iCandy Interactive’s Masketeers game hauls in $1 million revenue in record time

A day after completing a $10.5 million placement, video game publisher iCandy Interactive (ASX: ICI) has provided further festive cheer for its shareholders in the form of a revenue update regarding its Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen game.

iCandy said the game reached $1 million in generated revenue in the space of just 63 days – the fastest ever for an iCandy game.

In comparison, iCandy’s previous most successful game was Crab War, which reached $1 million in revenues around nine months after being released in January this year.

Unmasking Masketeers

Masketeers was first launched on 6 October 2020 on Google Play and Apple App Store as a role-playing game, offering players the chance to “take a stand against the inner demons of society”.

The game has been received very positively and maintains a 4.5 average rating from a total of over 31,000 reviews on Google Play.

The game’s early sales performance led to iCandy declaring that strong revenues would contribute “significantly” to the company’s financial performance in both the current and subsequent financial years. In 2019, iCandy posted total revenues of $2.2 million and expects to beat last year’s performance on the back of Masketeers.

With the Christmas season quickly approaching, iCandy said it anticipates Masketeers will continue to its strong sales performance and confirmed that it intends to extend the game into other languages and localise the game wherever necessary.

The game is currently available in 70 countries and in English only, although this is expected to change as iCandy rolls out its marketing offensive over the coming weeks.

One factor that could potentially boost videogame sales across the board and raise the tide for game publishers this year is COVID-19.

The pandemic has led to billions of people being subjected to lockdown measures and, as a by-product, has increased demand for digital services such as entertainment and online gaming.

iCandy said the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic is likely to further “accentuate” the already-strong festive uptake of video games and related peripherals and would therefore serve as a positive catalyst to the company’s performance over the next three months.

To the US and China

Aside from expecting a commercially strong Christmas period, iCandy is focused on North America as its prime market for Masketeers.

“Major marketing campaign via strategic corporate partnership and digital marketing in Masketeers’ key market of North America is on track and is now being carried out in various phases,” the company said.

Longer-term, iCandy expects to roll out its new game in China, via a partnership with a local company.

In a statement, iCandy confirmed it was currently in discussions with a strategic partner and was confident that it would be able to launch Masketeers in China “in the near future”.

According to research published by MarketingToChina, China recorded over US$36 billion in gaming revenue in 2019, thereby ranking the country as second to only the US as the world’s largest gaming market.

Within the mobile segment, China is expected to amass almost 500 million mobile users by 2023.