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In This Edition
- The impact of video game and movie tie-ins
- Games veterans form game studio for the modern age
- India gets new publishing and investment event
Hello. Happy The Game Business Show and Newsletter day! I was going to do a bit about tariffs here, but I’m worried by the time I press send something else might happen. So you’ll just have to imagine I said something pithy or despairing or joyful.
There’s plenty of other things to talk about. The Minecraft movie has done some huge numbers. We also chat with Jen MacLean of Dragon Snacks Games about her new studio. And we catch up with indie developer extraordinaire Avichal Singh to learn about his new event taking place in Mumbai this week.
For listeners or viewers to the show, I am also joined Kaare Eriksen, media analyst at Variety for the Variety Intelligence Platform. You can listen or watch it above.
Minecraft user numbers jump over 30% on movie launch
The Minecraft movie is breaking Box Office records, and it’s having a positive impact on the video game, too.
On Saturday, the day after the movie appeared in theatres, Minecraft daily active players rose 9% week-on-week, and on Sunday players were up 17% week-on-week. This is according to data from Ampere Analysis.
That may not sound like a huge leap, but that’s because Mojang ran a bunch of activity, including releasing some free Minecraft movie DLC, the week prior. The Saturday before the movie, daily active players were up 25% week-on-week, and Sunday numbers were up 14% week-on-week. That’s two consecutive weeks of double-digit growth for a game that already boasts around170 million monthly active users.
In terms of sales, Nielsen/GfK reports that sales of the Nintendo Switch version of Minecraft rose 25% the week before the movie came out, and then again by 8% when the movie released.
Is this unusual?
Video game sales and players typically jump around the movie launch, although it varies depending on the approach of the publisher. Let’s run through a few.
What happened with… Sonic The Hedgehog 3?
The third Sonic movie released before Christmas last year and grossed nearly $492 million worldwide
Sega released a game in October designed to tie-in with it called Sonic X Shadow Generations (Shadow featured in the film and game)
During the movie’s release month, Sonic X Shadows Generations saw a 46% increase in monthly active users (Ampere data)
Sales of the game jumped 47% across Europe (GSD figures)
But, it wasn’t the biggest Sonic game of the month. Sonic Frontiers was included in PlayStation Plus and was played by over 1m players. Big month for Sonic.
What happened with… the Gran Turismo movie?
The GT movie release in August and did reasonably well. Its Box Office doubled its budget with $122 million worldwide gross
Some small activity around the latest game in the series (Gran Turismo 7). The developer added a car livery design based on the film
Ampere data reveals that player count rose 20% month-on-month for GT7
In Europe, game sales rose 78% over July and it rose from No.33 to No.82. Not huge sales overall, but a noticeable jump
What happened with… the Borderlands movie?
The Borderlands movie launched in August with a big name cast, but was a commercial and critical flop with just $33 million worldwide gross
The video game Borderlands 3 was delivering big numbers throughout the summer due to an inclusion in the PlayStation Plus subscription service. Ampere data says there were 2.15 million monthly active users in July, and that rose to 2.16 million when the film released (up less than 3%)
Borderlands 3 game sales surged 418%, rising from No.99 in the European charts to No.6. This was mostly down to a 90% discount on the game
What happened with… the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie?
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie released in October 2023. Critics were not impressed, but fans were happy. It grossed $297 million globally on a budget of just $20 million
Before the movie released, the first game Five Nights at Freddy’s game was delivering around 10,000 active daily users. During the first week of the movie’s release, that jumped to 50,000 (Ampere data)
What happened with… the Super Mario Bros movie?
The Mario movie released April 2023 to huge success, delivering $1.36 billion globally and is in the Top Five most successful animated movies of all time
Nintendo did a number of console hardware bundles and marketing activity around its games starting in March.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sales rose 25% from February to March and rose again by 2% in April (European sales data, GSD).
Super Mario Odyssey sales rose 94% between February and March (going from No.72 to No.39), and then it rose again by 20% in April (peaking at No.22).
New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe rose 25% from March to April (rising from No.56 to No.29)
That was fun. Can you do the TV shows, too? Ok, go on then.
What happened with… Fallout?
The Fallout TV show was a mega hit for Amazon, with 100 million viewers. Second biggest TV show in the streamer’s history (behind Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power)
All TV episodes were released at once
Bethesda released a small update to Fallout 4 and heavily discounted the game across all platforms. It also featured in various subscription services.
European sales exceeded half a million in a April. IDG Intelligence says peak sales were 345% up compared with pre-show sales. The sales boost lasted a month
The huge activity around Fallout 4 resulted in 10.5 million monthly active users in April. A rise of nearly nine million over March (Ampere data)
In May, it still had 9.55 million monthly users. The MAU figures didn’t return to March levels until September
What happened with… The Last of Us TV Show?
Series 1 Aired in January 2023 to March 2023 to widespread acclaim. HBO’s most watched debut series ever, with episodes averaging 32 million viewers
It resulted in two spikes in sales for the game. At the launch of the TV series, sales jumped 38% compared with pre-show levels (IDG Intelligence) and then it jumped 75% vs pre-show sales at the end of its run. Possibly the result of people binge watching, or turning to the game after finishing the show
In terms of monthly active users, The Last of Us Remastered hit 1.8 million MAUs in January (Ampere data), a rise of over 1,000% month-on-month. Last of Us Part 2 rose 440% in MAUs with 1.4m monthly users, and The Last of Us Part 1 rose 347% to nearly 600,000 players
That success continued into February, Last of Us Remastered players jumped 417% again to over 2.2m monthly players, while Part 2 jumped to just shy of 1.6m players, up 178%. However, The Last of Us Part 1 dropped by 62%. The show finished in March, and things began slowing down then, but its monthly user count didn’t drop back to pre-show numbers until the summer.
