This article is part of an ongoing series of data-driven articles from PocketGamer.biz and App Anniehighlighting trends in the global mobile games sector using App Annie’s Game IQ analytics.
This enables mobile game developers to dig into the data and discover not only which games are performing best but what characteristics they have.
In this week’s column, we’re considering the top grossing games published by Chinese-headquartered companies in the strategy city-battle genre.
This is a very specific subgenre but that’s the granularity which an analysis tool such as Game IQ enables.
And this level of detail is particularly significant in this case given the hundreds of millions of dollars generated by the ranked games, mainly of which are well known titles.
That’s certainly the case for Lilith’s Rise of Kingdoms, which has been a top grossing game since its release in 2018.
It’s also interesting to see the repeated entries for certain companies. FunPlus had three entries while both Long Tech Network and Ultrapower have two each.
This demonstrates the concentration of expertise and resources required to carve out success in this most competitive of sectors.
Another salient point to consider is the different themes of these games. While many take what could be described as a generic fantasy setting, there’s also another collection of zombie-inspired titles such as State of Survival, Last Shelter: Survival and Age of Z Origins.
In this context, Yotta Games’ Mafia City stands out as an outlier, although it could be argued this entire genre was kicked off a decade ago with games such as Zynga’s Mafia Wars and Funzio’s Crime City.
Game IQ is a vertically tailored analytics product, developed by App Annie, that provides insight into dimensions such as class, genre, subgenre and tags. Games can now be analyzed by broad category class (tuning), genre, subgenre, and tags (modifiers) such as IP, art style, settings, monetization mechanic, and more.
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