The MMO Investor #1 – The Mobile Transformation

The MMO Investor is a weekly column on the state of the MMO industry when it comes to business. Get a quick weekly glimpse at the real life auction house that is high finance in the MMO Industry!

As the size of the MMO industry continues to grow, there's a relatively new, but massive shift taking place. Big traditional game developers are starting to seriously embrace mobile and it's starting to pay serious dividends. Remember IGG (I Got Games)? The company behind Tales of Pirates, Angels Online, Voyage Century Online, and several other client based MMOs? Well, they started to embrace mobile gaming a couple years ago and it's been a huge success for them. IGG self-publishes over a dozen internally developed mobile games from Castle Clash to Brave Trials. Take a look at IGG's revenue breakdown for Q1 2015:

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Revenue breakdown for IGG Q1 2015

Mobile made up 85% of revenue in 2014 and 93% in Q1 2015, and this trend will likely continue. Client based games make up a mere 1% of IGG's revenues; just 4-5 years ago, IGG didn't have any mobile games. How quickly things change. Not every traditional F2P company has embraced mobile this quickly though. Nexon, the Iconic South Korean developer behind Dungeon Fighter Online and MapleStory, generates about 16% of their revenues from mobile games as seen in the graphic below:

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Revenue breakdown for Nexon Q1 2015.

Nexon's mobile revenues will increase in the quarters to come, as their most successful game, Dungeon Fighter Online, will be getting a mobile version later this year in Asia. Despite being only 16% of revenues, mobile growth is significantly higher than PC growth (Mobile grew 10%, PC shrunk 4%). Another company just starting to embrace mobile is Blizzard Entertainment. Earlier this year we reported that Hearthstone generated more revenues on mobile than on desktops. Current trends suggest that the gap between mobile and desktop revenues are set to widen, with mobile continuing to eat into the game's PC market.

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Hearthstone Mobile vs PC Revenues

Perfect World Entertainment also began embracing mobile in the last few years with the release of Forsaken World Mobile and Elemental Kingdoms through Fedeem Games, the international mobile affiliate of the larger Chinese company. The game's mobile push in China has been so successful that the entire company was recently purchased by its founder for over $1 billion.

Mobile is quickly becoming a bigger and bigger focus for game developers. Call me old school, but I prefer to game on my desktop, but I'm clearly the minority. How does this affect you? Do you play any mobile MMOs? Let me know in the comments below!