MMO Business Roundup: Apex Legends’ Twitch decline, PUBG’s funding, and crappy gaming myths

Welcome back to another roundup of smaller business stories affecting the MMO industry and orbiting genres.

It’s not just your imagination: Apex Legends hasn’t been getting quite the same word of mouth it was treated to just a few short months ago. As StreamElements (via Gamasutra) notes, the top streamers aren’t streaming it anymore. Fame is fleeting, y’all.

“After launching in late February, the game set the record for viewership hours of a single game on Twitch. In the second week after it was first released, it peaked at 40 million hours watched. The game was still a major player by March but its peak viewership dropped by 75% to 10 million hours watched a week. 10 top streamers were playing the game in February but this dropped to just two in March, which was a big reason for that decline.”

Meanwhile, we got a peek at PUBG Corp.’s financials and a glimpse of how well PUBG made out in 2018. Not too shabbily, as it turns out; Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad notes it made almost a billion bucks in revenue last year, a third of that in pure profit, with more than half from Asia, but the vast majority from PC, not mobile. As Gamasutra points out, that’s because Tencent controls the bulk of the mobile version.

PUBG Corp Financials:

2018 Revenue: $920 million
2018 Profit: $310 million

Split-
PC: $790m
Mobile: $65m
Console – $60m

Asia = 53% of revenue

(Thanks @sinonobu for the translations)
https://t.co/7JSWWjUl7v pic.twitter.com/S64MwGzoOE

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) April 19, 2019

By the way, Google translating PUBG into “Unconventional Battleground” is amazing.

Finally, MOP reader Miol pointed us to an article on The Guardian from earlier this month that smashes five myths about video games, including that they cause us to be more violent (studies haven’t found this at all), that video games themselves are addictive (not really), that they’re a waste of time (nope), that games are purely entertainment (vast potential to be so much more), and that gaming leads to “social isolation” (I mean, seriously?). The Guardian even refers to the well-publicized story about a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, who led a hopping social life inside of World of Warcraft before his tragic death. The sooner these bullshit myths are well and truly pulverized, the better.