GameRefinery has released a snapshot report of the mobile role-playing game (RPG) genre for the first quarter of 2020. And the evaluation of 200 features in 2,000 games shows how the competition is increasing and revenues growing in the genre.
The report from the mobile game insight and analytics firm said that RPGs generate about 12% of all revenue among iOS games.
Traditionally, licensed brands and intellectual properties have played a big role in RPGs to date, but more recently original titles have begun to make their way into the top ranks. Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle from Bandai Namco was the top game in the quarter, following by Marvel: Contest of Champions and RAID: Shadow Legends.
GameRefinery vice president of games Joel Julkunen said in the report that event-bound versions of characters have the biggest impact on revenues. Special live event currency or material or resource has the second-biggest impact, followed by the number of different permanent boost items or boosts to purchase.
In Q1, the RPG genre as a whole has pretty much maintained its market share from the previous quarter, while the turn-based RPG subgenre has been trending upwards with a healthy revenue growth. This solid performance of turn-based RPGs is mainly thanks to continuing success of games like RAID: Shadow Legends, Hero Wars, and Marvel: Strike Force.
GameRefinery said the future of RPGs in the U.S. looks promising, as older titles seem to maintain their player base and new titles, such as Netmarble’s Seven Deadly Sins, are seeing success from the get-go.
The data is from GameRefinery’s software-as-a-service platform that holds more than 2,000 mobile game deconstructions. The platform was used to research and analyze the RPG games space.