Given how closely Golf Rival mimics Golf Clash’s production value and core game mechanics, it is clear that the battle has moved from the product to user acquisition front.Ģ020, was a very good year for Tennis Clash as it managed to grow it’s revenue by +331% YoY and downloads to +104% YoY. On the revenue side too Golf Clash saw a YoY decline of -10%, while Golf Rivals made a massive stride of +127% YoY revenue growth. This speaks of the aggressiveness from the rival’s front to capture market space from the market leader. While Golf Clash saw it’s downloads decline YoY by -46%, Golf Rival saw it’s downloads grow by +38% in the same period. But these experimentations are yet to pay off in a bigger way. It seems that the company has been thoroughly experimenting with better ways to monetize its existing user base via the introduction of features like Battle Pass, deeper live ops, tournaments. Playdemic, the developer behind Golf Clash, is not unaware of the competition. On the other hand, every golf course tends to have few tennis courts, so there might be some audience overlap there. We also witnessed Tennis Clash picking up the pace and registering massive growth, though with the game being so different, it is arguable that the game's growth didn’t eat much into Golf Clash’s decline. A publisher is known to get shamelessly inspired by other sports titles with titles like Pool-8 Ball Game. This is mainly attributed to Golf Clash’s direct rival, which is unsurprisingly called Golf Rival by the Asian publisher behind GR Sports Club. Golf Clash saw its revenue market share of the sports sub-genre almost halve down in 2020. This uplift can be attributed to impressive YoY growth rates achieved by the key titles that we will analyze in this post. The tiny Sports Management sub-genre saw impressive growth of +39% YoY, but the real surprise this year came from the general Sports sub-genre which grew 31% compared to 4% in 2019. Towards the end of the year, the installs bounced back up again as the second wave of lockdowns began. As the installs normalized after the first wave of lockdowns the revenues declined but continued at a significantly higher level, which speaks of improved live survival capabilities of key sports games developers. Mirroring the Racing and many other genre trends, maximum growth in both revenue and downloads came between Q1/ Q2 in 2020, owing largely to the lockdowns. The Sports category registered a healthy double-digit revenue growth of +32% YoY, downloads were up by +12% YoY compared to 2019. The key growth drivers were thus on the meta side through genre-blending features like quest systems, battle pass, enhanced social and various collections as well as power progression mechanics. The growth we are seeing is fuelled by existing games increasing their market share and becoming better at live-ops. Overall, the Sports category didn’t see any new notable chartbusting entrants. Original IPs like 8 Ball Pool and Fishing Clash on the other hand kept on keeping on as they weren’t affected by the real-world problems. In other words, as the franchises like NBA postponed their season and lost viewership, so did the NBA mobile game. In that sense, it’s much like on PC and Consoles, where EA grabs the sports’ crown jewels.ĮA Sports took a loss due to real sports franchises suffering from the effects of the pandemic. This increases the barrier to entry limiting the sub-genre to only a few publishers. Given the number of studios contending for IP's have gone up in the past few years, you need deeper pockets and longer development times to produce a quality product that can hope to become a contender against established players. Lion’s share of revenue in both Sports & Racing genres was still brought in by a handful of higher-production-value titles with IP-tie-ins like CSR Racing, Mario Kart Live, and FIFA. In terms of major category trends, not much has changed from what we covered in our 2020 predictions, but there are some interesting deviations:
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