MarketWire | 8 Ball Pool Keeps on Trucking
This oldie-but-goodie classic beast of a game holds lessons for future games
Hello GameMakers,
We’re getting to the end of 2023. I hope you had a great year.
This year for me has been another year of struggle and suffering but with a lot of really great lessons learned. Maybe I’ll try to share more of those lessons with you in 2024.
This week, we take a closer look at the game that popularized PVP betting as a viable monetization strategy: 8 Ball Pool.
Top 10 Charts
Ice Scream 8 rips back up to #1 in worldwide downloads last week.
It's great to see 8 Ball Pool in worldwide top 10 downloads this week. While the game benefits from longstanding ASO and gets tons of free organic downloads, they also do a decent amount of UA to help maintain new user flow. I’d guess around 30-40% of installs.
Monopoly GO continues to do a fair amount more UA than Royal Match. Given the disparity, I’d have to think that the economics behind Royal Match are better than Monopoly. Recent word on the street, however, is that Monopoly have recently scaled back on Android spend for some reason.
Blood Strike is a new battle royale game from NetEase focused on lower-end devices. Expect to see them push hard in Latam and SE Asia. They are also pushing hard on iOS relative to Android for some reason. Anyway, great to see them continue in top US downloads. I’d also expect them to organically grow in India over time although I don’t see evidence of that now.
Two new games hit top downloads in China this week at #3 and #8.
At #3, Sunborn’s 少女前线2：追放 is a super high-quality tactics RPG that has some resemblance to Nikke Love Goddess. Keep your eyes out for this game. Tactics has a lot of room for growth on mobile.
At #8 超进化物语2 is a single-lane team battle RPG translating to Super Evolution Story 2 in English.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
Top 10 Steam Games
Damn, Lethal isn’t going anywhere. This is the only game stealing time away from my kids playing Valorant.
Elden Ring made a huge jump this past week. Not sure why. However, this game back in March of this year, reportedly sold 20.5M units.
Cyberpunk also made a big jump last week and has sold over 20M units as of this past September.
🔦 Spotlight | 8 Ball Pool Keeps Rolling in $$$
During my days working at SEGA, I had the opportunity to meet with a few folks who worked at Miniclip on 8 Ball Pool during the early development days.
If I recall correctly, from my discussions with some of those folks, the game's initial development budget was only around $100K. Further, the initial development timeline was quite short. I forget the exact amount of time I was told, but it may have been like six months.
Today, the game often makes double that original development budget daily.
According to data.ai estimates, revenue for the game is fairly evenly split between iOS and Android and often clears over $200K in net revenue daily.
Even crazier, imagine operating a game that accumulates over 300K downloads on a daily basis!
So What?
8 Ball Pool was highly innovative and impactful at the time for two key innovations:
PVP betting mechanic
Ultra short tutorial
PVP betting mechanic
The game showed that PVP betting was a viable way to monetize users and that the mechanic could be used for a fairly casual audience.
Content scaling in this game is largely just dependent on higher and higher ranks of players with increasingly larger entry fees for betting.
Players start with bets at 100 coin venues but can go as high as 25M coin entry fees.
The first venue, Downtown London Pub, only requires 100 coins to play:
The entry fee for Berlin Platz is 25M coins!
Ultra Short Tutorial: Only 5 Steps to Play
In addition, the game has one of the shortest tutorials of any mobile game ever created.
Players start playing almost immediately in this game.
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Step 4:
Step 5: Tutorial Complete
Other Advantages
Besides that, the game has also done a good job in two other key areas:
Low-end Device Support
One of the other major advantages of the game is its low-end device support. This has enabled the game to garner massive downloads from emerging markets like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. These markets today comprise the game’s top 3 geographies by downloads.
Merchandising
The game has a lot of low-cost entry points to monetize its players and makes effective use of battle pass to help monetize.
Event monetization:
Bundle Sales:
Battle Pass:
In conclusion, this game is a classic beast of a game that prints money and has enabled Miniclip to grow and expand its business.
We likely have not seen the model fully commercialized across other game types. While some games like Golf Clash and Carrom Disc Pool have seen success, I suspect more games will be able to leverage this oldie-but-goodie classic lessons to success in a new game soon.
8 Ball is the Call of Duty in the shooting genre. Second to none