🚀 MarketWire | Payback 2, What’s an “Open Battle Sandbox” Game?

GTA clone Payback 2 hits Top 10 WW Downloads... how?

AuthorAuthor

Ryan Wilson & Joseph Kim
July 22, 2023

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?

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