Digital Game Sales For June 2013

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SuperData released data for top digital game sales in June 2013, which we’re running as part of a monthly column on [a]list daily. 

For methodology, SuperData collects anonymized data directly from publishers and developers, looking at spending by more than 1 million unique paying online gamers across 50 publishers and 350+ game titles.

Joost van Dreunen, co-founder and CEO of SuperData, provides insight for the report.

With the announcements of next generation hardware behind us, the overall digital games market recovered from last month and totaled $841 million across all categories in June 2013. The free-to-play category consisting of social, mobile and MMO grew 9 percent year-over-year to $489 million for the month.

For social games in particular, even as the total number of monthly unique users (MUU) dipped during the period, the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) rose to nearly $37. It’s apparent that as social gamers move to mobile, the underlying metrics of social games improve. The social game sector totaled $133 million for the month.

Free-to-Play MMO

Revenues for free-to-play MMOs broke an important symbolic barrier by reaching $205 million in June and more than doubled year-over-year. Key drivers for the success of this category have been the sustained growth of the overall audience, estimated at 46 million players in June, and the increasing level of spending per user. The category’s June ARPPU was $27.Popular titles such as League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 are proof that the gameplay mechanics and monetization methods of free-to-play provide a sustainable business model in Western markets. Compared to social games where the conversion rate tends to hover around two percent, free-to-play MMOs are monetizing at a rate of eight times better.

Pay-to-Play MMO

Earlier this month, Blizzard confirmed it is testing an in-game store in World of Warcraft. Although the test will initially focus on the Asian markets, where the micro-transaction revenue model is more common, the US market also shows great promise. Among American MMO subscribers, monthly spending on in-game items totaled $24 per user in June, up from $17 in December. This suggests that Blizzard’s decision to expand its monetization strategy might fit well with the preferences of their customer base.Month-over-month, the overall pay-to-play MMO market was slightly down in June at $83 million in total revenues, compared to $89 million the month prior. After the loss of well over one million users earlier this year, the overall user base has stabilized at 6.3 million MMO subscribers.

Downloadable (PC + console)

Spending on downloadable content on PC offset the usual decline in digital console sales during the summer months, which is likely compounded by consumers preparing for the next hardware generation. Overall revenues for the DLC category reached $273 million. Summer gaming is starting to heat up however as the market is flooded with discounted titles that released earlier this year and during the last holiday season.

The most notable release in June was Naughty Dog and Sony’s The Last of US for PlayStation 3, which did well at both retail and on digital platforms.  The game totaled 3.4 million in combined sales.

Because of the announced delay of the Vengeance expansion pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (Activision) on both PC and PS3 we expect an uplift in overall digital sales in August.

Mobile

The mobile games segment continues to be concentrated at the top with the same titles claiming dominance month-over-month. However, looking at the various sub-categories on a more granular level shows movement. Case-in-point, in June Fast & Furious 6 from Kabam became the fastest growing mobile game of all time, reaching 17 million downloads across both iPhone and iPad. Incumbent titles such as NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing and EA’s Real Racing both took a backseat. Fast & Furious 6 grossed an estimated $2.1 million in the US in June.

Revenues in the overall mobile games segment were up 1.7 percent at $147 million, despite a further cooling of overall monthly spending per user. With top earners generating 25 percent of revenues on Google Play, Apple has found a clear competitor in Google. We expect other major platforms to follow suit, including Facebook which announced it is experimenting with mobile game publishing.

Social Games

While the number of monthly uniques who play social games further declined in June, dipping to 89 million users, the underlying metrics have started to improve. Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) reached nearly $37 for the month, helping overall sector revenues to recover to $133 million. A central driver of the platform’s shrinking user base is the migration of gamers to iOS, Android and the various tablets. We expect Facebook’s announcement to become a mobile game publisher to further push web-based social gamers to mobile.

The popularity of social casino games on Facebook has been an important part of the overall sector’s revenues growth this month, as the ARPPU user among social casino players can be two to three times that of average social gamers. Leaders in this category such as IGT’s DoubleDown Casino (IGT) and Caesars’ Slotomania generate around $500,000 in daily earnings.

For full reports, visit SuperData Market Data.

About the Author

Joost van Dreunen, Ph.D., is CEO SuperData Research, a market intelligence provider specialized in online games. He has written extensively on online audiences, monetization strategies, virtual goods, social games, free-to-play, online gaming and entertainment.

