Top 10 Games Popular in Argentina in The First Half of The Year 2021
This time around, AppMagic brings you an overview of the most popular games in Argentina, ranked both by revenue and downloads. Let's get a few insights into the market!
— by Diana Levintova
This time around, AppMagic brings you an overview of the most popular games in Argentina, ranked both by revenue and downloads. Let's get a few insights into the market!
Starting on the revenue side; after all, who doesn’t like to make a bit of money? Now, the two best performing games, just like back in the previous period, are Garena Free Fire and Roblox as chart leader and runner-up respectively. However, while both have retained their positions, both have also shrunk their earnings by 19% and 25% accordingly.
Brawl Stars has lost some of its revenue, too; 9%, to be precise. At the same time, Candy Crush Saga has increased its gains by almost the same percentage. Clash Royale and Homescapes are also suffering from a downward trend in their revenue, nevertheless going up a few positions in the chart as a result of other apps moving up and down.
Genshin Impact and Toca Life World have both successfully doubled their revenues compared to the second half of 2020, which is actually not very surprising. Genshin Impact is an anime RPG with the vibe of the latest releases of The Legend of Zelda, which is extremely popular around the globe; the game is incredibly beautiful and very hi-tech in its wiring, including gaсha. Toca Life World is a sims for children by the well-established publisher Toca Boca that specializes in games for kids; therefore, their success was quite in line with the expectations.
An interesting point to note here is that *Toca Life World*—again, a younger kids’ game—has actually made it to the national top 10, settling comfortably close to Genshin Impact and *Homescapes*—two well-established titles with robust monetization and high degree of development. However, if we compare the Argentinian market to, say, the US, in the latter we won’t find a single kids’ title in the entire top 100 games chart. Well done, Argentinian user!
The two games that have not enjoyed too good a fortune this year are Lords Mobile: Tower Defense and Call of Duty: both have experienced significant revenue loss of 18% and 32% respectively.
The thing to notice straight away is the overall positive trend in the top free games chart. Two titles have stayed put on top as they were in the previous half-year: Among Us and Garena Free Fire. However, maintaining positions is one thing, but the absolute number of downloads is another, and here the situation is controversial: Among Us downloads are down almost 4 times (or by a whopping 75%!) which is quite expected—after all, the hype is gone and the game is likely to continue trailing off further. At the same time, Garena Free Fire has only lost 500K (or 29%) of its downloads, which is dramatically less.
Now, there is a game that grew nicely over the period: Craftsman: Building Craft has upped its downloads by 100K. That is actually quite surprising, since the game is yet another clone of Minecraft released back in 2019, and it has not had a single version update in the past two years! However, there are quite a lot of playthrough videos online with millions of views, so it’s clearly on the rise. Interestingly, Craftsman: Building Craft is most popular in the LATAM region specifically, with Brazil, Mexico and Argentina making up 45% of its market for the reviewed time period.
Another game worth mentioning is PK XD with about 1M of new users.
Three other games have stormed the top chart, reflecting a significant spike in gamers’ interest: Bridge Race (no downloads at all in the previous period); DOP 2 (downloads up by 1.7M in H2 of 2020); and Phone Case DIY (downloads up by 1.8M from the nearly non-existent downloads in H2 of 2020).
The only game to lose several positions at once in the top chart is Roblox: it has dropped 4 positions and lost just over 400K downloads compared to the previous period. Let’s pitch it against PK XD. At first glance, the two games are different: Roblox is more about custom modes that players create on their own, while PK XD provides strictly developer content. However, they are similar in the sense that both products are virtual worlds for relaxation that target teenagers, where players can hang out and chill with friends. Roblox is a mastodon of the genre, while PK XD only came out in 2019. Noticeably, despite this fact, PK XD managed to outplay Roblox. Along with other insights, the game is very popular in the LATAM region, with 42% of its downloads generated there. One of the reasons for its success could be that PK XD is presented as a safer game experience for younger kids, while Roblox has quite an issue with that.
So, how about some conclusions? It is clear from the top free chart that 40% of it is made up of hypercasual games, where revenue is generated only by large, acknowledged and mostly long-established products; in fact, it is not very typical of a market this dynamic. We can definitely spot some interest in the Games For Kids category. Also, according to statistics, the most popular genres in Argentina, as well as in the entire LATAM region, are strategy, shooters and racing games. For themes and settings, players in Argentina prefer fantasy and sci-fi, especially for core and competitive game categories. However, in general, everything is nicely balanced: in the grossing top, there are 2 games for kids, 2 match-3 titles, 3 shooters, 2 strategies, and 1 RPG. Thus, all the age groups are catered for, with a slight shift towards the teenager-youngster segment.