uhm… ok.

If I’m being honest, these reasons don’t make much sense.

Let’s take the first reason: Verticality and team-based gameplay? Ok, I think you can make an argument about verticality, but as a player of Apex Mobile I’d have to disagree. And team-based gameplay? I mean Call of Duty Mobile is quite literally mostly Team Death Match.

As for the second reason, this is just a generic response that doesn’t speak to the game specifically.

Finally, the third reason suggesting cross-progression is also another generic, doesn’t make sense, hand-wavey response, and more executive nonsense. “Hey, look at Fortnite, look at Genshin Impact. Ok, it’s all about cross-progression.” Never mind Call of Duty Mobile or many other successful titles without cross-progression. He’s taking the data points from Fortnite and Genshin and generalizing them.

Regarding Battlefield Mobile, Wilson hand waved that the game would likely “run into some of the same challenges.” Unfortunately, not much real information, detail, or insight here.

Sorry, I’m being a bit negative here, but life’s short, so let’s keep it real.

On a more positive note, Wilson suggested Apex Mobile could come back in the future:

Hmm… cross-platform or cross-progression isn’t the reason. Not saying cross-platform/progression shouldn’t be part of a future Apex Mobile title, but it’s not what creates the successful outcome.

I wish EA/Respawn good luck in the future, and Apex is a fantastic franchise. Personally, I’ll miss Apex Legends Mobile after the shutdown.