Thanks to this success the game made it to the top of the premium PC digital revenue chart for April, and seventh in the top ten PC games for the month worldwide. One such title, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, generated an impressive $34 million last month, even though the game is still in early access and therefore being constantly updated for bug fixes and new features. The free to play MMO, mobile, and console markets however, have all experienced high single digit revenue growth, which has served to counteract the decline seen in other sectors such as the premium PC segment. These games received somehow mediocre review scores, which is most likely why they didn’t sell as well as anticipated.
In the US, the digital games market was down year on year in March, which can be attributed to the lacklustre sales of publisher EA’s titles at the time, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Ghost Recon: Wildlands from Ubisoft. However, this has been countered by a decline in pay to play, console, and PC games. Mobile game sales have grown 8%, the free to play MMO sector has also grown by 27%. This figure is a 9% increase year on year compared with April 2016, showing consistent growth in the digital games market. Combined with NCsoft’s expertise, having four titles in the worldwide top 10 for subscription-based MMOs last year, Wildstar is a strong contender in the current market.According to SuperData the worldwide digital revenue reached $7.7 billion in April 2017. According to Carbine, the game has so far seen “four to five times” as many concurrent users than during its open beta stage.
Traditionally, sci-fi styled MMOs tend to generate three times as much in monthly revenue compared to fantasy-based titles. As the initial purchase included a free first month, NCsoft is about to find out how strong the demand for sci-fi action really is. And perhaps its because of this that NCsoft released its own subscription-based title, Wildstar, over one month ago. So far, a subscriber base of 772,374 (June) indicates that its strategy is working. When Bethesda Softworks released Elder Scrolls Online, the industry took notice as the publisher fearlessly announced a subscription model, rather than going free-to-play like its direct competitor Guild Wars 2 (NCsoft).
0 kommentar(er)
