GungHo’s Hit Puzzle & Dragons Makes $775 Million On the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android Store
After an exciting year for the mobile gaming sector, GungHo Online announced its annual results. The Japanese corporation posted $1.5 billion in 2013 revenues, with their hit game Puzzle & Dragons generating the largest portion of that sum, and $755 million in revenues through the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android store alone.
GungHo’s addictive take on the match-three genre pulled another $650 million on the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) app store, bringing the total annual revenue generated from just one game to well over $1 billion. Even though Puzzle & Dragons is not stomping the western top-grossing charts, the game is hugely popular in Asian markets, which could also explain the higher revenue figure generated on the Android platform.
In late 2013 GungHo expanded the list of European countries where the game is available, adding another six countries to it. This expansion obviously yielded results as the company claims that the game churned another $155 million in January 2014 alone. This would peg the daily revenue generation of the monster-collecting, gem-matching little wonder at roughly $5 millions per day – an unthinkable feat even for the likes of games like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans that have carved a nice place for themselves at the top of U.S. app store grossing charts.
The whole situation puts everything in a somewhat startling perspective. Japan’s Softbank now owns a majority stake in both GungHo and in the studio that produced one of Puzzle & Dragons’ biggest rivals – Clash of Clans maker Supercell. With this sort of established revenue monsters tucked under its belt Softbank may well be positioned to become one of the major factors in the mobile world.
On Google’s side of the fence, even though the giant obviously deals with far larger revenue numbers, its 30% cut in the form of a $0.2 billion in revenue, coming from just one Android app, is nothing to scoff at.
