As Honkai: Star Rail outearns Genshin Impact, and Royal Match takes a sweet lead over Candy Crush, 2024 is proving to be a year for fresher faces in the mobile space.
Industry titans are slipping, and young blood is rising.
This insight comes via Sensor Tower and data.ai’s Q1 2024 Mobile Market Overview, exposing where the market is shifting this year, which genres are rising and falling, and more.
Making millions
In the first quarter of 2024, last year’s newcomer Monopoly GO! was the highest-earning mobile game in the US, UK, France, Canada, Singapore, and overall worldwide, generating so much money that it boosted the whole casino genre’s yearly revenue by 34% alone.
Given Scopely’s smash-hit game raced to $2 billion in its first 10 months, its triumph on Sensor Tower’s revenue charts is unsurprising. Perhaps more surprising, though, is its absence from the global top 10 downloads chart, especially considering its expensive UA strategy.
Tencent’s flagship Honor of Kings ranked second for revenue despite still being limited to China, making its absence from the top downloads chart more obvious but its earnings only the more impressive. The 2015 MOBA is due for a global launch later this month.
“Monopoly GO! set a new high for revenue for a mobile game in a quarter with more than $770 million spent in the game in Q1 2024. This broke the previous record of $765 million earned by Honor of Kings in Q2 2021,” the report notes.
The two titles are also the only games to have ever surpassed $600 million in gross revenue in one single quarter, while only five have ever reached $500 million.
Royal Match is one of those five, joining the exclusive club this Q1 as the quarter’s third-highest earner. Dream Games’ match-3 title therefore outearned its older rival and match-3 monarch Candy Crush, dethroning King in the process.
And continuing this trend of newer stars supplanting the old, Honkai: Star Rail generated more revenue than Genshin Impact this first quarter, ranking ninth and 10th respectively. This is an especially noteworthy achievement for Star Rail as the game was slower than its predecessor in reaching $1 billion – of course a major milestone in its own right, now reinforced by its current dominance over Genshin Impact.
In another sign of falling grace for old favourites, Pokémon Go failed to land in the top 10 revenue generators of the first quarter. It was, at least, caught amongst the top 10 in Australia, the UK, and the US.
Across all genres, RPGs stayed on top as the most lucrative genre in the world.
