GameRefinery’s latest review, looking at the gaming market for the month of May, highlighted the successes in the US, China, and Japan, and noting the considerable impact of two new releases.
The US saw the launch of two mobile games that raced towards top-grossing positions in May – Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds and Apex Legends Mobile. The latter, a mobile version of the popular PC and console battle royale game – reached the 23rd position in the top-grossing chart.
Regional celebrations
May also aligns with Golden Week in Japan, and many mobile games within the country saw related in-game events and celebrations. This included Dragon Quest Tact, which brought in a log-in calendar, gachas, and a Dragon Quest X questline.
Pokémon Unite, developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, reached 50 million downloads in its first four months, and introduced a new subscription-based membership in May.
May 1 was also a public holiday in China that many games celebrated. Idle RPG RPG Xiao Huan Xiong Bai Jiang Zhuan brought in a seasonal battle pass, meanwhile 4X strategy game Red Alert Online and Fu-sheng wei Qing-ge both implemented co-op task systems.
4X games more broadly have maintained a strong presence across markets, GameRefinery has found, from The Grand Mafia entering top-grossing charts in China to Age of Origins doing likewise in the US.
A time of collaboration
This May also saw a number of cross-franchise collaborations, as noted in GameRefinery’s review with cases such as Sonic the Hedgehog characters appearing in Popkart Mobile and Minecraft releasing Star Wars-themed events.
One of the most successful May events was reportedly in Punishing: Gray Raven, which introduced a voting event as well as a new character, boosting its revenue sevenfold.
You can read the full report through this link, and another recent data.ai report suggested that this year, mobile gaming will exceed 60 per cent of the entire games market.
