Retro Bowl & Retro Goal: Hit Or Miss?
Recently Retro Bowl and Retro Goal has shown a high growth in both revenue and downloads, so, we decided to check the phenomenon.
— by Diana Levintova
Lately, two games by New Star Games have caught our attention: Retro Bowl and Retro Goal. Released in January 2020, Retro Bowl got featured in the Apple App Store quite quickly, which helped the game take off nicely right before the Superbowl of February 2020. However, the game really did reach new heights in September 2021 with the release of a new version packed with updates. Total revenue for the entire period has already hit $3M as of now, with the total downloads at 3.4M.
Retro Bowl is based on an American football video game called Tecmo Bowl released all the way in the 1980s for arcade gaming. In today’s app, the player controls the attack, acting as the team’s general manager at the same time. You may choose to have a team assigned to you automatically or pick the one you like directly. The main goal is to bring your team to victory in the championship called Retro Bowl.
As for Retro Goal —a summer release which graced the market in June 2021—it has so far garnered $67K of revenue and 431K downloads in total since release. The game is quite similar to the “more experienced” Retro Bowl and was likely developed on its basis, but this one is for soccer, or European football.
The catch here is that both titles are heavily stylized as retro, with basic pixel graphics and an unmistakable feel of 20th-century arcade rooms to them; they are quite basic control-wise, too, and all the action is paced moderately, so there’s no insane tapping at the screen. Naturally, the gameplay is typical for the arcade sport games for Dendies and Segas. However, despite their visible success, bear in mind that the retention rate for both games is rather low: when downloads drop, so does revenue, which means that users tend to be truly into the game for a few days at best.