Data & Research

One year on: How Yahtzee With Buddies scored high on the top grossing charts

Niche licence, strong sales

One year on: How Yahtzee With Buddies scored high on the top grossing charts

In our most recent Charticle, we looked back on four years of GungHo Online's Puzzle & Dragons.

In the arena of games-as-a-service, you don't have to be a $1 billion success to maintain a decent top grossing position - as demonstrated by Scopely's tie-in with Hasbro Yahtzee With Buddies.

(Incidentally, there's an interesting write-up of Scopely's GDC Europe 20156 talk about How it delivered Yahtzee's mobile success with the help from outsourcing.)

The result of Scopely early app store success with original games such as Dice With Buddies, the game is now celebrating its first birthday.

As is often the way, Scopely has announced some abstract metrics:

  • 500 billion dice rolls,
  • 15 billion round,
  • 1.2 billion games played,
  • 581 million Yahtzee scores rolled,
  • 63 turns per day per user on average etc.

It all sounds good in terms of retention, but the only thing that matters for the Charticle is a game's top grossing position.

On the charts

Given the scope of the original licence, it's little surprise that Yahtzee With Buddies' most lucrative markets are English-speaking.

The game's most lucrative markets are Australia, Canada and the US: SurveyMonkey estimates the game has around 3 million monthly active players in the US.

As we can see from its Google Play performance, it's been a top 100 grossing game since launch, peaking in the top 20 towards the end of 2015.

Yahtzee With Buddies hasn't done so well in the UK, though; only briefly hitting the top 100.

Looking at the iPhone grossing performance, the trends are the same. We've not shown Australia and Canada for clarity (App Store ranking are much more granular than Google Play), but the difference between the UK and other English language markets is clear to see.

Secondary in Europe

Having made little impact in Asia markets, the other big countries for Yahtzee With Buddies are the important European markets.

Looking at France and Germany, we can see that the game hasn't been as popular as English-speaking countries. Even the UK performs better than Germany, where the game has sat between the top 100 and top 200 since launch on Google Play.

In France, the range is top 200 to top 300 on Google Play.

Looking at the iPhone grossing chart, we see a similar situation.

As for the bigger picture, what's really significant about Yahtzee With Buddies' performance over the past year is how a game with a strong but niche board game licence has maintained a top 100 grossing position in some of the top 10 global markets by revenue.

This is also reflected in Scopely's position in the industry.

Privately-owned, the company (which ranked #22 on the PocketGamer.biz Top 50 Developer of 2016) has announced its annualised sales are currently around $200 million.

And the vast majority of those sales come from two games: Yahtzee With Buddies and The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, although the latter is a Top 20 grossing game on iPhone in the US, and so will account for the lion's share.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.