Getting the Star Wars license for its 'between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens' game Uprising was a big deal for Kabam.
And backed by a high class development team in the shape of its experienced San Francisco-based Kabam RPG studio, our initial reaction to the title has been positive.
Both in terms of his Star Wars inexperience and, more quantifiably in the shape of the IAP Inspector, PocketGamer.biz's Matt Suckley has been impressed with the game.
But can the same thing be said of the wider mobile gaming community?
That's what this week's Charticle aims to discover.
In a galaxy...
Released in mid-September for the Apple App Store and Google Play, to-date Kabam has taken a softly, softly approach to marketing Star Wars: Uprising.
According to mobile marketing tracker AppScotch, the game's launch was backed with a two week campaign via UnityAds, with more advertising kicking off on 7 October, but the company has not been spending big bucks.
Of course, with The Force Awakens due for release on 18 December, it has to balance its short-, mid- and long-term expectations and budget.
Obviously, the key market for the game is currently the US.
Incidentally, it hasn't yet been released in the big three Asia markets - China, Korea or Japan - which between them account for over $8 billion in mobile game revenues.
In a big country
Tracking the game's top grossing performance for iPhone, we can see that in its launch week, it entered the US top 100, peaking at #60. But since then, it's had a slip-sliding experience, until now it's hanging around the #200 position.
Looking at the US iPad top grossing chart, and the performance is broadly similar. It peaked at #53.
In the other key English-speaking territories such as the UK and Canada, the game's recent slipping in terms of iPhone grossing chart position has been even more pronounced.
The situation is mirrored in key European markets such as France and Germany.
And the Russian market demonstrates even more volatility.
Significantly, two markets in which the game generated high peak grossing positions on iPhone were Finland and Spain. But, even here, the initial strong performance of the first week fell away strikingly.
In Finland, the game is no longer in the iPhone top grossing top 500.
Android angle
Taking a quick look at the Google Play top grossing performance (which is easier as there's less volatility on this chart so we can group more countries together on one chart), we can easily see that all the previously mentioned main markets have followed the same trend: a decent launch, followed by a steady slip from the top 100 closer to the top 200.
In Russia, this falling away trend is more marked.
And finally, looking at Google Play performance for Finland and Spain, in Spain the game launched better, but fell away almost immediately.
Finland actually demonstrates two weeks of solid top 100 performance, but is now starting to fall away too.
So, it's not good news for Kabam, at least in the sense that the first wave of players haven't been well retained or monetised (probably nothing to do with the game's dynamic IAP pricing but who know?).
Of course, given Star Wars: Uprising has two months before it gets a massive promotion off the back of The Force Awakens, this isn't the worst news: certainly unlike pretty much any other game in this position, the situation is not terminal.
But it looks like there will be some long hours being worked at Kabam RPG over the coming weeks.
