The record-breaking performance of the game from GungHo demonstrated the extremely high potential of the mobile market, against which Supercell earnings seem to be far from the largest on iOS and Android.
Puzzle & Dragons is a cheerful mix of a collectible card game in which the user collects monsters, raises their levels, combines them with other monsters, and not quite the usual match3. In the latter, you can swap not only neighboring crystals, but also crystals that are far apart from each other. The attack on enemy monsters is carried out precisely by making a row of three or more crystals. Now, by the way, there are already many similar games in mechanics. Among the most notable are Tower of Saviors by Mad Head Limited.
GungHo published Puzzle & Dragons on the App Store a year ago, in February 2012. In September, the game was released on Android. To date, the game has 8 million registered users. Moreover, the game collected the last million in just 12 days: on January 18, the project’s user base numbered 7 million users, and on February 8, it was already 8 million.
But that’s not the main news. Last weekend, the company published a financial document for investors, in which it stated that in January 2013 alone it earned $92 million in Japan, which is 1022.4% more than in the same period a year earlier.
According to Serkan Toto, an analyst of the Japanese market, in his blog, most of this money is provided by Puzzle & Dragons. GungHo herself did not specify how much of the revenue came from her game. Japanese publications did it for her:
- “Inside Games“: $75.5 million
- “Projetista“: $64.6 million
- “Popular Social App And Game Analysis Blog“: $54 million
Once again, this is for one month in one country.
And an important addition: Puzzle & Dragons does not use the services of any promotion platform (a la Mobage, GREE), and is also not represented on any other platforms except iOS and Android.