Century Games Soars Past $2 Billion Mark in User Spending
In this article, we delve into the standout titles from Century Games, examining the publisher's triumphs across various genres and uncovering its strategies for dominating the market.
— by Diana Levintova
Recently, we have noticed a new impressive milestone: Century Games have crossed the mark of $2B in user spending! The top three games in the publisher's portfolio by revenue turned out to be Whiteout Survival (28%), Family Farm Seaside (13%) and Family Farm Adventure (13%).
When talking about Century Games, one cannot fail to mention their specialty: the “frozen” game setting that has become wildly popular and widely imitated. Well, first of all: Century Games aren’t actually the trailblazers of this setting! They took their inspiration from Frostpunk: a PC and console game developed and published by 11 Bit Studios in April 2018. Frostpunk offers quite a special blend of city-building and survival gameplay set in a bleak, ice-age-ravaged 19th-century world. Players are tasked with managing the last city on Earth, making morally complex decisions to ensure the survival of their citizens against the relentless freezing apocalypse.
In 2022, Century Games launched two games in this setting, both becoming hits: the 4X Strategy game called Whiteout Survival and the Idle Tycoon by the name of Frozen City. While Frozen City saw a dip in earnings after its March 2023 peak with the total revenue at $40M, Whiteout Survival is steadily growing, seeing an increase in revenue of roughly 10% a month and currently totaling $370M.
The setting itself is a snow survival kind of winterpunk, but in reality, the survival element is quite superficial. It does indeed create an emotional bond with the game, but by the gameplay, the user is not really risking anything—compared to the original Frostpunk. Apart from the appeal of the scenery, games like Frozen City work with event greed quite successfully, launching events in completely different settings with, say, Mad Max or Underwater World vibes. Keeping it fresh and unexpected!
Besides their frozen setting, Century Games are also quite famous for their Farms: remember, two out of three of their most profitable titles are in the Farming genre!
Let’s have a look at the graph: Family Farm Seaside is the kind of old but gold game which, since its release in 2013, has generated $178M in revenue with an average of 1M monthly installs over the last year.
A more recent title, Family Farm Adventure, which saw the light in 2022, is breathing down its older counterpart’s neck with $176M in revenue over lifetime and clocking almost 3M monthly installs, which is, however, considerably lower than their peak of 9M monthly installs back in 2022.
The publisher’s prolific nature doesn’t end here. Century Games are also quite well-known for their Idle Mafia, one of the most successful Idle Tycoon games of all times, which has so far generated $73M in revenue and continues to earn the publisher about $1.3M per month.
Hold your horses though: there is yet more! Century Games are also quite seasoned in the 4X Strategy genre! In fact, Whiteout Survival wasn’t even its first success there. Before that, the publisher experimented with other games in the genre, focusing very strongly on the Asian market with 阿瓦隆之王：凛冬破晓 and ガンズ・オブ・グローリー: キングダム戦略MMO戦争.
The first game (its title translates as Lords of Avalon: Winter's Dawn) has successfully generated $119M since its release in 2017, and while the monthly metric has gone down more than 4 times, the title still earns the publisher almost $300K per month.
The second game (Guns of Glory: Kingdom Strategy MMO War), while not quite reaching the same numbers, still managed to generate a total of $29M in revenue since its release in 2017 and, over the past few months, has stayed put at an average of $80K per month.
Coming back to Century Games themselves, the largest share of their revenue regionally comes from the US (31%), China (12%), and South Korea (10%).
As of its revenue distribution across the mobile platforms, the larger share comes from App Store (56%) and the remainder from Google Play (44%).
Examining Century Games' journey highlights the significance of innovation and how the PC gaming realm can be a rich source of inspiration. It also underscores the value of diversification and experimenting with new genres, enabling a discovery process for strengths and weaknesses in pursuit of the ideal market fit. With this approach and current dynamics of the publisher’s metrics, we won’t be surprised if, by the end of the year, it hits $3B in user spending!