MarketWire | Love and Deepspace & Palworld Top #1 Charts
MarketWire | Love and Deepspace & Palworld Top #1 Charts
Love and a Pokemon "clone" top mobile and PC charts respectively last week!
Hello Gamemakers,
What a crazy week!
Everyone’s talking about Palworld. I do a quick overview on some of the storylines about the game rather than the game itself.
And, we also cover a new worldwide #1 downloaded game also #1 downloads in both the US and China: Love and Deepspace.
More below!
Top 10 Charts
Yo! Aren’t narrative Otome and Bishojo games a small niche market? The games we’ve covered here, like Obey Me! and the dating elements in Love Nikke, suggest this genre may be much bigger than we thought. This week, Love and Deepspace hit #1 downloads worldwide, in the USA, and in China!
Pocketgamer reported that Whiteout Survival made over $400M in its first 11 months. I really like the new game development approach Century takes for their games. Maybe we can get Xiang or CQ from Century to talk about it someday in the future! Let’s get this newsletter to 30K, and I think we can try to make it happen.
Monopoly Go continues to dominate the US market at #1 top revenue. And some folks will continue to attack Matej and me (for our discussion on Monopoly Go profitability) without ever addressing the issues we brought up and always attacking straw man arguments instead. Pretty lame.
I’ve discussed the importance of understanding nuance in the games industry over and over again. For those who actually want to understand this more deeply, the awesome guys at Building Better Games host a great podcast, and they interviewed me a while back with this as one of the main points of discussion:
China market continues to deliver new games that regularly break the top 10 downloads every week in that market.
At #1 downloads, Love and Deepspace is an Otome (story-based games targeted towards women) genre game.
At #5 downloads, 世界之外 (aka Beyond the World) is a high-quality anime-style Otome game, so basically similar to Love and Deepspace. I was shocked, however, that a Japanese company, Nikki for Love and Deepspace, could outmarket Netease in China.
At #9, Snake Off by Weipai jumps into the top 10 downloads. This is basically the classic snake game you’ve seen, similar to the old-school .io games.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
For a while, it seemed that Chinese publishers would completely dominate the top 10 publishers. While Tencent remains dominant, Netease and miHoYo seem to be a bit more volatile these days.
Top 10 Steam Games
Everyone’s talking about Palworld. There was lots of slack and Twitter/X chatter on the sustainability of the game. What game would you rather own: Palworld (currently at #1) or Naraka: Bladepoint (currently at #10)?
🔦 Mobile Spotlight | Otome Power! Love and Deepspace Hits #1 Downloads
Interactive romantic experiences on mobile! I would’ve never guessed this genre could get to be a #1 downloaded game 5 years ago.
Today, Love and Deepspace hit #1 in downloads worldwide, in the US, and in China.
It was preceded by a pretty impressive marketing campaign that helped it achieve 14M pre-registrations.
Researching the developers, they are listed in data services as Nikki, Inc., have also been called Papergames, operating since 2013 and having developed other female-oriented mobile games such as Nikki Up2U, World Traveler, Miracle Nikki, Love and Producer, and Shining Nikki. Papergames was headquartered in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.
Today, the developer of Love and Deepspace is listed as Infold Games established in 2021 with offices in LA, Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. Also, the former Papergames game portfolio is now operated under Infold.
Could this have anything to do with existing or upcoming Chinese government games regulations?
Also, interestingly, the game was marketed in the physical world via an interactive, immersive 3D video played in New York (US), Tokyo (Japan), Keelung (Taiwan), and Changsha (China).
While I’m no expert in these games… yet, I was impressed by the game's production value and the balls it takes to have the game integrate multiple gameplay modes (interactive story + action shooter) and shift between portrait and landscape modes.
You actually do go from interactive story in portrait; see below:
To action/shooter where the screen shifts to landscape; see below:
It was surprising to see how much these games have an audience!
Data.ai estimates show cumulative downloads since the January 17, 2024 launch at roughly ~7.6M downloads (7 days). Downloads have dropped off to shortly over 300K per day as of Jan 24. See below:
Data.ai also shows cumulative net revenue since January 17 at $5.3M with Asian countries comprising the bulk of revenue and also primarily from Android. See below:
Otome games? Who knew?
Well, make sure you keep your eye out for this genre!
🔦 Steam Spotlight | Palworld takes the world by storm!
Who hasn’t heard about Palworld at this point?
Currently, it is the #1 game by revenue on Steam, as shown above, and is also #1 in terms of current and peak players today:
The most interesting aspect of Palworld is the discussions and background about the developer rather than the game itself.
First of all, the game team has had a lot of experience working together and building experience before finding success with Palworld:
There’s also some debate - not so much about the success of Palworld - but whether the game should have been commercially more successful given the popularity of the title:
Finally, if you haven’t checked it out, you should read Pocket Pair’s (the developer of Palworld) blog post shortly before the launch of the game. It’s in Japanese, but you can get the English translation if you use Translate on Google Chrome. Table of contents from the blog post below:
Best of luck to Palworld for continued success!
Hi there I came across to this post and noticed that you mentioned Nikki is a Japanese.. it's actually from China too. I believe it used several names. Infold (that's the name they use for outside China), Paper (they used this when publishing the 3D Nikki as I remember), and Diezhi (that's how the name pronounce in Chinese). Also I believe L&D got pretty well funded... compare to Beyond the World (this project was terminated at a moment but finally got a chance to restart🥲) Both of them are really great games so far in my opinion lol.