Sony’s Fate/Grand Order was Japan’s top-grossing mobile game in 2019

Sony Aniplex’s Fate/Grand Order has topped $4 billion (£3bn) in lifetime player spending, making it the top-grossing mobile game in Japan last year.

Whilst generating almost 13.8 million downloads globally, the game is most popular in Japan, which racked up 6.7 million downloads, which is 48.7 per cent of all downloads. It’s also popular in China, which accounts for 24.3 per cent of the playerbase with 3.4m installations. The US comes in in third, with 1.4 million downloads – or 9.9 per cent of the total.

Consequently, the majority of revenue comes from its Japanese playerbase, where players have spent $3.3 billion – a whopping 81.5% of all user spending. The average spend per download in Japan stands at around $487 (£370).

“Fate/Grand Order has proven once again just how lucrative major mobile RPGs – or games that fuse together elements of this genre with another – can be in the Japanese market,” said market analysts, Sensor Tower. “These games have the ability to generate significant revenue from the country’s biggest spenders, while requiring relatively few downloads. Now generating more than $1 billion a year from players, Sony’s hit looks set to continue to be a heavyweight in mobile gaming for the foreseeable future.”

A recent report into the mobile gaming market, also by Sensor Tower, discovered 82 per cent of the 29.6 billion new app downloads in Q3 2019 new installs are generated by just 1 per cent of app publishers. This means 99 per cent of games publishers share just 20 per cent of the market, with 6 billion downloads combined.

The report also determined the top 1 per cent of games generated 93 per cent of all spending, and 95% of mobile game revenue.

“There were more than 3.4 million apps available globally across the App Store and Google Play in 2018, an increase of 65 per cent from the 2.2 million apps available in 2014,” the report said. “However, the percentage of apps that have been downloaded at least 1,000 times has decreased over the same period, from 30 per cent in 2014 to 26 per cent in 2018. In other words, in a continually growing market where most publishers are competing against the publishers controlling 80 per cent of all new user acquisition, standing out among the competition is more crucial than ever.”