The Minecraft Movie Jolts Mobile Revenue, but It's Just Not Enough
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Chicken Jockey. Check out the full article for more insights.
Minecraft is and has been the top-paid game in the US on both the App Store and Google Play for several years now. This is despite the need to fork over $6.99 before you can even see the game on your phone. That's not very common these days.
The Minecraft Movie came out a couple of weeks ago and I was very curious to see if the movie would drive more revenue for the game considering its antiquated paid-upfront monetization and relatively young audience.
What do you think?
Of course it did! All publicity is good publicity, and a movie is good publicity.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, players spent $6M on Minecraft's mobile games across the App Store and Google Play since the movie came out on April 4th.
That's roughly twice as much as the game saw in the same number of days in February. Great, right?
Unlike most games and games, Minecraft's revenue is pretty even between the App Store and Google Play, which is a testamant to its strong brand. In fact, Minecraft generated more revenue from Google Play in the US than the App Store, which isn't common at all.
But while this looks great for Mojang, which is owned by Microsoft, if you know games, you know Minecraft is a very underutilized property. By that I mean to say that it could be generating more revenue than it is right now. A lot more.
See, Minecraft is a paid download, a relic we don't see often. At $6.99, Minecraft practically shot itself in both feet and knees and only then entered the race.
All successful games today are free to download and utilize in-app purchases. Some charge for power-ups, or to unlock levels, others for cosmetic improvements, but they don't charge to download.
In a recent interview, Mojang said the single purchase strategy's purpose is to make the game accessible to as many people as possible. But that's really doing the opposite.
Look at this comparison:
I rounded up the top-grossing games in the US and compared their downloads to Minecraft, which isn't on the list.
When it comes to downloads, what Mojang is trying to get the most of with their "simple" pricing, Minecraft trails every game in the five that I selected even though its brand is as strong (if not stronger), especially after the movie.
According to our App intelligence, Minecraft has welcomed 4.5M new downloads so far this year to rank 5 out of 5. Moving up, Coin Master, in 4th place, saw 9M new downloads, Monopoly Go 10.5M, Royal Match 20M, and the winner, Candy Crush, 24M new downloads in the same period. More than five times the downloads of Minecraft.
If you think that's bad news, wait until you see the revenue comparison:
We estimate Minecraft grossed $32M so far this year, which includes the extra revenue after the movie's release, and it's again, last on the list.
4th place Coin Master saw $248M in consumer spending in the same period, Candy Crush $328M, Royal Match $494M, and Monopoly Go saw more than a half billion in consumer spending, according to our estimates. I'm going to skip the calculation and just say Minecraft is leaving a lot of money on the table by being a paid-to-download game.
Monetizing with in-app purchases isn't easy and could anger its user base. I get it. But there are ways to make it work.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
