In the Japanese market for the last year, three projects have tried to take away the title of the highest-grossing game from Puzzle & Dragons. And, according to Metaps marketers, one game still managed to do it. So, meet the new “king” of Japanese yen – Monster Strike.
In November, on the windows of the App Store and Google Play of the Land of the Rising Sun, the game was in the first position for more days than Puzzle & Dragons. But here it is necessary to understand that the victory is not yet unambiguous: GungHo is not going to move to the league of “catching up” and, for example, at the moment (evening of December 3) her game is back at the top of the chart. Be that as it may, the table below demonstrates that the overall trend for the “dragons” cannot be called prosperous.
Monster Strike is a collectible battler in which conditional billiards acts as the root mechanic (the characters on the playing field are represented in the form of balls that need to be rolled towards enemies).
Gameplay description (in English)
The creation of mixi, which was engaged in its own SNS platform in the mid-noughties, is the only project that managed to push Puzzle & Dragons from the first place in the box office top of Google Play for the whole year (!). Dragon Quest Monsters Super Light from Square Enix and The White Cat Project from Colopl also managed to do this in the App Store.
Out of curiosity: Metaps also writes that in Japan, the box office top of Google Play is more jaded with games than the App Store. In the first, 94% of applications belong to games, in the second – 87%.
An even more unexpected observation is the relatively low number of games in the free App Store chart. Only 36% of applications can be attributed to them. In Google Play, the situation is noticeably different. There games are responsible for 50% of the chart.
Metaps is a marketing and consulting agency specializing in expert evaluation and promotion of mobile games for the Asian market. The company also owns a large advertising network. Mataps is headquartered in Tokyo and has offices in Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Taipei and London.