The Monster Strike hype in Japan has no limit, it seems.
The action RPG has made Mixi (2121) a US$4 billion company at the Tokyo stock exchange today (US$4.2 billion at 2.30pm Japanese time, to be more exact) – after the share price has risen and risen over the last few days and weeks.
So what happened?
There a couple of factors behind the trend:
- the game has hit 10 million downloads just a few days ago
- Monster Strike featured a number of successful gacha-based in-game events in the past few weeks
- the marketing collaboration with the Godzilla movie proved to be pretty clever
- another TV ad campaign was started last week
- partner Tencent opened the official site for the game for the Chinese market yesterday and also started distributing a first test version on Android
- the biggest competitor, Puzzle & Dragons from GungHo Online Entertainment (3765) went into maintenance today to get a major update (Puzzle & Dragons W)
- Monster Strike shows no weakness in terms of number of downloads and position in the grossing charts on iOS and Android
In fact, Monster Strike has become the top grossing game on both platforms in Japan (at the moment, simultaneously), for the first time:
This is especially remarkable when considering the Mixi game has just a third of the downloads GungHo achieved for Puzzle & Dragons.
The Monster Strike hype is reflected in Mixi’s stock price over the past 12 months like so:
The stock has roughly risen by a factor of 20 when compared with November 2013: lucky are those companies operating a hit game.
Monster Strike is available on iOS and Android in Japan and Taiwan only at this point (again, the Tencent app for China is labeled a test).