Case study: how the creators of Archero earned $181 million on a game with a hybrid genre and monetization

Last year, the revenue of the Singapore startup Habby grew 181 times, thanks to the success of the original Archero mobile game. The founders of the studio told Tech in Asia how experiments with genres and title monetization helped the company achieve explosive growth.

Archero’s background and successes

• Habby was founded in 2018 by people from the Chinese publishing house Cheetah Mobile. The studio’s earnings at that time were quite modest. By the beginning of 2019, the company’s revenue was $1 million.
• Only two people worked on the demo of the future mobile hit Archero — a producer and a coder. At the same time, they were able to prepare the first mini-version of the game in less than a month.
• In mid-May 2019, Archero appeared in mobile stores, where it quickly gained popularity. In its premiere month, the title earned $ 8.5 million, and the number of downloads reached 10 million.
• By March 2020, Archero was in the top 5 for in-app purchases in 75 countries (Google Play and App Store).
• The revenue of game developers by the end of 2019 has already reached a record $181 million.

What provided Habby with such results?

• The developers from Habby were not afraid to experiment. According to Habby CEO Stefan Wang, in 2019 the mobile gaming market was overflowing with gaming “fast food”, while the players wanted something sophisticated. Studios regularly released casual projects and midcore RPGs, but no one guessed to combine them. It was a mixture of these genres that Archero became.
• But it wasn’t just genres that Singaporean authors experimented with. Their next step was to work on monetization. The creators of Archero have combined not only casual and RPG gameplay, but also earning tools. The developers took advertising from the first, and the in—game purchase system (IAP) from the second.

• As a result, the revenue between advertising and IAP was distributed approximately equally. 60% of Habby’s earnings come from in—game microtransactions, the remaining 40% from advertising.
• However, not everything is so smooth with the growth of startup revenue. Despite the fact that Archero generates huge earnings, the marketing of the game takes a significant part of the money. Expenses in this direction have increased 106 times over the year.

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Archero is not the only, but the key game of the studio. Nevertheless, her time is already passing. According to Habby, the monthly revenue of the project has already decreased by half compared to the starting months.

Now the startup plans to develop the brand beyond hybrid casual games. Instead, the company intends to develop “something unique and that will change trends.”

Also on the topic:

• In the debut month, Archero mobile bagel earned $8.5 millionAbout 50% of Archero’s iOS ad impressions were on Instagram
• Why is hybrid monetization gaining popularity and how to integrate it in an optimal way?
• Is there any news?