Analyzing Riot Games’ move to mobile

As Sensor Tower puts it, “Just over 16 months into Riot Games’ first foray into mobile titles, the publisher has released three games and generated $108.4 million from player spending.” Quite frankly, that is a very commendable feat for a company that has primarily focused on one PC game since 2009. While Riot will need time to build their mobile revenue contribution up to League of Legends’ reported $1.75 billion 2020 on PC, it’s off to a good start.

That said, achieving competitive success on mobile is a very different ballgame and the numbers below would make it seem like Riot is feeling the heat: League of Legends: Wild Rift is tracking quite well versus Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, but it’s miles away from Supercell’s Brawl Stars and Tencent’s Arena of Valor. Legends of Runterra’s revenues are pretty insignificant against the competition, and MTG Arena is showing comparable performance in just a matter of five months. Teamflight Tactics is a subgenre leader and likely driven by the IP attached to it, but the Auto Chess subgenre’s revenue opportunity is generally insignificant against other target subgenres.