ARE YOU PLAYING THE GAME THAT MAKES $5 MILLIONS PER DAY
The days when Candy Crush Saga dominated the top of the game charts are over. Even though you can still see it being played everywhere you go, there has long-been a new game changer in town, and we're not talking about Clash of Kings or Game of War either. According to App Annie's current figures, Clash of Clans dominates the number one spot on its highest grossing Android app list in 85 of the 101 countries tracked by the service.
As if being the highest grossing app in 85 percent of the world's Android game-playing countries wasn't enough, that popularity is backed up by serious money. To give you the back story: Clash of Clans' Finnish developer, Supercell, reported yearly revenue for the game in 2012 of 101 million USD, followed in 2013 by 892 million USD, with Clash of Clans sitting atop the iOS and Android charts pretty much since it first appeared in 2012.
This game makes its developers 5 million dollars a day.
Last year, however, revenue figures blew the roof off, with a yearly gross revenue of 1.8 billion USD. That's right, almost 2 billion dollars of revenue from a single game. Breaking that figure down, that equals just under 5 million dollars per day. Clash of Clans has only increased in popularity since then too, so you can expect that figure to have grown in recent months.
We contacted Supercell for more recent revenue figures and will update this story with any response. But taking a quick look at digital game growth in the US alone from Superdata Research, we can see the market has grown by 15 percent in the past year: from 0.96 billion USD in April 2014 to 1.1 billion USD in April 2015.
A more recent gaming market report notes that mobile hit a new record in the US, with more than 147 million gamers on smartphones or tablets spending 380 million per month, representing a 13 percent increase from the same period in 2014. These figures include console and PC games as well but the trend is clear: games are big business.
If we take the trends above (which are admittedly only US figures) and apply them to Clash of Clans, it is feasible that Clash of Clans is now on target to rake in over two billion dollars this year. If the mobile games market in other regions has grown in a larger proportion to the US, this figure could be much higher.
For comparison's sake, Candy Crush developer King reported a staggering revenue of 2.26 billion USD in 2014, topping even that of Supercell. However, King has a few lucrative titles under its belt, whereas the majority of Supercell's revenue comes from Clash of Clans alone. Nevertheless, the studio has two other top 20 games in its stable: Hay Day and Boom Beach.
If Supercell can sustain the popularity of Clash of Clans and add another successful title or two to its repertoire, its position as the undisputed king of mobile gaming would be assured. But just as we saw King toppled by Supercell in a matter of years it is entirely feasible a new game studio or genre will emerge that redefines mobile gaming once again.
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