🚀 MarketWire | Undawn of a new era in Survival and MMO games to launch

Tencent's new MMO x Survival game tries to improve upon NetEase's LifeAfter

Hello GameMakers,

First, I want to admit that I made a big mistake.

Matej Lancaric and I did a Top 5 mobile game launches podcast where we suggested that the top 5 game launches (based on scale + profitability) over the past year included: Honkai: Star Rail, Survivor!.io, Monopoly Go, Marvel Snap, and Frozen City.

By the way, yes, I got the messages from some of you asking about Whiteout Survival. You asked why we picked Frozen City over that game. I responded to some of you that I believed that the economics of mobile 4X games were likely not very attractive in today’s modern UA environment post-IDFA.

Well, turns out I was wrong. I’m here to inform you that 4X is still alive and kicking, and we should have put Whiteout Survival in the Top 5. However, note we’ll see if this is true after fingerprinting goes away.

This week I review Undawn, Tencent’s Top 10 downloaded title for the 2nd week in a row, although dropping from its #1 spot from last week. In general, survival and MMO are two big themes that I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of soon.

Top 10 Charts

  • Uma Musume up 67 spots to crack Top 10 Revenue? Wow.

  • Welcome to Top 10 Downloads Robot War: Robot Transform!

  • Undawn continuing in Top 10 Downloads for a second week but dropping to #2

  • Newcomer in US Top 10 Downloads: Reload Rush!

  • Pokemon GO has done a great job sticking around in US Top 10 Revenue. What if Niantic allocated more resources to Pokemon GO instead of endless reskins? Would a focus vs. reskin strategy serve the company better?

  • China’s Top 10 Downloads chart remains dynamic, with regular appearances by new games.

  • I’m continuously surprised by Eggy Party’s success in China!

Top 10 Mobile Publishers

Top 5 Mobile Trending

Top 10 Steam Games Sellers

  • FPS rules on Steam!

  • BattleBit continues to amaze with its outstanding performance on Steam; this three-person team continues to outperform huge companies and massive products.

🔦 Spotlight | Undawn of a new age of MMO and survival games

We are seeing a massive wave of survival and MMO-based games hitting the market this year and more in development to launch in the years to come.

Hence, it’s no surprise that Tencent, the world’s #1 mobile game publisher, would launch a survival x MMO mobile game.

Since the launch and success of NetEase’s LifeAfter, which did between $15M-$20M per monthly IAP net revenue in 2021-2022 based on data.ai estimates, we have suspected more games of entering the space.

However, more recently, LifeAfter has declined to make between $4M-5M per year over the past few months.

Enter Undawn and a new wave of upcoming high-fidelity and feature-rich MMOs and survival games that will enter the market in the next few years.

Performance

By the numbers, Undawn hard launched with an estimated 3.7M downloads on June 14, which has more recently slowed to 175K-400K daily downloads (still a lot!). On the revenue side, data.ai estimates suggest between $100K-$200K in daily net IAP revenue, although a recent boost over the past two days of between $250K-$300K per day.

Gameplay

Undawn closely follows LifeAfter with notions of a story-based campaign, building, crafting, coop PVE, and PVP.

As fairly common in MMOs and especially for mobile, the game highly automates and guides the player in game progression.

A decent review of the game to give you a better understanding of the game below:

Watch this space!

Many more big bets coming across the themes of MMO x Survival.

An interesting trend is that while more Chinese companies focus on Zombies and survival, Korean companies are betting much more on MMO x ARPG/fantasy.

Lots of games coming up, and it should be an exciting trend to watch.

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