In terms of revenue, during the first quarter, Mixi’s Monster Strike continued to dominate the revenue charts. Especially well the game is performing in Japan. While last year’s ‘troublemakers’: Pokémon Go and Super Mario Run showed signs of decline in terms of downloads and revenue. Type-Moon’s Fate/Grand Order, mobile game from Japan, increased its positions in revenue charts in the first quarter. Thus, it reached the second place on Google Play and appeared in top five on the App Store.

According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence mobile game revenue from iOS and Google Play stores grew 53 percent in the first quarter and reached $11.9 billion. At the same time, Google Play revenues are growing faster than Apple’s with 83 percent versus 35 percent respectably.

As Ruika Lin, mobile insights analyst at Sensor Tower states:

“Apple app store revenue grew 35 percent to $6.6 billion from $4.9 billion in the first quarter, compared to the same period a year earlier. Google Play revenue grew 83 percent in Q1 to $5.3 billion from $2.9 billion a year earlier.”

On both stores in the first quarter of 2017 mobile game installs went as high as 15 percent compared with the same period of the previous year: to $8.8 billion from $7.6 billion.

In general, in terms of monetization, mobile games continue to dominate worldwide for all apps. As for the first quarter, they generated up to 80 percent of the gross revenue of Apple’s App Store. When it comes to Google Play the figures are even more impressive with about 91 percent of Google Play revenue.

The post Subway surfers – world’s most downloaded mobile game appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“It’s all healthy organic growth. There’s no user acquisition. We’re not fans of turning games into money-making machines.” says Jeppe Bisbjerg, CEO at Kiloo, to pocketgamer.

“We’ve always taken the approach that this is fair free-to-play. There are no paywalls. We give access to all the content.”

The game was created in equal parts by Kiloo and SYBO games, where SYBO stood for the grafics and concept, while Kiloo for the shop and social parts.

Amongst the biggest games

Not only are the total number of downloads impressive, but the game also has 27 million active users. It may be just as hot as games like the ones on https://slot27.id/.

“We focus on the game itself, on player retention. That’s how you see how fun your game is.”

Compared to other successful nordic games, such as Rovios Angry Birds or Kings Candy Crush Saga, those are very impressive numbers. Angry birds has been downloaded more then 3 billion downloads, and boasted 200 million monthly active users in 2014. Candy Crush on the other hand has had 46 million average monthly users. As it however is both a Facebook and mobile app, download numbers are harder to compare.

Indie approach

But Subway Surfers has not been nearly as much in the spotlight such as other nordic games. One of the reason is that the teams behind it are not at all as interested in making money on the game.

“We’re game developers. We’d rather work on different games.” says Jeppe Bisbjerg

Update: we mistakingly attributed Subway Surfers to only Kiloo, but have corrected the article now showing that is was a collaboration between Kiloo and SYBO games.

Update 2: In the original article it was pointed out that Kiloo is not interested in spin-offs or sequels. However, SYBO is open for those kind of development. We removed the quote to not emphasis this wrongly.

The post The gaming success Subway Surfers reaches 1 billion downloads appeared first on Øresund Startups.