What 2021 has brought to titans of the mobile game development industry? Who has succeeded in the fight and who surrendered their positions? Let’s dive into the top of game publishers in the first half of 2021 and look through the route of ten major players on the market.
When we look at the top 10 publishers by downloads we notice quite similar names that shift from one place to another from year to year. However, in 2021 we can find two newcomers that have crossed the upper line and taken their 3d and 10th rightful places – Supersonic Studios and Zynga were welcomed to the top 10 in H1 2021, raising their downloads by 280M and 113M accordingly.
Supersonic Studios boomed with its three hypercasual arcade hits: Bridge Race, Going Balls, and Join Clash 3D – all of which, however, being popular during the winter-summer period, are facing a downtrend towards the summer.
Zynga hyped with hypercasual runner High Heels! that peaked twice in February and in April, declining afterward and facing a slow decrease.
VOODOO, Lion Studios, and Tencent Mobile hold their permanent 1st, 2nd, and 9th place. However, while VOODOO and Tencent Mobile are losing on downloads by 272M and 12M, Lion Studios continues to slowly crawl to 1st place, increasing its numbers by 32M.
Most of the publishers, despite some minor changes in their position, have increased their downloads metric: Casual Azur Games by 169M, Crazy Labs by TabTale by 91M, SayGames by 88M, and BabyBus by 23M.
The only publishers that took some losses in downloads were Outfit7 Limited – its numbers declined by 35M.
Moving to the revenue metric for the first half of 2021, we see several major shifts.
One novelty that can be pointed out instantly is the entrance of miHoYo Limited in the top 10 publishers by revenue with the 648M for the H1 and 167M increase.
Publisher’s hit Genshin Impact, which is bringing the most revenue, has declined compared to the end of 2020, however, recently it has started growing again. It is intriguing whether the game would be able to retain users as successfully as MMO RPGs and Battles of the major league do.
All other names in the top we have seen during H2 2020. Some of them have gained some extra revenue compared to the previous period: Tencent Mobile Games increased its numbers on 117M up to 3.18B, as well as Net Ease that gained 4M and King that earned 21M. NCSOFT and Supercell were lucky as well, increasing their numbers by 135M and 34M accordingly.
However, not all the companies were as successful in 2021. Playrix and Square Enix Co. have lost 4% and 5% of their revenue, which is equal to 38M and 35M respectively. Slightly more bad luck had Lilith Games declining the revenue by 7% or 43M. Nevertheless, the biggest drop faced Bandai Namco Entertainment decreasing its metric by 15% or 106M and going down by 5 positions in the top, mostly because of the heavy decline in revenue coming from Dragon Ball Z.
The data is provided by AppMagic – a mobile market intelligence tool that helps developers to analyze the dynamics in the industry and competitors’ strategies in order to build a viable product and increase revenues.
