Sport Gaming's Big Surprise
One of the most undercovered stories in gaming is the rise of eFootball. Remarkable, given that none of this has bled over to the PC/console version, which has stagnated and even declined in the last year.
Even more remarkable is that anime crossovers have been somewhat of a bust despite tight integration, including player cards with anime integrated into each card. eFootball has also followed FC Mobile's trend and moved away from seasonal refreshes, previously built around one-year player card contracts.
The download growth has been almost exclusively in Indonesia, where FC Mobile also does extremely well, including across the broader Southeast Asia region. Indonesia and Thailand are not just a huge part of the active user story but also the revenue one. In the last six months these two countries have generated over $44M in revenue, 19% of worldwide mobile revenue. There can sometimes be different payment methods beyond IAP in these regions, so this is not capturing all the juicy goodness either.
Lots of laughter over the years at Konami's FC challenge, but they have built a growing business. The only failure is its inability to translate to PC/console, which is logical given the lack of consoles and PCs in Indonesia and Thailand.