Welcome to this week's edition of News by Numbers, where we highlight some of the can't-miss mobile gaming news from the past week.
Seen any news we've missed? Share in the comments below!
Reigns: 2
Reigns was recently named our Interactive-fiction/Story __game of the Year. It was on a lot of other top-games lists too, including Apple's. Nerial, the maker of Reigns, kicked off 2017 with a bang and announced not only a free expansion for Reigns—full of new cards, characters, and creatures to interact with—due in February, but also a sequel. Reigns 2 (a tentative title) will switch perspectives to that of the queen and should make the __game different enough without changing the innovative style that launched Reigns to such success.
Card Thief: 180 testers
Card Thief is a highly anticipated new game from TiNYTOUCHTALES, the makers of Card Crawl and ENYO and a Pocket Tactics favorite. Card Crawl won quite a few of our awards in 2015 including board/card game of the year, readers' choice game of the year, and editor's choice game of the year, so, yeah…we're fans.
Card Thief will also be played with a deck of cards and will use a mechanic where you pick the path a thief takes to steal loot and avoid capture. Light, shadow, and stealth will play a big part in the game. Card Thief beta sign up for both iOS and Android devices opened and closed in a very short window last Wednesday with over 180 testers signed on. Stay tuned for more info as this one moves toward a release date, you can bet we will be talking about it more.
SolForge: 22 more days
SolForge, the CCG that launched in August 2013 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign, will be shutting down at the end of January. The game attracted thousands of players who played millions of games according to this announcement, which also cited having bit off more than they could chew in terms of scope as a reason for the shutdown. I suspect this roughly translates to, "Hearthstone happened", but that's just a guess. This is probably not the last CCG we will see call it quits as more and more games rush to compete for players in such a lucrative market.
Demon's Rise: 30 playable characters
Demon's Rise 2 won our RPG of the year in 2016, but the original is still seeing updates. Demon's Rise the First just got a major update with all of the graphical enhancements and other improvements made in the second game to put it on the same level. Demon's Rise has an impressive thirty playable characters. If you haven't checked out the original now's the time.
On that note, the dev was kind enough to give some promo codes for the game to hand out, so stay tuned!
Duelyst: over 400 cards
Duelyst, a tactical CCG where you assemble a deck and battle other players, is coming to mobile devices in Q1 of 2017. In it you play as a general and play cards to cast spells and summon minions. The twist on the usual Magic/Hearthstone model is that you also move your team around the gameboard in turn-based style, with bonuses gained from occupying certain squares.
Super Mario Run: $30 million dollars
Super Mario Run has had more than 900 million downloads and made about $30 million dollars in revenue. That means three million people bought the full game, about 3% of those who downloaded. That's a lot of money and though it's hard to know exactly how this result will shift the mobile-game landscape in terms of free-to-play versus premium games, it doesn't jump out as a result that will lure other big-name titles into paid-game territory.
App Store: $240 million on New Year's Day
Apple announced that January 1st, 2017 was its biggest day ever, with $240 million worth of purchases made. Another metric in a growing list pointing to the continuing explosion of mobile games and other apps. Speaking of…
IAP: $500M during Christmas
In-app-purchases over Christmas weekend grew 52% from 2015 from $330M to $500M worldwide according to Sensor Tower. Most of that (87%) came from the super-hot mobile games market with Clash Royale leading the way.
That's not all, 2016 mobile metrics keep trickling in and here's a big one…
App Store Developers: $20 billion in 2016
App Store developers earned $20 billion in 2016 according to Apple's year-end roundup. That's a big, big year and makes up about a third of the total developer earnings since Apple's marketplace launched. Games, of course, make up a big percentage of that total.
That's it for this edition of News by Numbers. If you've got a news item worth sharing send it our way on Twitter to @MrVigabool and it may show up in a future edition.
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