The flagship of the PerBlue studio – the Parallel Kingdoms game – brings $200,000 to its authors every month. The app is not in the top 100 on either iOS or Android.
This was stated in the speech “Bootstrapping 101: How College Kids Built a Thriving Game Company in Under Three Years” by the company’s executive director Justin Beck at the recent GDC Online.
The total number of users on iOS and Android reaches 1.5 million people. The DAU of the project is 15,000 people, the MAU is 50,000. From each active player, on average, the company earns from $0.40 to $0.50 per day every day. So it turns out that on Parallel Kingdoms, the company has from $180,000 to $232,000 per month.
Interestingly, 85% of the company’s profits come from the Android platform. This, to put it mildly, fundamentally contradicts what mobile project developers usually talk about. For example, GameDuell employees recently claimed that iOS users are four times better monetized than Android users.
In any case, now, according to AppData, Parallel Kingdom is not in any of the iOS tops, as for Android, the game is in 94th place in the casual gaming top of Google Play. However, before that, the game more or less consistently occupied the 440th position in it for several months. This means, according to Inside Mobile Apps, that even without being in the top 200, the game managed to earn somewhere between $153,000 – $197,625 per month.
The average LTV in Parallel Kingdoms is $3.25. As for the LTV of the average converted user, it is $21.75. The conversion rate of the project is a serious 15% (the company considers a user who has been playing for at least four days in a row and has started investing in the game to be “converted”). LTV of 22% of these 15% is a solid $95.
So, as Justin Beck himself notes, do not underestimate the niche audience, “niche games have more legs than you think.”