Are Paid Games Still a Thing?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #92 - Just Super. Check out the full article for more insights.
I don't normally analyze paid apps these days because there's not much going on there. But, I looked this week because sitting at the top of the most downloaded paid apps in the US is Minecraft, and I wanted to see how it's doing in comparison to Roblox.
You can probably guess the answer, so I'll skip that, but what I did find interesting is Minecraft's revenue growth.
Since 2017, Minecraft's net revenue has doubled. It rose from about $44M in 2019 to nearly $90M in 2021 (I estimated the end a bit). And that's net revenue, so it's after fees.
That's no small amount, but for the #1 app in the US, it's much less than you'd expect. For comparison, Roblox, which isn't the #1 app in the US, earned $70M of net revenue in August, according to our estimates. Almost all of Minecraft's 2021 revenue in a single month.
If you're planning on asking me if there's any money in paid games, the answer is "yes, but not much".
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