Season 2 arrives next week
What happened with… The Halo TV show?
Halo ran for two series. The first in 2022 and the second in 2024 on Paramount+. First episode was the biggest debut for a Paramount+ series. Numbers estimated around 5m viewers, significantly lower than Fallout and Last of Us.
According to IDG, when the first show launched in 2022, sales of the game rose 1,090% over pre-show sales, although this was from a very low base. However, the second series, which aired last year, barely had any impact on game sales at all. Which suggests, unsurprisingly, that the first series is the one likely to have the best sales impact.
But there was an engagement boost with the second series. According to Ampere, Halo Infinite and Halo: The Master Chief Collection saw monthly active users rise around 300% each during February 2024 when series two debuted. The Master Chief Collection then rose gain by 100% in March as the series continued, making it the biggest month for The Master Chief Collection since November 2022.
The TV show was cancelled in July last year
There was always some form of positive boost to the games during the launch of their movie or TV counterparts, but the scale would depend on how much the publisher leaned into the opportunity.
Dragon Snacks Games: “If we don't change as an industry, we will continue to decline”
A new game studio set-up by video game veterans wants to show the way in how to be a modern, sustainable games studio.
Dragon Snacks Games is a new team formed by Amazon and Xbox exec Jen MacLean, Scopley veteran Chris Nemcosky and strategy games expert from Oxide and Firaxis Michelle Menard.
The team is targeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamers, with titles that are quick to get into combined with social spaces where friends can interact (inspired by TikTok and Discord).
“We've been able to do more with a small team of six than teams of 60 because we all know the vision that we are building to”
Studio CEO MacLean told The Game Business that to reach new audiences, and to have a more sustainable future, requires a different approach to building a studio. Dragon Snacks Games plans to keep its team size to no more than 20 people.
“I have no interest in building a 200-person team,” she said. “They're slow, they're expensive, they're big, they're challenging. We've been able to do more with a small team of six than teams of 60 because we all know the vision that we are building to. I want to make sure that we are doing something that the future gamers want, that gamers of today and tomorrow want, not gamers of yesterday.
“And I want to make sure that we're doing it in a way that's sustainable because we all know or have been impacted by layoffs. Nobody wants that again. And so being really smart and deliberate about using outsourcers, using co-dev… the reality of making games is that you are not going to have a consistent need for every position at every part of development. So we've got to move away from the old way of making games where you had that fully staffed team, no matter what the game required, no matter what players required, and move to something that's more flexible, more agile, and certainly more sustainable.”
She continued: “If this inspires one person to do things differently, I think it's a win because if we don't change as an industry, we will continue to decline. No one wants to see that happen.”
“Where’s the next Black Myth: Wukong coming from? Could it be India?”
Leaders in India are asking whether the country could create the next Black Myth: Wukong.
That’s according to Avichal Singh, who is the co-founder and game director at Nodding Head Games, the studio behind one of India’s most successful games Raji: An Ancient Epic. He’s also behind this weekend’s business and consumer event Indie Game Utsav, which is taking place during Comic-Con India.
Pointing to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi playing his game as part of an event last year, Singh says there’s a cultural shift in the views around video games in India. But also, there’s been a sharp rise in the number of original game creations from local teams.
The market has also attracted attention from the likes of Xbox, PlayStation, Epic and Krafton, who have launched incubator programmes designed to boost Indian studios in order to reach the large audience of gamers within the country.
“If you just look at mobile gaming, the numbers are crazy,” Singh said. “And especially for free-to-play games, these add a lot of value. I've worked at Zynga for two years on Farmville and Empires and Allies. India might not be the top paying nation for some of these games, but whales cannot exist if there's no ecosystem of other gamers.
“Plus, I have seen crazy numbers being spent from India as well. So people do like to spend. It's a matter of value. Are you able to provide that value in your product? Be it a movie, be it a music album, or be it video games? There are some cultural nuances of course, but slowly everything is changing.
“People now know a lot about games like Black Myth, and there's a huge question going on out there around where is the next Black Myth coming from? Is it from India? Sony Hero Product just got here, there’s XDAP [Xbox Developer Accelerator Program]… all these things have just started. I have personally seen the quality go really high in just few years.”
“A lot of developers here do not have the funds or the means to fly to GDC”
The Indie Game Utsav event, which is co-organised by esports company Nodwin, takes place this weekend and will see over 45 indie games demoed to consumers, publishers and investors. They have also held sessions with Raw Fury and Devolver, amongst others, to support the studios within the country.
“A lot of developers here do not have the funds or the means to fly to say, GDC,” Singh added. “So I'm trying to create those opportunities here. So far, publishers have been very supportive and developers have seen the value.”
That’s it for this week! We’ll be back next week with fancy new feature shows and more news and analysis. Meanwhile, I’m off to play Nintendo Switch 2. I’ll let you know what I think.
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