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ESA Study Shows Changing Game Industry

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The Entertainment Software Association has released its 2013 survey of the US game playing market, which offers some very interesting facts and figures. First, let’s look at some context: The US retail market for games is in its fifth straight year of decline from its high point in 2008. Hardware and software sales in retail stores have been falling, and not all of it can be attributed to nearing the end of a generation among consoles. At the same time, the gaming industry has undergone an incredible expansion with mobile, social and online games globally. “It was the best of times, it wast the worst of times,” as Dickens put it.

One thing is crystal clear: Gaming has become something the majority of Americans do. The ESA notes that 58 percent of Americans play video games, with an average of two gamers in every game-playing household. Some 51 percent of American households have a dedicated game console, and most every household has either a PC, a smartphone or a game console. The average age of a game player is now 30 — gaming is not just for kids anymore. How gamers play is mostly with others — 62 percent of gamers play with others, either online or in person, and 77 percent of those who do play at least one hour a week with someone else.

The demographics of gaming are changing in another way — women are increasingly a part of the audience. In fact, the ESA found that women 18 or older are a larger part of the gaming audience than boys 17 or younger (31 percent versus 19 percent). The overall gaming market still skews slightly male (55 percent to 45 percent), but that is a far cry from where the gaming industry was twenty years ago when it created games for ‘teenage boys of all ages.’

The ESA found online games are dominated by puzzle games (34 percent) and action/sports/strategy/RPG (26 percent as a group) while what they labeled ‘casual and social’ games are only 19 percent of the online gaming audience. The remainder are in ‘persistent multi-player universes’ and ‘other’ categories. On mobile platforms, casual/social and puzzle/board games each take about 35 per cent of the audience, leaving the rest to action/strategy and other.

The ESA found that 85 percent of people are aware of the ESRB rating system, and 88 percent of parents felt it was helpful. Some 93 percent of parents said they pay attention to the content of the games their kids play, and 89 percent of the time they are present when games are purchased or rented. It’s hard to see how this explains the sales of Grand Theft Auto — are parents really aware of the content of that series

Predictably, console games in 2012 were dominated by action (22.3 percent) and FPS (21.2 percent) titles, with sports games in third place (15.3 percent). The rest of the genre breakdown had no category taking more than 10 percent of the audience. Computer games were fairly evenly split among roleplaying (28 percent), casual (26.7 percent) and strategy games (24.9 percent), with the remainder scattered amongst various genres. For both console and computer games, these numbers reflect only the number of units of titles sold at retail — which means missing a substantial amount of the action on computers, both in terms of units sold and in amount of time played. Something like League of Legends isn’t even considered in this data.

The ESA tried to put a brave face on the data regarding sales and units sold by combining retail sales data with digital revenue data from NPD. Still, the drop in unit sales and dollar volume at retail can be clearly seen since 2008. The rise in dollars from digital revenue should be looked at with the understanding that it’s not clear how NPD arrived at those numbers (and whether it’s accurate or complete), and that not all of that digital revenue went to the same publishers that were losing retail sales revenue.

Finally, it can be seen that the total share of the market for physical sales continues to diminish, and even if you only consider PC, online and console games while ignoring the mobile market, digital revenue will be overtaking physical revenue sometime in the near future, probably this year. That does not mean physical retail sales are going away, nor does it mean an individual publisher will be doing better or worse. This shift of revenue to digital is, however, an inexorable change sweeping over the game industry, and every publisher and developer needs to determine a business strategy for it.

Source: ESA

Valve Introduces Pipeline

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Valve is once again thinking outside of the box, this time about future employees. Gabe Newell introduces the concept of Pipeline, where youth interested in game development can work together to hone their skills for creating games. The impressive video was created entirely by young aspiring game makers, showing just some of the potential they have to change the future of games.

Iron Throne As Envisioned By Martin

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It’s fascinating how things can change between a novel and a TV show or movie . . . and of course, a video game. Sometimes the iconic images for a story don’t come from the original vision of the creator. When stories get big enough to become transmedia, they inevitably add new creative visions to the mix. The image of the Iron Throne from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is seared into the minds of the viewers of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones. Yet that’s not at all how Martin himself envisions the Iron Throne.

The Iron Throne as seen on Game of Thrones

Martin’s view of the throne is forged from the swords surrendered to King Aegon Targaryen by his enemies. The Iron Throne is cruel and often cuts those who sit in it, and it said to have caused the deaths of several people. Looking at Martin’s vision of the Iron Throne, you can see how it could hurt or even kill those rash enough to sit on it.

