Flat App Store Revenue YoY Presents a Bull Case for Mobile Gaming, Dubbz: Crypto-Powered Tournament Platform & More News
Hello dear readers, we’re back to cover another week at the bleeding edge of the gaming industry. Enjoy!
Highlight News
Dubbz, Crypto-Powered Tournament Platform
Dubbz is a tournament platform for gamers where you can challenge other players in a 1v1 or sign up for daily tournaments to win a fixed price pool.
Holders of their token $DUBBZ receive dividends of 1% of all wagers that are placed through the platform, payed out in USDC. As a gamer, there are benefits to holding the token such as: reduced match fees, access to exclusive tournaments and events. You also have the option to use PayPal to deposit and withdraw funds.
We like the way this platform positions itself as a “sustainable alternative to P2E gaming” because ultimately this is a test of skill, it’s based on the pure joy of competition and doesn’t encourage value extraction. What’s more, platforms such as Dubbz could potentially bring a lot of visibility to smaller games.
For now, they’ve decided to feature the world’s most liked games: Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, FIFA 23 and more. You can play as soon as today here.
A Bull Case for Mobile Gaming
This month, Apple reported that it paid app developers the same amount of money in 2022 as in 2021, suggesting that App Store revenues were likely flat from 2021 to 2022.
Indeed, per Eric Seufert’s research, this would be the first time that developer payout did not grow year-on-year. He argues that this is a consequence of the App Tracking Transparency (Apple’s ATT privacy policy) recession: “a degradation of app advertising efficiency has likely resulted in slowing platform revenue growth as app advertisers face friction in reaching the most relevant customers.” Read Seufert’s piece here to learn more about this.
The fact of the matter is that mobile games have no choice but to be on the App Store, however the leverage is equal on both sides since the vast majority of App Store revenue is generated by the 30% platform fee. Again, you can read Seufert’s deep-dive ‘The App Store is the Games Store’ to gain more context.
Following their flat revenue growth YoY, there’s high potential that Apple will seek to restore commercial opportunity to the games category, which is a bull case for mobile gaming. It will be interesting to see whether Apple makes any changes to the NFT policy (imposing standard 30% fee on all transactions) they published!
Rapid Fire News
There are 180+ million gamers in sub-Saharan Africa today.
PvP is coming to Worldwide Webb.
Content creators can now join the Ready Player DAO Creator Network. They must have some form of video content or the intention to create video content. Creators will be able to use the hub to collaborate with other and participate in creator bounties. Fill in their form to apply.
Moritz Baier-Lentz hired as new partner to lead Lightspeed’s gaming practice. As an ex pro-gamer (ranked number 1 in Blizzard’s Diablo II among 13 million players in 2003), ex VP at Goldman Sachs, where he built the firm’s global gaming practice and finally partner at Bitkraft. He has advised the world’s leading gaming and tech companies, leading deals including Horizon and Inworld AI. Listen to his interview ‘The State of Gaming VC’ with Naavik Gaming Podcast here.
As always, thank you for reading Frontier Gaming Watch!
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