Earning a million dollars in the mobile market does not guarantee success. The history of the Marvel Realm of Champions is an example of this. Launched in 2020, the project for a major film franchise did not even live up to its two-year anniversary.
Realm of Champions is a simplified MOBA in the heroic Marvel universe. The player takes control of the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man or any other character, and then fights them in multiplayer PVP and PVE activities.
A team was responsible for creating the game, partly consisting of the authors of the mobile fighting game Marvel Contest of Champions, currently the main and only box office hit Kabam (the game earns $ 10 million a month). Moreover, they have one creative director — Gabriel Frizzera.
Against the background of the huge earnings of Honor of Kings and the strengthening of Marvel as a brand, Kabam most likely hoped that an experienced team would be able to make a commercial hit. However, something went wrong. Last week, the publisher and developer removed the title from the shelves of the App Store and Google Play.
The official reason announced in the press release is that the developers were unable to implement the original vision of the project. So part of the team returned to the short-staffed Contest of Champions, part left Kabam.
As for the hypotheses, the main and most obvious one is that the purchase of traffic was in the negative, even after the release of a number of significant updates (for example, last spring the developers completely changed the interface of the game).
At the same time, judging by AppMagic data, the game was not spoiled by large-scale purchases of users. At the launch stage of the launch of a major campaign dedicated to the softlonch, 3 million users were attracted to it. After that, such significant UA campaigns were not carried out (the game attracted plus or minus 150-300 thousand people per month).
Dynamics of Marvel Realm of Champions downloads
At its peak, the game earned around $ 300 thousand. However, on average, its revenue was kept at the level of $ 100 thousand. After a decrease in the number of installations, the monthly revenue of the title instantly went down, judging by the available data.
Dynamics of Marvel Realm of Champions sales
In total, during the operation, Marvel Realm of Champions earned $ 1.6 million with a total installation base of 5.1 million downloads. Based on this, it turns out that the average income per user of the game is at the level of 30 cents.
For comparison, MARVEL Future Fight, a successful battler from Netmarble, has an ARPU of $3.3. The already mentioned Marvel Contest of Champions has this figure in the region of $6. The extremely successful MARVEL Strike Force: Squad RPG from Scopely boasts an ARPU of $11.
Focused on the same audience, Realm of Champions was not able to monetize its audience as successfully. Therefore, they did not continue to work with him, despite the successful example of Supercell, which “pulled” Brawl Stars to an ARPU of $ 3.4.
Marvel Realm of Champions has been in development for two years, two more years in operation.