📈 Lilith's AFK Journey off to a strong start!
📈 Lilith's AFK Journey off to a strong start!
Lilith continues to launch a strong slate of very high quality mobile games with its latest AFK Journey
Hey Folks,
This week, we look at Lilith's recent launch of AFK Journey, which shares the same brand and art style as AFK Arena.
With AFK Journey, Lilith continues producing high-quality, high-polish mobile games, and this game starts off fairly well.
See more details below!
Top 10 Charts
AFK Journey bursts onto the scene as #2 downloads.
Brawl Stars continues its ascent, breaking into #8 downloads and cracking the top 10 in revenue.
Honkai Star Rail makes a massive jump to #1 top revenue.
Last War: Survival Game's revenue soared to #4. They should milk the money while they can before Apple kills fingerprinting.
4X games made moves up in revenue as Pokemon Go drops.
射雕 at #3 downloads is a wuxia MMORPG based on the famous Jin Yong novel “The Legend of the Condor Heroes.”
At #7 downloads 仙境传说：爱如初见 translates to “Fairy Legend: Love at First Sight” but it is the Chinese version of Ragnarok Origin which is a prequel to the popular Ragnarok Online series by South Korean Gravity Games.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
Honkai Star Rail’s huge revenue boost last week helped get miHoYo back into the top 10 publishers and to #3.
Onefun jumping into #9 off of the success of Last War Survival.
Top 10 Steam Games
Besides another week of no more indies in top charts here, the big gainer is Final Fantasy XIV off of the pre-purchase launch of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail DLC.
🔦 AFK Journey shows strong promise in its first week
Lilith continues to prove it is one of the best mobile gaming studios in the games industry. AFK Journey, launched on March 26, is the latest entry from Lilith, proving they can continue delivering very high-quality and well-designed mobile games to the market.
In its first week, the game generated over 10M installs and almost $2.8M in net revenue. It is currently averaging about $400K in daily net revenue.
Given its quality and current performance, the game could surpass the performance of AFK Arena, which has generated 43.6M downloads and $423M in net revenue, according to Sensor Tower (data.ai) estimates.
What is AFK Journey?
The game is difficult to categorize because it continues the recent trend of combining multiple game types/genres/modes over the past few years.
In this case, the gameplay is a bit of a hybrid mix of:
A top-down ARPG, this jumps into…
An auto team-battle skill proc mode for combat
The game also has a concept of an MMO world with MMO quests and auto pathing.
A narrative storyline.
Finally, the game includes idle elements similar to AFK Arena.
From a systems & progression perspective, the game includes:
Hero collection for team battle
Lots of game modes using the auto team battle gameplay
Async PVP
Idle collection
Guilds
A bunch of standard Chinese collection systems
Battle Pass (called Noble Path)
A multi-part daily login + “tower” progression (AFK Stage) incentive system
Class-based equipment system with forging/upgrading
Conditional progress locking
Long story short, the game has a very well-integrated hybrid of gameplay models and many systems but is presented in UI/UX in a much simpler way than many other Chinese RPG games.
Features Overview
Below, I highlight a few cool features.
Strong merchandising, including:
Purchase-gated, progressive free gift unlocks
Double-tier battle pass
Battle pass with 100 levels
Purchase progression through a multi-tier VIP system
Gameplay: ARPG + auto team-battle + narrative story
Heavy use of progression awards to incentivize retention:
In conclusion, this is a well-crafted and well-designed game. The game had a strong, although not spectacular, launch week, but I would expect the game to continue to do moderately well and, over time, overtake AFK Arena in lifetime performance.
Good luck to Lilith!