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Samurai Siege’s $37 million lifetime revenue growth now being driven by in-game events

Why in-game events can be worthwhile

Samurai Siege’s $37 million lifetime revenue growth now being driven by in-game events

Space Ape Games generated half of its revenue for strategy game Samurai Siege through in-game events during the last 12 months.

Speaking at GDC Europe 2016, the developer's COO Simon Hade discussed how profitable in-game events had been for the London studio.

Baseline rival

He claimed that during the last six months, its strategy title Rival Kingdoms had made 27% of its revenue through in-game events.

Total lifetime revenue so far for the game have reached $19 million. Samurai Siege has brought in around $37 million.

Hade claimed that he felt developers can double lifetime revenue for a title if they get in-game events right.

For its part, revenues tended to spike from typical baseline revenues each time one took place.

He warned however that developers should be wary of even cannibalisation. While he said it’s not something devs need to be scare of, they should be make sure that events don’t affect baseline revenue negatively.

Hade also cautioned against sales conditioning, content bloat and inadvertently screwing up a game’s economy by offering amazing deals on items.

Untapped feature

Despite Space Ape’s success with in-game events, Hade admitted that this approach isn’t particularly helping games set the app store charts alight in the West.

He said that while a number of games in China have events and a dynamic economy, most Western titles lack this.

A look at the App Store showed very few games in the 100 top grossing games used these.

Hade said games don’t need to have events to be successful in the West, but it’s something that has clearly proven prosperous for Space Ape.


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Craig Chapple is a freelance analyst, consultant and writer with specialist knowledge of the games industry. He has previously served as Senior Editor at PocketGamer.biz, as well as holding roles at Sensor Tower, Nintendo and Develop.