The Iron Throne as Martin sees it

Source: Wiki of Ice and Fire

 

Original PS4 Controller Read Emotional Response

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In the journey to create what we currently know as the DualShock 4 controller for the PlayStation 4, Sony went through a number of designs, including one that featured biometric sensors that read a player’s emotions. The controller would have had biometric strips that measured skin conductance to get data on a player’s state of mind.

In an interview with Stuff, chief PS4 architect Mark Cerny said the controller was a “long research project where we looked at pretty much any idea we could think of.” Instead, Sony opted for a more traditional style of controller that was optimized to play first person shooters, which are some of the most popular games on the market. Cerny said that in the past the DualShock was not ideal for playing FPS games, and they wanted to fix that with the final design for the DualShock 4.

“Historically we have heard many times that our controllers have not been ideal for first-person shooters, so we wanted to make sure we had something that would be much better for that genre,” Cerny said. “We tested the throw of the triggers, the position of the triggers, how much pressure it takes. We looked at the joysticks, the dead spot, we looked at convexity and concavity.”

The end result, he says, “Feels extraordinarily natural.”

Source: CVG

Amazon UK Slashes Wii U Price

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Amazon UK has lowered the price of the Wii U, perhaps due to generally low sales and public perception. The 32 GB Premium console now retails for £199.00, or around 300 U.S. dollars. The 8 GB basic console was also given a price cut and now costs £149.00 pounds, or around 230 dollars stateside.

It appears that Amazon UK’s price cut doesn’t come from Nintendo. On Amazon’s US site and other major retailers across the US, the price of the console remains where it has been since it was first released at $349.99 for premium and $299.99 for the basic system.

The cut puts pressure on other UK retailers to follow suit, but it remains to be seen if sales will jump enough to create such pressure. This price cut could be a harbinger of the holiday season as Nintendo’s two new competitors, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, hit shelves in November. Many analysts believe Nintendo will be forced to cut Wii U prices in order to boost sales against the aggressively priced PlayStation 4 base model, which will retail at $399.

Source: MCV

American Idol Taylor Hicks Plays At EVO

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When pop cultures collide it can be fascinating. Popular music has been dominated by the hit show American Idol, and its competitors have become famous to millions of fans. Now one of America’s idols has shown off his video game skills, leaving music fans and game fans alike confused. Which group of fans should claim him as their own

Taylor Hicks is mostly known for winning the fifth season of American Idol in 2006, but this past weekend he also showed off his Super Smash Bros. abilities at the US’s biggest fighting game tournament, EVO. Hicks, who is the current headliner at the Paris in Las Vegas (which was down the street from the tournament) was one of the 700 competitors in the “Smash” tournament, and managed to tie for 257th overall. Not bad for someone known as a singer, not as a pro gamer. The singer always has a backup career plan this way, though he’ll have to get a lot better than 257th to finish in the money.

Source: Polygon

Nintendo Launches Console Road Tours

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In the face of middling Wii U sales numbers, Nintendo will be taking its console on the road through the US, Canada, and the UK this summer. The tours will bring the Wii U to popular vacation spots and events to expose as many consumers as possible to anticipated games coming out for the console. Wii U games on the tour include Nintendo Land, New Super Mario Bros. U, Lego City Undercover, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Need for Speed Most Wanted U.  According to Nintendo, the experience will be a “living room setting” filled with various Nintendo props.

In the US, the Wii U exhibit  started at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida and the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. Next up are stops at the Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois then in Bloomington, Minnesota, with the tour running from June 28 to July 21. From August 10 to September 2, the tour goes to Boston, Massachusetts and Hollywood, California.

In the UK, the Wii U and the 3DS will begin their runs at the Sunderland Air Show on July 27 and 28 but will part ways afterward with the Wii U Den Tour going to Bristol Baloon Fiesta and the 3DS Festival of Fun moving on to the Nottingham Riverside Festival.

Canada’s tour is going to hit dozens of places, with fans able to influence the selection — find out more here.

Nintendo also has a booth and lounge at Comic Con San Diego this weekend to show off their consoles and some of the games that were announced at E3.

Source: MCV

‘Bugs Vs. Tanks’ Trailer

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Bugs Vs. Tanks is one of the wackier titles to come out of Level 5’s Guild 02 initiative. The game, made by Keiji Inafune and his company Comcept, features a small battalion of tanks during WWII that gets miniaturized and has to fight against everyday bugs. The game is currently out for Nintendo eShop.

The Ultimate Warrior Is Back With A Vengeance

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The Ultimate Warrior has come out of wrestling retirement and has laid the smack down on the 2K offices in the latest trailer for WWE 2K14. Watch as he wreaks havoc on the programmers who work there, and generally shows what he will be capable of when the game comes out this fall.