The Japanese app market can be quite fierce when it comes to making an impact with a new game, especially considering that GungHo’s immensely popular Puzzle & Dragons has been dominating for months. However, according to the Metaps blog, the team at Mixi has managed to do just that with its newest game, Monster Strike.
The site reports that Monster had no trouble overtaking the Japanese mobile business for November, landing at number one on both the Apple App Store and Google Play charts. This was surprising, considering GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons had dominated for the past two years prior to its arrival.
As you can see by the chart below, Puzzle had no problem maintaining a steady audience of players, with high numbers on both the iOS and Android front. However, as you can see, Monster Strike easily adapted its own share of players, to the point that more were picking up on it, rather than Puzzle.
That’s not to say that Puzzle‘s profits are bound to drop anytime soon. While Monster has gained a huge following, GungHo’s app managed to keep a fair amount of audience playing, which should keep grosses coming in, continuing its streak of being one of the top-grossing apps in Japan for 2014.
What’s interesting about these numbers is that these two games are the only ones that spent a single day as Google Play’s top grossing game for the entire year. Meanwhile, over on the App Store, only two other apps have managed to have such a streak — Square Enix’s Dragon Quest Monsters Super Light and Colopi’s The White Cat Project, each of which held the top spot for a combined total of just five days for the year.
Now the only question is how long Monster Strike can keep that foothold. Puzzle & Dragons has relied on cross-promotional material in the past to keep players coming back, and can easily introduce it again leading into the New Year. That may require the developers at Mixi to do some thinking in regards to keeping its application from losing popularity. Needless to say, this battle between titans is just heating up.
