📡 1. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang! Secrets to Success, 2. NFTs, and 3. Crypto Gaming Survey

Sep 30, 2021

Happy Games Radar Thursday,

Here is an I. game alert, II. word on the street, III. question to consider this week, and IV. results from a few newsletters we haven’t published in a while…

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I. Game Alert

The Rise of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

MOBA’s don’t work on mobile or in Western markets, right?

While you were sleeping, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has been quietly racking up over $730M in life-of-product net revenue since its launch in November of 2016 (according to Sensor Tower). Hence, on a gross basis, this is already a Billion Dollar LOP game.

Moreover, since its acquisition by Bytedance in March for $4B, we saw a fairly big uplift in revenue.

What about revenue in Western markets? Surprisingly, the US is the #1 revenue country for Mobile Legends (15.0% of revenue) although downloads are a much smaller contribution (2.3%):

Secrets to Success

When we look at the history of MOBAs in mobile it’s a bit surprising how many super smart and incredibly well-resourced companies attacked this market without success including companies like Discord before they pivoted away from games (Fates Forever) and even Zynga (Solstice Arena).

How did the upstart Moonton achieve success where everyone else failed? What was the secret to their success?

Because I’m dope… 😘 actually, really because App Annie was able to help me out, I was able to speak to none other than Skyhook, Moonton’s Chief Game Designer. We spoke about MOBAs as a genre, MOBA classification, and the secrets to Moonton’s success.

Watch it here:

II. Word on the Street

All the game companies are doing something in crypto right?

Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic

@EliBenSasson Replied: We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and scams.

😳

But the bigger issue is China. The Chinese government has banned crypto for real, for real this time:

Links:

But does that mean NFTs are banned from China as well? There seems to be some controversy here:

China’s Ant highlights distinction between NFTs and cryptocurrencies (India Times)
Can NFTs happen in a crypto-less China? Amazingly, yes. (protocol)

The Word on the Street that I’m hearing is that at least a few Chinese publishers are backing away from crypto completely including NFTs.

I personally believe the majority of NFTs go to zero in the medium term. Further, I do believe, like Tim Sweeney, there is likely a fair amount of fraud there. However, I firmly believe in the longer term, NFTs are the future. Let’s hope NFTs are able to persist in Chinese markets.