Puzzle & Dragons, which earns about $1 billion every year, reached 10 million downloads four years after its release in North America.
This was announced yesterday, May 9, by the developer and publisher of the game, the Japanese company GungHo.
Recall that Puzzle & Dragons became the first mobile game to earn more than $ 1 billion. In the region of $ 1.3 billion, the game generated in 2013. And, as far as can be understood from the financial reports of GungHo, somewhere in the region of a billion dollars continues to earn annually until now.
Buttler, who forced everyone to take a closer look at collectible mechanics and gacha, was released in America just a couple of months later than in Japan (in November 2012, not in September). Despite this, in the homeland of Puzzle & Dragons, the number of installations by the end of 2013 was already tens of millions, and in North America at the same time it hardly overcame the bar of 2 million.
To improve the situation and reach the 10 million downloads mark in North America, Puzzle & Dragons was partly helped by TV advertising, which GungHo launched in the States and Canada in the fall of 2015.
It is surprising that the company took this step so late in North America. In Japan, it is TV advertising that GungHo calls one of the main reasons for the success of the game. It was after the launch of the campaign on Japanese television in 2013 that Puzzle & Dragons installations went up rapidly. Today, downloads of the Japanese version of the game amount to 41 million.
Most of Puzzle & Dragons’ revenue also comes from Japan. In the USA, where the cash position of the game on iOS regularly “walks” between 50 and 220 places in the overall top, the game hardly earns money comparable to the income of the Japanese version.
However, today we are not talking about the unconditional leadership of Puzzle & Dragons in Japan, where it is actively being squeezed by other “veterans” of the market. Including Monster Strike and Line: Disney Tsum Tsum.
The game’s MAU is also steadily falling. Unfortunately, the publisher does not provide specific indicators, but the graph below shows a drop in interest in the game.
The news about overcoming the 10 millionth bar in the American market may be regarded by GungHo as important, but the problem is that the company has not been able to offer the market something comparable in success to Puzzle & Dragons in four years. And for the Western market, the project remains a Japanese curiosity.