Welcome to this week's edition of News by Numbers, where we highlight some of the can't-miss mobile gaming news each and every week.
Apple Affiliate Program: 2.5% commission
The Apple Affiliate Program provides a small commission to websites and other content producers who refer users to apps and games on the App Store. Apple recently announced that it is slashing the commission for apps and in-app purchases from 7% to 2.5%. The rates paid for music, movies, books, and TV will remain unchanged.
2017 Google Play Awards: 5 nominees for Standout Indie
Google announced its nominees for the 2017 Google Play Awards last week. The "Standout Indie" category has five contenders, three of which have been reviewed on this site. Reigns is a case study of indie success, Kingdom: New Lands provides genre-bending, side-scrolling fun, and Mushroom 11 is a platformer worth playing. The winners will be announced May 18 at Google I/O.
Hearthstone: 6 tier-1 decks
Rotation and the addition of Journey to Un'Goro has definitely switched up Hearthstone's Standard environment. Tempo Storm produces the best metagame report out there (for any game) and has identified six different tier-one decks. Pirate Warrior is still on that list, but there was a stretch prior to rotation where it had far less company on the tier-1 list.
Osmos: 64-bit conversion
Osmos is a fun, beautiful, and relaxing game. Until recently, this iOS classic was on the 32-bit endangered-species list. Luckily, it sounds like the __game is being updated and looking for beta testers to help make sure the __game continues to be awesome.
Warbits: 1860 units
Warbits recently celebrated its one-year anniversary on the App Store and released a huge update. To celebrate they put the game on sale for $.99 for a limited time. Risky Lab, the makers of the game, posted some interesting data on the sale:
On average we sell about 25-35 units a day at $3.99
— Risky Lab (@RiskyLab) April 20, 2017
Day 1 of 99¢ sale moved 1860 units and peaked #138 in top paid apps. #12 in strategy.
That's quite a spike and a big influx of new gamers.
Meganoid: $6200 launch-period revenue
More behind-the-scenes sales info, this time from OrangePixel, the makers of the super-awesome Space Grunts and most recently Meganoid. Pascal, the one-man-dev-machine behind OrangePixel, posted this very candid blog post about the making of the game. It's definitely worth a read, especially if you're interested in games development. Long story short he spent about two months creating the game (backed by 13 years of experience to know exactly what he was doing) and made about $6200 on the game in its first 20 or so days on the market. About half of that came from iOS, with Android being the second-largest platform.
iOS 11: 187,000 obsolete apps
Commissions aren't the only thing Apple's slashing…it's a foregone conclusion at this point that they will be removing 32-bit support with iOS 11 this fall, which means any apps not updated to 64-bit will become unusable. According to app-analytics firm Sensor Tower over 187,000 apps will fade into obsolescence. That's 8% of the App Store. A huge majority of those apps are probably abandoned by devs and users alike and no great loss, though there are some classic games in jeopardy.
Mobile game Industry: $11,900,000,000 in Q1
Mobile gaming industry revenues continue to skyrocket with $11.9 billion earned in the first quarter of 2017 according to, once again, Sensor Tower. That's a 53% year-over-year increase from 2016, which certainly seemed bonkers at the time itself. Games are by far the biggest app money maker for both Apple, representing 80% of all 2017 revenue, and Google where games accounted for 90% of app revenue.
That's it for this week's round-up - if you want your news/announcement considered for next week's update, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
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