iCandy (ASX: ICI), in collaboration with Google Play, has successfully completed an early access trial for a new game, Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen.
“Masketeers” is one of four new inhouse mobile games, iCandy is currently developing.
iCandy Chairman, Kin W Lau, said the Trial was highly successful with a total to 80,000 gamers. iCandy tracked gamers’ behaviours during the Trial and the results were very encouraging.
“Day-1” retention, a closely watched user retention matrix in the video-games industry, hit as high as 40% for the Masketeers. Comparing this to Crab War, iCandy’s most successful game in its portfolio, Masketeers has recorded almost 10% higher Day-1 retention rates.
As with the majority of the mobile games in the market today, Masketeers is a free-to-play mobile game, where it generates revenue from in-game purchase of virtual items and in-game advertisements.
During the Trial, Masketeers recorded monetisation rate that was significantly above any of the iCandy’s developed games.
For in-game purchase revenue, Masketeers recorded an Average Revenue Per Paying User (“ARPPU”) of US$ 25.99. For in-game advertising income Masketeers recorded Average Revenue Per User (“ARPU”) of US$0.46 in the USA and ARPU of US$0.25 for rest of the world. USA is one of the main markets for iCandy’s games.
For comparison, iCandy’s most successful game title to date, Crab War, has an ARPPU of US$12.63 and for advertising income it has an ARPU of US$0.26 in the USA and ARPU of US$0.11 for rest of the world.
Crab War has generated more than US$2.5 million of revenue for iCandy since its launch and continues to generate substantial income to date. Masketeers has demonstrated approximately two times + potential in in-game purchase and in-game advertising compared to Crab War.
Mr Lau said Masketeers has generated a lot of interest from the gamers community in the international markets that iCandy serves. It is now scheduled for a full launch in mid-October 2020 on Google Play and Apple iOS.
The game is now in a phase where it allows interested gamers to pre-order for a copy of the game when it is launched. The pre-order numbers have climbed steadily over the last few weeks. Masketeers has to date recorded 870,216 pre-orders. This is the highest pre-order iCandy has ever seen for its games.
Kudos to the team – they have put in tremendous effort to ensure that the game is released without any delay despite the Covid-19 situation,” Mr Lau said.
“The encouraging trial results indicate that this will be possibly the biggest game title iCandy has ever released. We are very excited about the game and we are already now planning for constant content updates to the game once we have launched it.”