A new mobile strategy in the spirit of Fallout Shelter has started earning $ 20 million a month

Fallout Shelter has acquired a lot of fritupley clones and followers in seven years of operation. The most successful until recently was Hustle Castle. However, the situation may change soon. According to the cumulative box office, Last Fortress: Underground from the Chinese company Life Is A Game is approaching the development of My.Games.

Game

Last Fortress: Underground uses traditional niche mechanics and approaches.

There is a construction part in which the player digs tunnels, equips rooms in them, erects defensive structures, and also collects resources.

Right there, by the way, heroes are pumped, which are divided into several types and are rare. The source of heroes is gacha.

There are several combat mechanics. One resembles a traditional battler — heroes fight waves of opponents.

Another is the one—in-one combat mechanics of 4X strategies: the player chooses a point on the hexagonal map where the jeep with the fighters goes. Then an automatic battle follows and the heroes return.

Numbers

The project was released in softlonch back in November 2020. However, full-fledged promotion began only in April-May of this year, when the publisher launched a large-scale campaign, as a result of which the game collected more than two and a half million installs in May alone (hereafter the data is provided by the AppMagic analytical service).

Now the level of downloads is lower. At the beginning of autumn, the game collected 1.8 million installations per month. However, by the end of November, we have to talk about the level of a million installations.

At the same time, the revenue of the game has been growing continuously since March. If in February a game with IAP earned up to $3 million per month, then by the end of June its net revenue (excluding App Store and Google Play shares) was $10 million, and in October it was $19.7 million.

In total, to date, the game with micropayments has earned $ 127 million. For comparison, the total box office of Hustle Castle with IAP is $209 million, and the original Fallout Shelter earned $111 million on mobile devices, according to App Magic.

Main markets

Despite its origin, the game is not represented on the Chinese market. The main revenue comes from the markets of the USA, South Korea and Taiwan. They account for 66% of the entire cash register.

The situation is almost mirrored with downloads. Only Germany is in third place instead of Taiwan.

In total, by the way, the game has been downloaded 20 million times.

ARPU for all regions is $6.33. However, this figure varies greatly from country to country. In the main US market for the game, Last Fortress: Underground has an average revenue from the installation of $ 14, and in South Korea — $ 18.9.

Factors that could affect success

In recent years, zombie and construction creatives made in a realistic manner have been actively used to attract a wide audience to projects of various levels (for example, to the strategies of Last Shelter: Survival and State of Survival).

Last Fortress: Underground is very close to these creatives in terms of graphics quality and subject matter. It seems to be the game based on which they were created.

Plus, the game turns out in terms of visual appeal immediately to such large IP as Last of Us and Fortnite.

Of the great successes of the project, it is worth highlighting the launch session, during the creation of which a great emphasis was shifted in favor of narrative and research, rather than the main mechanics for the game (resource collection on the base and management in general).