#number nerding

• iPhone vs Android - Apple has the majority of the market of mobile phones in the US, but this is not the case in most of the rest of the world, and especially not in China where Android has the vast majority of the market. Which means that on top of the above point, said data becomes even more unstable.

[Not applicable to LaDS, but this is also relevant to games avaliable via EroLabs - revenue from those versions is also not taken into account.]

• Banners/events - smaller games have a more steady stream of revenue and DAU, but ones that are more banner driven at higher success have major spikes and major dips. This kind of game can double or half its revenue month on month, and this is extremely difficult for statistical modelling to take into account. Basically, the revenue and DAU is not predictable by user trends, and that makes for a very very wide margin of error.

• Out of app sales - games that are available on PC or console have whole other revenue streams that app metric trackers are not measuring. Games that have top-up or item shop websites are another revenue stream that is not counted. Often times these methods give more value for money and are favoured, thus the app tracker numbers may be VASTLY lower than the reality.

• Corporate vs player - yes corporate accounts with SensorTower and others gain access to further metrics. No, that doesn't change any of the errors of margin.

• DAU vs revenue - while revenue can be estimated (albeit with the errors mentioned above) based on sampling and statistical modelling, there is absolutely zero way to accurately predict or record daily active user numbers. It can be estimated when total download numbers and/or revenue are announced by the game company, but otherwise it is a complete shot in the dark.

• Month vs week vs day - again, these are comparative metrics, which are better at identifying an overall trend than actual solid figures. A month worth of data compares better to a month worth of data for this purpose. Day to day is largely meaningless, as is week to week. There is no accurate tracker for a single day of revenue, unless the game company puts that information out themselves.

~

How It Works

So why do these external data trackers exist? The answer lies in the fact that the player is not their customer!

These are platforms utilised by corporations to observe and track competitors, and in such cases it is the trends that are important, not the figures themselves.

Additionally, if the corporation utilising the platform can see what, for example, SensorTower has for their own app's metrics, they can then use their actual figures to reverse engineer the margins of error that particular platform has.

Meaning they can then similarly work out more accurate estimated figures of their competitors ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

That's why this information is valuable, and why a corporate account costs a fuckton of money. It gives them the ability to benchmark their app versus the competition and identify opportunities for maximising app store strategy.

Put simply, if you do not have access to a company's actual daily data, such platforms are not very useful or accurate for you.

App data is all privately held by the company owning the app, and that includes data via Google Play and App Store.

This isn't unique to mobile apps either, most financial data of any property is held privately because duh, who wants their competitors to see how well or poorly they are doing in the minutiae?

TV viewership, ebook sales, video games - it's all estimated via a mix of actual reported sales and statistical modelling, eg a small sample scaled up.

Are APIs involved? Sure, if a company has signed up to do so, but many don't, and that info is again held privately. APIs do not give revenue numbers.

Does the info from the app stores take into account the percentage cut that Google and Apple take? Nope.

Does it take into account in-game ad revenue? Nope.

How inaccurate can it be? For actual numbers it is estimated that the margin of error can be anywhere from -100% to +100% ಠ_ಠ;;

So, you see what I mean about it being more useful for trends than hard figures, right?

~

Important Factors

So what does have an impact on mobile game revenue and DAU, and do boycotts have an impact?

There are various methods for trying to predict consumer spending when it comes to gacha games, and almost all of them are faulty.

This is mostly because there is a giant gap between what people say will impact their spending decisions in game, and what they actually do.

And that, in turn, is why these metrics are seen as so important, because the best way to understand player spending is to work backwards from what they have paid for compared to what hasn't opened wallets.

Gacha games are money makers for one primary reason - gambling. They exist as a game to generate money, to encourage people to keep spending to get what they want, to keep things at a chance rather than a guarantee, and to prey upon the spontaneous and impulse spenders - with an added aspect of engineering an addictive quality to keep the player returning to spend more.

While players will say they want fair mechanics, that they'll protest if profit is prioritised over content and player experience, and even that they'll leave if such changes are not made… this rarely happens.

And when it does, it can be offset by attracting enough new players to fill the gap and drive expansion.

Gacha games are not intended to have a long shelf life, rather to maximise profit before collapse when the playerbase and all potential players have been exhausted.

In more recent years we are seeing gacha games live a little longer, perhaps because of the insane revenue they have generated since the pandemic. Mihoyo has specialised in this, still pumping out new story content and characters, being multi-platform, and generating lots of positive attention.

Their games still aren't reaching the heights they once did, but they are defying the odds nonetheless, and have certainly not left their games to stagnate.

As a very obvious counter example, Obey Me came before many of the current frontrunners, cultivating a small but loyal fanbase and earning an explosively successful start… only to flounder and give up on the game when it was still a constant earner. They've since failed to repeat their success, and now look to have moved away from gacha mechanics entirely (which may well suit the fanbase better).

And with LaDS we have an even bigger success story, with a very new kind of otome gacha that has eclipsed all others... but one that has come with increasing player unhappiness due to perceived lack of story and lore vs gimmicks and greed.

This isn't just talk either, with the game consistently earning less every year, and never quite reaching the heights it hit with the Sylus release since (though projections do suggest that Valko could have achieved a close second place).

Gambling though, is a hard addiction to break, not least when paired with an encouraged parasocial dependency. It is no coincidence that a sizeable number of gacha players are people who are neurodiverse - people with ADHD are more likely to fall prey to impulse spending and gambling mechanics.

It is always important to bear in mind the fact that this is gambling. That is not to say the games cannot be played, or even that you should not spend money on them - we all spend money on entertainment! But it is good to be mindful of not getting carried away and spending more than you would wish to.

~

Boycott

Boycotts can and do work, but they require a seismic shift in the usual playerbase ecosystem. If a game makes an error or move so egregious that it gives a focal point for player resentment and frustration, then revenue can and will fall.

These things are difficult to predict and measure for all the same reasons as above.

Day to day and week to week are not reliable.

Absolute figures are not reliable.

Even the month to month comparative numbers have a large margin of error - the statistic models cannot cope with large shifts, and can take another month to readjust accordingly.

So why do boycotts work?

Because the game company sees the actual revenue, the actual DAU, the actual demographics, and has accurate figures on how those numbers change on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. By country.

Papergames has all of that information.

Estimated numbers and predictions and approximate graphs really don't matter, only the actual actions of players do.

Panicking and focusing on these numbers and graphs is really not going to do any good - it's actually very pointless. The daily numbers might as well be made up.

What makes a successful boycott will vary from game to game, but there are two factors that are important across any game boycott:

Don't log in

Don't spend money

That's it! The rest is simply a waiting game.