From the previous thread, mostly for Nirolak to follow up on mobile and a question I had:
Most (all?) of these games are gacha, right? With the general trend on the market slowing its growth, are these titles lateral transitions in the market from competing products or are we seeing a centralization at the top and the charts out of the Top~5-10 becoming smaller and smaller parts of the overall market?
With the way all of these are gacha, it boggles the mind that people can spend this much money on so many different "same thing, different skin" products with imaginary worth. And because of the expect tail off in growth on the mobile market, this means people are moving either laterally or up from older/other products, and leaving behind *huge* investments in gacha for... more gacha.
Yes, sorry, I was just swamped this week.Did you see my question earlier on the mobile stuff?
(Did I maybe miss a response?)
So, there are a few things happening here:
1.) There is still some growth in the mobile market, in the form of a few hundred million every year. Generally the biggest hits are what are going to be pushing that.
2.) It's important to keep in mind that Japan's mobile market is a bit different than the West. The amount of people monetizing is closer to 20-30% of the market instead of 2-3%, so games are distinctly less dependent upon whales to succeed. Similarly, I believe that paying mobile users in Japan were averaging in the range of $20-$25 a month (in total, not per game), which works out to be equivalent to buying 4-5 new $60 games a year, or put another way, a new $60 game every ~2.5-3 months, so it's not a crazy investment for your average gamer.
3.) There is some decentralization of the money being spent. Most notably, at their height, Puzzle & Dragons and Monster Strike were earning $4-$5 million a day. These days they're more in the $1-$2.5 million range, and the market size has increased dramatically since the time they were making that, so there's a lot more cash to go around to all the other titles. These days you have a lot more $100K to $2 million a day hits, which are all very profitable endeavors. $100K a day works out to $36.5 million a year, so you could even be averaging half that and making a financially significant profit on a lot of mobile titles.
4.) There are definitely older mobile titles that fade out. To use an example from a few years ago, when Hortensia Saga (Sega) came out, it took a fair amount of the audience from Chain Chronicle (also Sega). However, this was worth it for Sega because the two games combined were still making notably more money overall, and it's much better to transition your audience to a new game you publish than for them to go to a competitor's game instead. Some game do also fizzle out all together as tastes and expectations change. CyGames' biggest hit used to be Rage of Bahamut, a tap-based autobattle game that was barely even interactive. These days, that game is largely dead, but they have huge new hits with GranBlue Fantasy (a sprite based JRPG) and Shadowverse (a card game that plays like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone). Their newest game, Lost Order, is basically a somewhat simplified version of Final Fantasy XII directed by Matsuno and developed by Platinum Games, so you can see the sophistication growing, and why newer titles might cause older ones to fade out. You can also imagine why even the biggest spenders might want to move on to newer titles that interest them more, since they simply find them more fun and engaging.
5.) It's important to keep in mind that Japanese mobile games are looking progressively more and more like Japanese handheld and console games. For Madoka in particular, it appears to be a game similar to Fate/Grand Order, in that it's going to have a ton of story focus. Imagine a gamer who likes playing visual novels or adventure games with very large narrative components. They might play and notably enjoy both Ace Attorney and Danganronpa. Releasing a new Danganronpa game does not lower their desire to keep buying Ace Attorney games, it simply results in them purchasing both titles, as they really enjoy this kind of content. There's also a limited amount of content at any given time, so after they run out of content in one series (for example, by beating the newest game), they will go play the newest Danganronpa, and then repeat this process as new titles come out in each given series. Fate/Grand Order and Madoka have a similar relationship. It's just that new content for both will come out much more quickly, but in smaller chunks, so you might play through a new storyline or event in Fate one week, and then play through new content in Madoka the next week.
I hope that helps make a bit more sense of the mobile market. In a lot of ways, it's actually pretty similar to the console one, if you just pretended every console game was a service title, or at minimum a singleplayer game like Hitman.