A Japanese publisher has announced that the revenue of Knights & Dragons, a third-party studio project, has crossed the $1 million mark per month. About the developers’ dislike of publishers and about the success of the Canadian game – in our material.
As a rule, the internal teams of a publisher earn the most money. To make sure, just look at the box office top: Big Fish Casino, Kingdom of Camelot, The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Each of the projects is the own development of a certain large publisher. And, yes, the list can be continued for a long time.
Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the opinion that, they say, it is better to enter the market independently and, allegedly, publishers are not the best helpers.
But in fact, everything is more complicated here. It’s just that in the case of internal developments, the publisher initially works on monetization of the project, immediately integrates analytics into the code and does not step on dozens of rakes peculiar to young and independent teams.
Experience and a wide base of released projects allows you to bring the project to the market more effectively. On the other hand, of course, there is always a risk of getting lost and becoming just “one of many” games of the publisher.
Anyway, you can become a millionaire with the help of a publisher. As GREE recently reported. The Knights & Dragons project published by her in October (not to be confused with Puzzle & Dragons) from Vancouver-based IUGO currently collects $ 1 million per month (we talked about the game in detail last December).
This is not a lot of money against the background of Supercell and GungHo records, and considering that part of it goes to Apple, and another part of GREE itself, but by the end of 2013, the publisher plans to “collect” $ 5 million per month from the project.
Knights & Dragons was the first project published with the help of the GREE partner fund, which invests from $ 1 million in the equity of a particular studio.
It became known about the fund in February, at the same time the cash positions of Knights & Dragons went up, information about the financing of IUGO by the fund was received only in April. Since March, the game’s positions have remained stable: the game, as a rule, is between 40 and 60 positions in the iPhone US box office top.
GREE claims that with its active operator support, the ARPDAU of the game increased by 75%, and the 30-day retention increased by 50%. And, as you can see from the graph above, the jump in indicators just falls on February. In other words, financing began simultaneously with the opening of the fund.
P.S. While I was writing, the thought arose that speaking of Knights & Dragons, we can no longer talk about a completely third-party studio if part of its share capital was bought by GREE.
How many exactly? Pocket Gamer believes that about 30%.
The conclusion is this: it is not a fact that becoming a millionaire with the help of a publishing house, your team will not become part of the “big organism”.
Sources: gree-corp.com/pres, pocketgamer.biz, App AnniePhoto: businessnewsdaily.com