Reports indicate that premium games are getting more popular in China, with collectible card games being the most profitable in the free-to-play space.
Digital game revenues continue growing at a double-digit pace. Superdata today released its digital game sales report for August, which found that worldwide revenues were up 11% year-over-year to $6.1 billion for the month of August.
The CEO of Superdata, Joost van Dreunen, attributed the boost to a number of successful games across the industry. Pokemon Go helped push mobile game revenues up 16% to $3.04 billion. The launch of No Man's Sky played a part in premium PC revenues jumping 21% to $401 million and console digital sales rising 16% to $399 million. Free-to-play PC MMOs also rose, but only by 8% to $1.41 billion, while the pay-to-play MMO segment continued its current decline, dropping 4% to $226 million.
Interestingly, van Dreunen sees the pay-to-play model receiving a boost, at least in one region, China. He highlighted a shift in Chinese spending habits driven by Blizzard titles Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Overwatch has sold nearly 3 million copies in China, surpassing the performance of the company's previous premium release, Diablo III. What's more, NetEase changed its payment structure for World of Warcraft with the launch of the Legion expansion so that players can no longer pay by the hour and now must commit to monthly subscriptions.
Meanwhile in the free-to-play market, van Dreunen pointed to collectible card games as the market's "last untapped genre." The CCG free-to-play market is about $1.3 billion right now driven largely by the success of Hearthstone, but van Dreunen sees it growing by 8% in the next two years thanks to titles like The Elder Scrolls Legends and Gwent, as well as "unconventional" efforts like EA's Titanfall-based mobile card game.