People who pay close attention to the grossing ranks in the US might have noticed a new high-performer entering the top 10 last month. What makes it interesting is that this game was launched in January 2021, and it remained mostly under the radar in 200+ ranks before its sudden surge in early September 2021. The game in question is Cookie Run: Kingdom by the Korean developer Devsisters.
Get Cookie Run Kingdom On Mobile From Here: Download
Let’s take a closer look at the game itself, the revenue spike, and what factors contributed to it.
Cookie Run: Kingdom is another addition to the Cookie Run game brand. The earlier additions are Cookie Run: Ovenbreak (an Endless Runner game released in October 2016) and Cookie Run: Puzzle World (a Match3 game released in January 2020).
Core
Cookie Run: Kingdom does its main progression through an auto-battle core. The player puts together a team of 5 cookies that run through stages while stopping to beat the enemies. The cookies use their regular attacks automatically, but the player controls their special attacks. The stages occasionally have jumping/sliding sequences similar to the core gameplay of Cookie Run: Ovenbreak. Players can get extra coins by performing well in those parts.
To perform well in the matches, players need to train their cookies and equip them with good toppings (equipment items). The whole party can also be equipped with 3 Treasures (another kind of equipment item) that give boosts to stats or act as extra skills that can turn the tide of the battle. All of these characters and equipment items can be upgraded in some way. At the time of the writing, the game has 61 characters to collect.
Kingdom mode
The Kingdom part of the game’s name comes from the town that players get to rebuild from ruins and decorate to their liking. There are buildings that generate material items that can be used in other buildings to create new items. Items crafted in the Kingdom can be used to trade for new materials and coins. Special Landmark buildings provide stat boosts to battling teams (e.g., All cookies HP +15%), and basic houses generate EXP items but other than those, there is not much impact on the core gameplay from the Kingdom side.
Monetization
Monetization is diverse, seemingly fair for collector-type players, and focuses mostly on smaller purchases.
Gachas are used for obtaining characters and Treasures. The gachas for the two are separate, so you can choose which you want to go for. Character gachas can give either shards of the character or the full character. If a player accumulates 20 shards of a character, they can unlock the character regardless of its rarity, making shards of rarest characters feel like a win even if you didn’t get the full character. Once a character is maxed, any shards will be converted to Mileage Points that can be used in a shop to purchase shards for almost any character (not the rarest ones or the latest additions).
There are event gachas players can’t really prepare for as they use special event currencies. To make up for it, you can get the currency for them by clearing tasks. Of course, you can also purchase the currency during the event. Nether Gachas, which are reserved for max rarity characters, offer guaranteed pull of the featured character after 250 pulls. The tasks get you close to the needed amount.
The other event gachas have an emptying gacha pool (mix of consumable boosts, stamina, character shards, and character) that can be refreshed after you pull the main prize.
Other than gachas, the game features a variety of things to spend on. Item bundles offer a mixture of useful items, Battle Pass plan includes boosts for farming and PvP attempts, and Paid Progression Plans can be purchased for good value gems. Limited-time IAP offers also strike when you might want them as unlocking or promoting a featured character often gives a pop-up for an offer that helps you upgrade the character.
This covers the basics of the game. For a more detailed breakdown of the game’s features, be sure to check the game in the GameRefinery service.
But what is this recent revenue spike we talked about at the beginning? Let’s dive into that next.
What revenue spike?
During the first half of September 2021, Cookie Run: Kingdom suddenly started rising in revenues and downloads. The grossing rank used to stay around 200, but in about half a month, the game was suddenly around rank 10. The daily revenue estimate jumped from daily $20k to daily $200k on iOS in the US. Downloads rose hand in hand with the revenues, but as the downloads started dropping again, the revenues stayed up.
Since the rise began, the game has been able to establish a new revenue baseline that is approximately 10x what it used to be. When a new event launched on October 8th (v.2.2.001), the revenues jumped another $100k on iOS in the US before returning to the new baseline.
So what happened in the update where the rise began? Reviewing the update (v2.0.101) in the GameRefinery service shows that the update included a new max rarity cookie, a new server named after the new cookie, a tower, where players can review the story so far and Japanese voice acting.
