The Charticle

The Charticle: GREE finds it hard to open a new front with War of Nations

Its strategy classic Modern War won't surrender

The Charticle: GREE finds it hard to open a new front with War of Nations
While things are currently going very well for DeNA, the same can not be said for its Japanese rival GREE.

The mobile gaming platform announced an extraordinary loss of ¥4 billion ($41 million) in May, and has been shutting down offices, notably in the China and the UK.

Even when it's releasing new games, they haven't performed as hoped.

Time to attack

One significant example is War of Nations.

It's the first internally-developed strategy game from GREE's San Francisco office, which was established following the company's $210 million acquisition of Funzio in May 2012.

Released in July (at present only available for iOS), it's being out-gunning by a game that could be considered its predecessor; Modern War, the strategy game Funzio released at the end of 2011.

A persistent real-time strategy game in which all players fight on the same hex-grid map, War of Nations hasn't been a flop but doesn't yet seem to have found a solid audience.



On iPhone, it's been in the top 100 top grossing charts in 47 countries, but only top 10 top grossing in 10 countries.

On iPad, it's performed slightly better, being top 100 in 47 countries and top 10 in 17.

It's not broken the US top 25 top grossing position for either format, however.

Less like Poland, more like Australia

Even in countries where it's gone higher in the charts - such as Norway and Poland - it's fallen back heavily in recently days.



War of Nations' top grossing performance in Poland - via apptrace

Of course, the majority of revenue is coming from the US.

Distimo estimates that 52 percent of revenue is from the US, followed by Australia (14 percent), the UK (8 percent), Canada (7 percent) and Singapore (3 percent).



War of Nations is doing better in Australia - via apptrace

And looking on the bright side, Australia demonstrates the sort of upwards momentum GREE will want to spread globally, albeit even here the game has yet to trouble the top 10 top grossing charts.

Still, Distimo's revenue estimate for the game over the past two months has a strong upwards trend.


Distimo's estimation of War of Nations' revenue in June-July 2013

Yet with Modern War continuing to be such a strong performer, GREE may decide it's more sensible to focus its US development talent on keeping that game in the top 10 top grossing charts, rather than risk canabalising its audience by encouraging them to switch to War of Nations.



After all, the victory in hand is worth many potential triumphs.

Methodology:

Distimo AppIQ provides download and revenue estimations for any app worldwide, based on daily sampling of transactional app data (>3 billion downloads / quarter) and publicly available information. When calculating downloads and revenues for individual apps, Distimo's unique methodology excludes that app's transactional data from the analysis to preserve the confidentiality of their users' data.


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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.