🚀 MarketWire | I'm screaming at the success of Ice Scream 8
🚀 MarketWire | I'm screaming at the success of Ice Scream 8
How successful is this game?
Hello Gamemakers,
This week, we take a look at the new action-horror narrative/puzzle game Ice Scream 8. The game is another example of a game getting massive downloads on Google Play, but oddly, not much on iOS. Coincidence? Hmm… it seems a little bit suss to me.
Further, if the downloads are real, the game would be a good counter-example that narrative-focused games on mobile can’t work well.
Top 10 Charts
Everyone loves GTA! Netflix recently published the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy - Definitive edition including GTA: San Andreas, GTA: Vice City, and GTA 3 on mobile. Well folks, GTA: San Andreas has hit #1 worldwide downloads.
The new game Ice Scream 8 hits #3 in worldwide downloads this week. The asymmetric download pattern for this game iOS vs. Google Play is suspicious though.
Not much movement on the top worldwide revenue charts, but for shooter fans like myself, it’s good to see Call of Duty Mobile back in the top 10.
A very unusual week for top downloads in the US, we have 7 new games hit the top 10 downloads chart this week.
Congrats to Netflix for getting two out of three of their GTA trilogy hit Top 10 downloads for US.
Even a few years ago, the top revenue games often included hardcore 4X types of games. In today’s market, most of the top revenue games are midcore to casual.
Amazing just how much Tencent and Netease dominate China’s top charts. Note Wild Rift is basically Tencent as well.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
NCSOFT’s Lineage M responsible for more than half of their mobile revenue and helping drive the company back into top 10 mobile game publishers.
Top 10 Steam Games
House Flipper 2 is a first-person building simulator where your player is contracted to repair and renovate homes.
Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising from Cygames is a fantasy single-player 2D fighter game.
🔦 Spotlight | How successful is Ice Scream 8?
Well, folks, there are 8 of them, and it achieved #3 worldwide downloads. Doesn’t that mean it’s somewhat successful?
There are a number of games that are super suspicious to me when it comes to downloads on Google Play. Take this game, for example, which burst to a global hard launch with almost 14X more downloads on Google Play vs. iOS. Even further, while revenue on iOS is typically higher than Google Play at 14X downloads, we’d expect to see a wider gap between iOS and Google Play revenue.
Here’s what we show based on data.ai estimates:
While the iOS global launch was very low-key, Ice Scream 8 ripped to almost 3.8M downloads on its opening day Dec 16 on Google Play vs. ~273K downloads on iOS. This does seem a little bit suspicious.
Between this game and others like Spider Fighting Rope game and Sandbox in Space, we continue to see very suspicious games gain massive downloads on the Google Play side.
The developer Keplerians is a Spanish-based game dev studio founded in 2015. They seem to have a focus on narrative horror games, including other titles such as Evil Nun and Mr. Meat in addition to Ice Scream.
So, what is this game about?
The game is a linear, action-based, narrative horror game. A big focus is on completing various puzzles and mini-games.
Maybe the time for narrative mobile games is here, and this game proves there’s an audience for it. Or maybe a lot of the Android downloads are contrived, thereby overstating the game’s popularity.
From what I have seen so far, it’s still very difficult to tell.