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- 🚀 MarketWire | Payback 2, What’s an “Open Battle Sandbox” Game?
🚀 MarketWire | Payback 2, What’s an “Open Battle Sandbox” Game?
GTA clone Payback 2 hits Top 10 WW Downloads... how?
This week we saw a huge spike in installs enabling the “battle sandbox” game Payback 2 to hit Top 10 Downloads, Worldwide.
Apex Design’s Payback 2
What the heck is a “battle sandbox” game? This week we take a quick peek at Payback 2.
Top 10 Charts
Source: data.ai estimates
Damn, Payback 2 huge jump in downloads. All of the gain seems to be coming from Android but data.ai is not showing much paid UA there. Odd.
Monopoly GO cracks top 10 WW revenue. Congrats! Looks like they are still pushing UA hard as well.
Source: data.ai estimates
I’m very tempted to launch a game called “Booger Please” to hit Top Downloads in US
Dragon Ball Z is one of the spikiest, event-driven revenue games in market. You should see this game drop in and out of Top 10 based on events and the huge revenue spikes the game has.
Source: data.ai estimates
At some point, somebody should do a full deconstruction on Eggy Party and Battle of Golden Spatula.
Also, clearly Tencent should do a “Golden Spatula” of Minecraft just like they did to TFT.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
Source: data.ai estimates
Well, looks like Microsoft will soon be a top 3 mobile games publisher.
Congrats to Scopely for their savvy move to crack Top 10 this week.
Top 5 Mobile Trending
Source: data.ai estimates
Big jumps in downloads by simple, progression oriented, offline games this past week.
Source: data.ai estimates
Come on somebody take on mobile tactics!!!
Top 10 Steam Game Sellers
Source: steam estimates
Oddly, despite the overwhelming evidence, people still question how popular shooter games are especially for the Western market.
Am I the only one who doesn’t get Dave the Diver?
🔦 Spotlight | Payback 2 the Battle Sandbox Game
Payback 2 from developer Apex Designs launched way back on October 4, 2012. The game was the F2P version of the original Payback game launched in Jan of 2009 as a mobile knockoff of Grand Theft Auto.
Performance
The game generates a good number of downloads, almost all from organic traffic. Typically the game will get between 300-350K installs per week with a couple of spikes. The first spike drove about 650K installs for the week between April 16-22 and this past week in which we saw almost 900K installs for the week.
Most of the traffic originates from lower-tier geos such as India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and Indonesia.
Source: data.ai estimates
The traffic spikes are unusual in that the studio does very little user acquisition on the game: ~0.1% paid on Google and 10-15% paid on iOS, according to data.ai. Further, we can see that the install bursts came from Android:
From a monetization perspective, the game definitely orients toward ad-based revenue with the option to purchase to opt out of ads for $3.99. Otherwise, every mission or gameplay session forces an ad watch in order to continue with gameplay.
Payback 2 ad break option
Based on the data observed, the game monetizes very lightly generating between $10K-$15K in monthly net IAP revenue. Assuming ads are 80% of the game’s revenue we can expect the game to be generating up to $50K/month or so in total revenue.
Source: data.ai estimates
Gameplay
As mentioned, the game is basically a dated translation of Grand Theft Auto for mobile F2P.
The game supports both single-player modes “campaign” and “story” and includes a multiplayer mode in which players can create and configure multiplayer versions of the various game modes from single-player.
Payback 2 UI
For more details on the gameplay, feel free to check out the YouTube video below by DroidGameplaysTV:
Conclusion
I dunno guys. The Android spikes feel a little sus to me, lol. This seems like a game that is basically just generating a bit of extra cash with little cost and perhaps drawing a little bit on black ops UA on Android to give the game some additional push/exposure.
What do you guys think? How do we explain hitting Top 10 Worldwide Downloads for this game otherwise?
Authors
Data and analysis: Ryan Wilson
Commentary and spotlight: Joseph Kim
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