at its peak war strategy game rise of kingdoms
made 70 million dollars in a single month and today we're gonna be discussing their
unbelievable total revenue but first how did they pull this off with mobile games
having in-app purchases as low as 99 cents it's easy to forget just how profitable this game
can be especially when you consider the top three most purchased items in rise of kingdoms cost
less than three dollars so i thought it'd be interesting to pull back the curtain and take a
closer look at lilith games the developer behind rise of kingdoms but first if this video hits 5
000 likes i'll give one lucky subscriber a free pair of airpods pro about 80 of you guys are
not subscribed and i'm getting close to 20 000 so i wanted to celebrate a little bit early make
it interesting so drop a thumbs up and make sure you're subbed anyway for those of you who aren't
familiar rise of kingdoms is a real-time strategy game that was initially released in september
of 2018.
But where did those games even come from and how did they see such massive success so
quickly well as it turns out their founder wang xin wen was already super experienced in the
realm of mobile game development wang founded lilith games in 2013 shortly after leaving a tiny
company that you may have heard of called tencent and given their success with afk arena and rise
of kingdoms it didn't take long before lilith games was competing with 10 cent for mobile game
downloads and monthly revenue now of course 10 cent has since exploded in the last couple of
years but live games has proven that they are a dominant force in the mobile gaming market so with
all that experience rise of kingdom's late 2018 launch quickly saw 2 million downloads it
was an impressive start but it came with a catch you see rise of kingdoms was actually
called the rise of civilizations back when it first launched in fact some people saw the global
release of rise of civilizations and thought that it was somehow related to the popular pc game
civilization the similarities between these two games are obvious and abundant not only in
their gameplay and their genre but also the characters that they choose to promote so as you
can imagine when lilith games went to trademark rise of civilizations across the world they were
facing some legal pushback due to their trademark requests being declined in a couple of countries
they were forced to make an important decision do we release the game in multiple countries under
different names or do we unify the entire game under a single brand luckily this drama happened
around the same time that the highly anticipated kingdom versus kingdom event was first being
implemented into the game it was only fitting that the game changed to rise of kingdoms
pushing forward into 2019 rise of kingdom saw steady growth with an aggressive advertising
campaign when asked about the marketing campaigns for rise of kingdoms head of user acquisition at
lilith games yi ming chao had this to say our user acquisition strategy at live with games has always
prioritized a return on investment focusing on long-term sustainability instead of aggressive
scale it's been difficult for us to strike a perfect balance between the two sides and acquire
a large number of quality users with promising roi now despite that being their ideal goal when you
actually analyze the advertisements for rise of kingdoms you'll see a much different picture now
obviously to have the massive growth that rise of kingdoms did these ads needed to be catchy and
out of the ordinary in just the first few seconds rise of kingdom's ads accomplished this by
having a dramatic story and a unique art style the problem with this strategy is that most of
their ads have cinematics and not gameplay now having cinematics that look way cooler than
the gameplay will inevitably result in more users downloading your game but the problem is
that these cinematics misrepresent the game so when you have a lot of players download they're
actually disappointed once they open it up for the first time now eventually this strategy led to
a really controversial ad going out to the public which we'll talk about later but at its peak this
advertising strategy led to there being almost 5 million daily active users during 2020 and if you
take a look at the monthly active users for this same peak time period you'll discover that there
were more than 20 million active rise of kingdom players during that time the key to not only
their massive amount of players but also their massive amount of revenue is player retention
data suggests that 41 percent of players will continue to play rise of kingdoms past day one
now that sounds like a really good number and it is but typically the top performing games in the
same genre hold about 50 percent of their players if you zoom out and take a look at the 30-day
average you'll find that 8 of players continue to play rise of kingdoms for a full month again
other top performers in this category have around 14 and 22 of 30 day retention on its players
and this just goes to show that their aggressive marketing strategy with beautiful cinematics leads
to players realizing that they're not actually interested in the game but the ones that are
interested tend to play the game a ton data shows that 12 percent of players will launch and play
the game between 9 and 14 times per day if you're a rise of kingdoms fan that might be you but you
don't generate 70 million dollars in a single month if players are only playing for a couple of
minutes referencing the same data it shows that 57 of players spend more than 10 minutes playing
