Fingersoft has launched its hit game Hill Climb Racing 2 on alternative app stores through games marketing company Flexion. The game is now live on Huawei AppGallery, Samsung Galaxy Store, ONE store, and the Amazon App Store.
Hill Climb Racing and Hill Climb Racing 2 have generated a combined two billion installs and generated $197 million in revenue. Through Flexion’s distribution services, the company hopes to accelerate revenue and user acquisition.
“We announced our partnership with Fingersoft a few months ago, so we’re delighted to have launched the first game,” said Flexion CEO Jens Lauritzson. “Flexion is currently averaging around 10% extra revenue for Android games it distributes.”
The rise of the alternative app store
Alternative app stores have become an increasingly hot topic in the mobile gaming industry, allowing game makers to publish their titles outside of the established ecosystem. By doing so, they can circumvent the commission fees charged by both Apple and Google for in-app purchases, allowing companies to maximise revenue.
Google and Apple’s dominance over the mobile games space has long seen them come under fire, with regulators worldwide growing concerned that their market dominance represents a duopoly. As such, markets worldwide have passed new legislation forcing the companies to allow the installation of third-party apps and app stores, giving game makers more freedom to decide where and how their apps are distributed while enjoying a greater proportion of the profits.
It's widely expected that Apple will reveal details of how it plans to implement third party app stores as part of its WWDC reveal of iOS 17 on June 5, making it easier than ever to use natively on an iOS device.
Flexion in particular is a company on the forefront of the space, recently celebrating its eighth consecutive quarter of record revenue. Lauritzon attributed this growth, in part, to “adding distribution power to our platform and ramping up sales activities across the organisation to capture the increased interest in alternative distribution is a priority for us in order to continue capturing market share.”
What’s next for Flexion? Lauritzon has stated that the company has “signed several major titles that we will launch in the next few quarters.”
In February, we discussed the topic of alternative app stores in our interview with Lauritzon.
