“Fortnite’s peak may be behind us,” SuperData asserts in its report on July 2018’s global video game revenues. “Fortnite revenue is up only 2% from June. Growth was modest despite Epic releasing Season 5 of the game’s battle pass midway through the month.”
One the PC side, it looks like Dungeon Fighter Online has surged to boot League of Legends from the top slot since last month (not the first time that’s ever happened, but it’s not common). PUBG dropped quite a bit too, as did Fortnite, but the top 10 is still the top 10, just shuffled around. The same is true of mobile, with only two games swapping places. It’ll be interesting to see whether World of Warcraft has a good showing in next month’s report, which should include the Battle for Azeroth launch.
On console, Fortnite remains king, though Grand Theft Auto poked up to #3 with the After Hours update and Overwatch has dropped from the top 10, helped along by the re-entry of No Man’s Sky – on console, mind – with its “best month since launch,” counting 2M players and $24M in revenue cross-platform.
“Overwatch revenue continues to slide despite consistent playerbase,” argues the firm. “Overwatch additional content sales across all platforms declined year-over-year and sequentially from June. On the other hand, monthly active users increased due to a free-to-play weekend and the release of a new playable Hero.”
No Man's Sky had its best month since launch #NoMansSkyNEXT https://t.co/Lq66W3L2Br pic.twitter.com/h1wRtagye4
— SuperData (@_SuperData) August 23, 2018
And here I thought Fortnite was going to become the next Minecraft. Oh well.
Would also love to see which regional revenue breakdown for each game.
No surprises seeing Overwatch losing its popularity (which includes revenue from sales of lootboxes), a lot of people are bored with its stagnant gameplay and Blizzard doesn’t care about making it better.
They could’ve easily attracted a much wider audience by, for example, increasing map sizes to accommodate more players per team, at least for Casual modes only. Something like 16v16 would be much more relaxing to play because you wouldn’t suffer from a single teammate’s mistake much and nobody would bother you with “you should switch to hero x” crap (which also means “less in-game toxicity”), plus more heroes would be “relevant” to play and the overall gameplay would be more interesting if you would have more ways to reach the objective (due to increased map size).
But hey, it’s Blizzard who thinks their way is the only correct way and who will stick to that no matter what will happen to the game’s popularity. So bored players will keep migrating to games like Fortnite and any similar games which would offer more gameplay variety and more relaxed gameplay.
Personally I like the fact that Blizzard knows what they want to produce with their games. So far they have done quite well by it for me at least and judging by thoir numbers a lot of other people as well.
Having said that I dont agree with everything they decide. That’s probably unlikely in the best scenarios.
To play devils advocate to your argument we have all seen games that listened TOO MUCH to players and failed because of it.
I’m a firm believer that players aren’t always right nor do they know what they want a lot of times.
Fortnite is a lot of fun for a lot of people. The same can be said for Overwatch.
A few quick thoughts from a cubicle dweller peeking in.
First, no surprises this report. Agree with Dad-S below, boring…
Overwatch, IMO, is suffering a from the Fortnite flu. The trend I’ve seen over the past year on Twitch is Fortnite over Overwatch. Big streamers made the switch and their audiences have followed etc.
Doesn’t mean much because OW is in for the long run, so as long as nobody panicks and does something stupid over at Blizzard which they won’t Fortnite will come back and OW will be waiting. Heh.
The rest is “meh”. Should be a good report next time which will include WoW and Hearthstone updates.
You know what?
No Man’s Sky…….
I know initially there was a ton of anger and outcry over this game but what a crazy kind of comeback and I think it shows that many people still do want this game to persevere despite set backs.
IMO this game still has a ton of things to add before I would call it a REALLY fun and interesting adventure but its getting there and its hard not to cheer them on.
Is is just me or do these rankings seem boring since they don’t involve MMOs vs one another anymore? I’m not that interested in how MOBAs and pseudo-MMOs are doing these days.
I’m not sure why but it always seemed much more interesting when WoW, EQ2, FFXI, and other typical MMOs would talk about subscriptions and how they faired against the field.
I feel the same exact way, I often wonder why they even get covered here; I get the reasons why I just don’t agree with them.
I mostly cover it because of WoW and things like POGO. As I said in the post, it’ll be interesting to see how WoW fares next month. Either way, we cover a lot of these games as orbiting the MMORPG genre, and I like to keep an eye on what’s beating us and where the winds are shifting.
You have to cover what the readers find interesting. But
Mano a Mano unzip-and-show-your-subs reports are prime fodder for reddit threads. But the above is far, far, far more important for MMOs and the MMO industry than those X vs Y sub reports.
To keep your astronomical metaphor, the above games are “orbiting” MMOs the same way a black hole “orbits” your spaceship before it crushes it.
FFXIV’s biggest competitor is not WoW, it is mobile. SE gets a majority of its revenue from mobile and I think the latest FF mobile game did 380M vs the 280 from 11, 14 and DQX combined.
GW2’s biggest competitor is not WoW, it is mobile and PC games that have a console&mobiole component. NCSoft gets a majority of its revenue from mobile.
Let’s be charitable and say GW2 does a tenth of WoW’s revenue. If it did a fifth or a twentieth of WoW’s revenue, it would not change the desirability for the NCSoft execs trying to decide how to allocate their development dollars. Because when a NCSoft exec is deciding whether to increase or decrease the ANet budget, he is not comparing the performance of GW2 to WoW, he is comparing it to the above games.
A “WoW vs the rabble” subscription report would provide very little insight into why many of us do not expect a AAA MMO anytime soon. Whereas the above report does give insight – both into why new AAA MMOs are not being greenlit and why existing MMOs are not getting the funding we would like.
:-) I am sure a lot of dinosaurs did not find market research about asteroids interesting. :-) Alas, while ignorance is bliss, it is scant protection.
Yeah it’s basically just “in other news, more people still prefer apples over oranges!”
Or maybe junkfood over salad would be a better comparison.
That was before my time or maybe I was not paying as much attention to non-WoW titles, but I don’t recall a time when companies besides WoW would discuss subs. Or rather WoW would regularly give quarterly subs and the others would have “infographic” sort of announcements like X million accounts but not always clear whether that included trials and Betas.
Did companies besides WoW disclose subs?
Wait wait wait…
THIS game is beating LoL right now?
Interesting…
It’s a really good beat ’em up game and has been one of the biggest games in Korea for a really long time. The Global English version is actually managed fairly well by the main devs.
Interesting, at a glance it seems like just one of those eastern browser cash grab pseudo-MMO things.
But hey, if it plays well, then to each their own!
You’re not entirely wrong. The game is very cash grabby, with very annoying cash shop systems and loot boxes, and little in the way of customer support for bugs and gold sellers.
But, underneath all the nonsense, its a very fun side scrolling beat’em up. Only real problem I had as far as game-play goes is better controller support. I personally think it runs better with a controller than a keyboard.
It’s the kind of game that if one day all games but this one magically disappear, I will stop being a gamer.
It is one of the worst games you will ever play – if you so choose to try it. Horrible.
Cosmetics are important. :-)