Revenue per player

How much do some of our favourite games earn from each user?

Many of us are guilty of the occasional impulse purchase. You might have thrown a box of fancy chocolates into your shopping basket or got yourself a new jacket that you didn’t really need, but it was on sale so you’ll allow yourself a treat. However, there’s one thing which many of us are spending more money on than we might realise.

Due to in-game microtransactions, video games have become a prime source of ongoing revenue for developers even years after the game’s initial release. This is true across all platforms, whether you’re paying for in-game currency or full-blown add-ons and DLC. Love it or hate it, post-purchase transactions are now a staple part of the gaming world.

With this in mind, we wanted to find out which of our favourite games generate the most revenue per player. So, which games are more “pay” than play?

The richest and most-played games

Some of the richest and most profitable games are the ones we play on our smartphones. These little games that we might play on our commute, on our lunch breaks, or whenever we’ve got some dead time to fill, are some of the most played games out there. So, does being played more translate into high earnings?

We’ve looked at five of the most popular games and will compare them on revenue, player base, and earnings per player. We’ll also take a look at how earnings have increased or decreased over the last five years

Highest average revenue:

Clash of Clans

@clashofclans

Game

Average Revenue

Clash Of Clans $1,200,000,000
Pokemon Go $868,000,000
Candy Crush $827,333,33
Roblox $433,750,000
Minecraft $416,000,000

Of the five major titles that we’re looking at, Clash of Clans pulls in the most revenue on average. Pokemon Go and Candy Crush follow in second and third places respectively, with Roblox and and Minecraft trailing be...

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The most Players

Candy Crush

@candycrushsaga

Game

Average Players

Candy Crush 295,000,000
Pokemon Go 152,600,000
Roblox 91,250,000
Minecraft 78,400,000
Clash of Clans 40,333,333

The game with the most players is Candy Crush, the game in which you crush rows of candy which are then replaced with more candy, that you then crush, and so on. The simplicity of the game means that it's super...

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Average revenue per user:

Clash of Clans

@clashofclans

Game

Average Revenue per User

Clash Of Clans $29.75
Pokemon Go $5.69
Candy Crush $5.31
Roblox $4.75
Minecraft $2.80

From the selection of games we’ve looked at, Clash of Clans appears to make the most money from each individual player by quite some way. The fact that Clash of Clans is free to play means that this revenue must come...

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Changes in the gaming market

Changes in the video gaming market has its ups and downs like any other, but recent lockdowns and social distancing have led many of us to take a renewed interest in exploring virtual worlds.

Rising revenues
Increased revenue
per player

When looking at the revenue that these games have taken over the last five years, we can see that apart from a considerable contraction in 2017, revenues have grown every year since. In fact, last year’s revenue growth boosted earnings by a whole third!

This shows that the gaming industry is doing very well, experiencing several years of revenue growth even before receiving the 2020 boost which could be linked to shifting habits in the wake of the pandemic.

We can see a similar story when looking at the amount that games earn per player. While there was a repeated decline in 2017 and 2018, this turned around to produce an increase of 3.89% in 2019. Last year saw a huge increase in revenue per player which also indicates that 2020 was a boom year for gaming. Whether the market remains this buoyant is yet to be seen.

New consoles

Since the release of the next generation of consoles in 2020, the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X (and Series S) are yet to make huge waves in the gaming world. This is mostly due to a shortage of materials and a lack of AAA launch titles.

As the next-gen consoles become more common, and their game libraries fill out with some new titles, it will be interesting to see the effect on the mobile gaming industry. Will the likes of Candy Crush and Pokemon Go suffer as a result? Or do they exist in completely separate spaces?

Methodology

We wanted to find out which of our favourite games have the highest revenue per player. To do this, we used data from businessofapps.com which gave us the yearly revenue, players, and other data on some of the biggest games available on your smartphone.

We compared player numbers to revenue for each game, looking only at years where the data for both was available and were able to identify which games earned the highest revenues per player. We also looked at changes in revenue across all of the featured games in order to build a picture of how the market has changed over time.

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