rise of kingdoms every single day but what's even more impressive is the core audience of rise of
kingdoms 21 of them play between 1 in 10 hours a day so who are these players are these players
just a bunch of kids who have nothing to do after school well it might surprise you to find
that the average rise of kingdoms player is 31 years old the age range distribution for rise of
kingdoms is actually pretty even but the important part is all of those people are old enough to
have full-time jobs and thus a salary they can use to spend in the game if the average rise of
kingdoms player was 14 years old you might find that the revenue per month would be a lot lower
now this advertising strategy was highly effective with a couple of flaws but the biggest controversy
is when one of the ads featured a cinematic of a woman clearly getting sexually assaulted and
then the cinematic gave the player the choice of revenge or suicide needless to say a lot of
people found this ad highly disturbing and it ended up getting a little bit of traction over
on reddit eventually lilith realized that they made a huge mistake and approved an ad that was
highly controversial obviously they removed the ad immediately and apologized to those who brought
it to their attention and you would think that something like this would cause damage to rise
of kingdom's reputation but rise of kingdoms didn't reach its peak until 2020 when covid shut
down the world honestly this should come as no surprise because there were tons of games and
online content that surged in popularity and rise of kingdoms was in the perfect position to
capitalize on this this is when they had their most successful month ever at the end of 2020 they
made 70 million dollars in a single month and in less than three years rise of kingdoms was able
to pull in 1.15 billion dollars in revenue as of april of 2021.
To put that number in perspective
the united states space force paid spacex 316 million dollars in november of 2020 for a single
rocket launch that means lilith games could have sent almost four rockets to space with just
the revenue that they've generated from rise of kingdoms alone to put it another way if lilith
games decided to spend all of their revenue from rise of kingdoms at mcdonald's they could purchase
287 million five hundred big macs that means they could almost afford to buy a big mac for
every single person in the entire united states what's interesting is that 262 million dollars
of that revenue came from the united states alone which is typically a market that chinese
game developers have a tough time to break into other markets where rise of kingdoms continues
to be highly successful are south korea china japan hong kong taiwan and singapore and because
of its international appeal rise of kingdoms has been downloaded 67 million times this means that
if there are 7.9 billion people on planet earth one in every 118 people has downloaded rise
of kingdoms of course that number shrinks in countries like the usa where there tend to be more
downloads than average so the next time you find yourself in a crowded target or shopping mall just
remember that somebody else in that building has probably played rise of kingdoms to put that in
perspective the best-selling call of duty title of all time is call of duty black ops with 31 million
sales so for every one person that's purchased the most popular call of duty there are two players
who have played rise of kingdoms but this pales in comparison to the success of arguably the most
popular free-to-play game ever league of legends league of legends has 115 million active users
so lilith if you're watching you should probably start working on a moba especially considering
the decline that rise of kingdoms has had in 2021. remember when i said they had 20 million active
users at their peak in 2020 that's been cut in half as of the beginning of 2021 with about 10
million on average the daily active users has suffered even worse because at its peak it was 5
million and as of the beginning of 2021 it's about 1.5 or 2 million however the summer of 2021 is
finally here and lilith has been aggressively marketing their brand new vikings campaign
lilith has paid a ton of money for this advertising campaign going as far as to include
celebrities in their ads such as alexander ludwig and paying high-profile content creators such as
jlat to promote rise of kingdoms will this massive marketing push be enough for them to capture a new
audience or recapture their old fans or are the glory days over and rise of kingdoms is left to
demise slowly over time i would love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below
guys if you enjoyed this video make sure you drop a thumbs up on it really helps out the channel
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and click that bell to be notified the next time that i upload a video if you've played rise of
kingdoms on your phone but you're interested in playing it on a bigger screen you can download
rise of kingdoms for your pc using a program called bluestacks link is in the description i've
used bluestacks for years it's free it's fast and it's my favorite way to play and if you don't like
it you can always uninstall it later as always my social media links are in the description
below so make sure you follow me over there on instagram twitter facebook discord all that stuff
it's always down below and with that being said guys thank you so much for watching this has been
Omniarch i will talk to you guys again soon peace
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