SuperData July Numbers Show a Resurgent Grand Theft Auto V

The numbers are out from SuperData Research for July 2019 digital revenue, so it is time once again to look at their lists.

SuperData Research Top 10 – July 2019

On the PC end of the chart the list of titles was a bit stagnant.  Nine out of ten titles listed there in June were still there in July.  There was a little shakeup as Dungeon Fighter Online took the top spot from League of Legends.  That was shocking the first time it happened, but now they swap every few months, so seems pretty normal.

Six of last month’s titles remained in exactly the same position, including World of Warcraft in seventh place, behind World of Tanks.  We will have to see if the launch of WoW Classic pushes the Blizzard title up the list some when the August numbers come out next month.

The one new entry was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which returned to the list in ninth place, replacing FIFA Onilne 3.  As noted below, PUBG saw a price cut which juiced sales in July.

In the console column Grand Theft Auto V jumped back to the top spot with the release of the Diamond Casino update for the online version of the game.  Having purchased GTA V during the Steam Summer Sale, I received several email notes about the casino, so they were pushing that hard… and successfully it seems.

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII moved up from third to second place in July, while the new release, Fire Emblem: Three House fell into third place, leaving last month’s number one, Fortnite, down in fourth.

At the mobile end of the chart, Honour of Kings remained on top, with Pokemon Go holding on to second place.  Candy Crush Saga, my other benchmark, moved up one spot to third place, taking it from Clash of Clans, which dropped down to seventh position.

Overall Supdata said that worldwide spending was up with this bullet point.

• Strong mobile growth drives a 5% increase in worldwide spending. Consumers spent $9.02 billion on digital games across console, PC and mobile in July, up from $8.56 billion in the same month last year. Mobile revenue grew 14%, offsetting declines on PC and console, with the latter being dragged by a 50% drop in free-to-play spending.

But when they tweeted a chart to support that, I wasn’t all that convinced.

Digital Spending July 2019 vs July 2019

It feels like if you’re going to claim that mobile is pulling the segment up, you ought to go with a chart that doesn’t show mobile taking a smaller slice of the pie while the PC slice is growing.

I realize that this chart does not necessarily invalidate their statement, it just feels like goofy optics to support the assertion being made.  “Mobile is growing!” he said, waving around a chart that showed PC and Consoles were growing.

Meanwhile, the comparison list from NPD of July sales is also available.  They show the following:

1. Madden NFL 20
2. Fire Emblem: Three Houses*
3. Super Mario Maker 2*
4. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order*
5. Minecraft
6. Grand Theft Auto V
7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
8. Mortal Kombat 11
9. Mario Kart 8*
10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild*

*No digital data

As usual, it is different from SuperData because the NPD data is US only, combines PC and consoles, includes traditional retail (which favors console sales), and does not include digital sales where noted.

Given all of that, I think the relative position Madden NFL 20 is interesting.  It is primarily a US focused title, but I would probably say the same for NBA 2K19, and it was higher up for SuperData but didn’t make the cut for NPD.

Also, look how much Nintendo still depends on the normal retail channel.

And so it goes, another month of numbers.  Additional notes from the SuperData post:

Grand Theft Auto Online‘s Casino update leads to a huge uptick. We estimate Grand Theft Auto Online made $69 million across console and PC in July following the anticipated “Diamond Casino” update, marking one of the best sales months for the game since launch and the first month of double-digit year-over-year growth since August 2018.

Apex Legends Season 2 sales falls short of Season 1 levels. Apex Legends generated $37 million across console and PC in July, more than double what it made in June but only roughly half of what Season 1 earned in March.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a solid launch. Fire Emblem sold 800,000 digital units on Switch in July, making it the best digital launch in franchise history.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds gets a price cut and sells another million units. We estimate PUBG sold 1.1 million units on PC with an average selling price of roughly $18, though sales are still down significantly from last year.

FIFA Mobile Soccer faces a tough comparison against 2018’s World Cup. Despite being one of EA’s most reliable sources of growth on mobile since launching in 2016, FIFA Mobile has hit a rough patch this summer, with revenue declining over 50% year-over-year in each of the past three months.

The Steam Summer Sale 2019 Winds Down

When this post loads, the 2019 Steam Summer Sale will be officially over, being set to finish at 17:00 UTC today.

The Steam Grand Prix

I was incorrect in my post announcing the sale back when it started.  I expected it to consist of a lot of the usual things.  Valve has been pretty consistent over the last few years with the tasks related to events which allow those interested to collect cards or levels or whatever.

This time around they decided to try something new.  And, as with many new things, it wasn’t without its problems.

The metaphor of the sale was a race, and you got to select which team to join.  Each team had an animal mascot.  They were tortise, hare, pig, cockatiel, and corgi.

Since people could select on their own, most of the population chose the cutest animal on the internet, the corgi, and so every day when I logged in the race looked something like this:

One of the least lopsided days

Corgi did not win every day.  Tortoise won a single day, and hare won twice, but otherwise it was Corgi on top for 9 out of the 12 days of the race.

Those on the winning team had a chance to win something from their wishlist.  There was some confusion as to how that would happen and, fearing they might be awarded something inexpensive, people began purging their wishlists of cheap indie games.  Since devs get stats on that, it was like an indie game apocalypse I gather.

Valve had to quickly tell people how to designate which game you would win, but I am pretty sure the damage was done by that point.

PSA! You don't need to remove games from your Steam wishlist in order to win your Top Wishlisted Game during the Steam Summer Sale – just move your favorite game to the top of your wishlist and you're good to go!

2019 Steam Summer Sale: https://t.co/4TuWeBVo1O pic.twitter.com/hNrMnTSzcY

— Steam (@steam_games) June 27, 2019

As I mentioned in the month in review post, even after I knew what the deal was I decided purging my wishlist was a good plan.

There was also a hole in the system early where there was no cap on the number of points you could apply from qualified games from which you had earned achievements that allowed people to go crazy with points, buying badges, the discount, and boosting their Steam level into the hundreds.

Oh well.  I am sure Valve learned something along the way.  And I suspect that most Steam users ignored the whole thing.  My sample size for that assertion is pretty small… my daughter and a half dozen of her friends… but I was the only one paying any attention to that aspect of the event.

On the sale side of things however, my daughter did come to me for two titles.

The first was Rust, which had been on my own wishlist before the purge hit.

She and her boyfriend play that together.  How sweet.

However, her big game for the event was Megaquarium, which is a “run your own aquarium attraction” simulator.

She ended up not having to work over the weekend and burned through the campaign mode. I was looking over her shoulder when she added the whale shark to her exhibit, the crown jewel in the game.  I think she is one achievement away from being complete on that front, and you have to do that one in sandbox mode according to her.

This was her sort of game and she gives in a big thumbs up.

I only purchased one title during the sale, but it was one I have been thinking about for quite a while.  I now own Grand Theft Auto V.

Unlike my daughter’s choices, I was struggling a bit to even get started in GTAV.  This was primarily because it seemed to be all about having a gamepad controller to play it and seemed to be trying to hide keyboard commands from me.

Not that the basic keyboard commands were completely opaque.  It is the usual mouse and WASD for movement and such.  But about 10 seconds into the game somebody is yelling at me to use my phone to detonate an explosive, but there was nothing to indicate how I should do that.  Where in a normal tutorial a game might tell me which key to use, I had to dig into the menu, find where the commands were hidden, and scroll through the list to find the right key.

Fortunately, as a single player game, all the NPCs were able to wait, if not patiently.

I think I need a long stretch of time on the weekend to get into that.

Anyway, another sale passes and another one will hove into view a few months down the line.  It is practically part of the circle of life now.