On February 2, the Japanese publisher and developer GungHo Online Entertainment published the results for the 2017 fiscal year. For the company, it ended much worse than the previous one. The main reason is the drop in revenue of the main title GungHo, the Puzzle & Dragons card battler, which entered the mobile market six years ago.
Puzzle & Dragons is one of the milestone projects of the mobile gaming industry. His name in history is located next to Angry Birds and Clash of Clans. This is one of the first games that reached $1 billion in earnings on the platform.
Commercial success in the market of the Land of the Rising Sun attracted the attention of Western developers to it. I forced them to take a closer look at the mechanics of loot boxes, then popular only in Asia. In Japan, Puzzle & Dragons gave an additional impetus to the popularization of the genre of card battles.
But after six years on the market, the game is losing revenue, and its audience is growing much slower. If in 2013 the project gained 1 million downloads in twenty days, then it took four months to reach the 47th million Puzzle & Dragons.
As a result, the company’s revenue fell by 17.9% to $846 million compared to last year, and operating profit by 25.4% to $314 million. For comparison, at the peak of the popularity of the game, the company received so much per quarter. For the first quarter of 2014, GungHo’s operating profit was $288 million.
The company plans to fix the situation in two ways: by launching new titles designed for the whole world, and increasing the MAU of existing ones.
As part of the first strategy, GungHo released the SUPER SENSO turn–based tactics last September, and as part of the second, it not only constantly releases updates and new modes for Puzzle & Dragons, but also prepares new anime and manga based on it.
Also on the topic: