Shooter Genre Snapshot

Sep, 2021 Shooter Genre

Snapshot

September 2021

•
Using a
Category -> Genre -> Subgenre
hierarchy we

are able to differentiate games in a meaningful way and

offer accurate insights for all individual game types

currently found in the market

•
Our taxonomy is
created together with industry

experts
and is based on thorough testing and

data-analysis of the market

•
In this report we are focusing on the
Shooter genre

under Mid-core

GameRefinery’s Genre Taxonomy

GameRefinery uses a three-layered

approach to categorize games

Shooters have become a very significant genre in mobile gaming in the past couple of years. It is the

6
th
largest genre in the US iOS market, contributing around 6% of the market’s revenues.

Epic and Apple’s legal battle that led to Fortnite’s removal from the App Store took away one of the

“big shots” of the genre back in August 2020. Currently, there are only seven shooter games in the

top-grossing 200, with over 84% of revenue coming from the “Big Three” – Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG

Mobile and Garena Free Fire. Garena Gree Fire has been the standout growth rocket of the year,
more

than doubling its revenues on iOS in the US.

Overall, the market has been very quiet in terms of new successful shooter games for a while. None of

the new Shooter games released within the past TWO YEARS has managed to make it into the US

top-grossing 200. The latest game to do this, Zooba, was released back in 2019. Even if we widen the

scope to the top-grossing 500, only one new game, Bullet Echo, was released over a year ago (May

2020).

Call of Duty Mobile’s highly successful mobile port has inspired many AAA developers to move to

mobile. With it being more than two years since the last top-grossing shooter launched, there are

some promising contenders on the horizon from the biggest developers out there. These include

Valorant Mobile, Apex Legends Mobile, Battlefield Mobile, and Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier.
Will

these games successfully challenge the “Big Three” of mobile shooters and bring fresh blood to a

stagnant market in the upcoming months? That remains to be seen.

Short Shooter Genre Overview

•
Currently Shooters are the 6

th

largest genre in the US iOS market, contributing about 6% of the market’s revenues.

•
The obvious major shake-up to the shooter genre was the lawsuit battle between Apple and Epic leading to Fortnite being

removed from the App Store. After all, before the removal it had over 30% market share of the Shooter market in the US on

iOS.

•
This has led to the other “Big Three” competitive shooters (CoD: Mobile, Garena: Free Fire, PUBG Mobile) taking market share

for themselves. Garena: Free Fire in particular has seen exponential growth during the past year, more than doubling its

revenues. It has grown from a mere 10% market share to equal share at the top with a bit under 30% market share of the

genre.

•
The shooter market has been very stagnant during the past year → not a single new game has been able to break into the top

grossing 500

•
It is quite rare that top shooters bring new bigger features to the game, but the content cadence of new cosmetics,

limited-time game modes, events, maps etc. is mind-bogglingly high in the most successful games

•
Monetization in most top shooters relies heavily on the popular

Battle Pas
s as well as a constant flow of limited-time

gachas with various special mechanics

Key points

Market

•
Top games and their market share

Top games and their current market share

within the
Shooter genre in the US on iOS

Key takeaway:
The shooter space is currently dominated by Garena Free Fire, Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG MOBILE.

The biggest

changes during the past year were the appstore removal of Fortnite and the massive rise of Garena Free Fire. While there wasn’t a

drastic change in the revenues of other top Shooters, Garena Free Fire was able to pull off an incredible climb, more than doubling

its quarterly revenue and overtaking PUBG and CoD. It is now neck and neck with CoD as the top shooter for Q2 of 2021.

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

*

x

Top games and challengers in the
Shooter
genre (US iOS)

Key takeaway:
As we can see from the chart, there has pretty much been ZERO new blood in the Shooter market in the past few

years.
Bullet Echo
is the newest game among the top grossing 500 games in iOS and it was released over a year ago (May 2020).

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing has been Garena: Free Fire’s massive growth to become as big as CoD: Mobile and PUBG

Mobile.

30d average

top grossing

rank

Days since release

1-25

0

251-50

0

New

Old

+5 years

0

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

GARENA

Free Fire

PUBG Mobile

CoD: Mobile

Bullet Echo

Zooba: Zoo

Battle Royale

Game

Tacticool

Left to Survive

World of

Tanks: Blitz

War Machines:

3D Tank Game

Pixel Gun 3D

Sniper 3D: Gun

Shooting

Games

War Robots

Multiplayer Battles

What does the future hold for the mobile
Shooter
genre?

(Upcoming announced games)

What does the future hold for the
Shooter
genre?

(Upcoming games) (US iOS)

•
The shooter market has been super stagnant in recent years, but as we can see from the previous slide → currently there’s a huge

amount of upcoming announced titles with several big IPs attached to them

•
It’s noteworthy that there is a lot of variety among those titles. e.g.

○
Valorant
+
Project M
, 5v5 class-based tactical shooters

○
Apex Legends
, class-based Battle Royale

○
Lost Light
,
survival shooter in the style of
Escape From Tarkov
or
Metro Royale-mode
in
PUBG Mobile

○
Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier
, class-based Battle Royale with RPG elements

○
Garena Free Fire MAX
, enhanced version of Garena Free Fire – players able to sync their Free Fire progress to the new game

•
Will these games challenge the “Big Three” of mobile shooters and bring fresh blood to the stagnant market in the upcoming

months/years? Will they be able to gain a wide enough user base / push out the crazy amount of constant content needed to

satisfy/monetize that audience, like the current top shooters do? That remains to be seen, but there are plenty of companies now trying

for sure

Valorant on PC

Apex Legends Mobile

Lost Light

Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier

Features & Updates

•
Top updates

•
Implementation examples

Top updates of
Call of Duty: Mobile
for the past year

All the top Shooter games follow a similar pattern of

releasing content. All are based on various seasons

(Battle Pass, ranked seasons etc.) that pace the games

and their bigger e.g feature releases. On top of this,
over

the course of seasons there are numerous “smaller

content” update in the form of events, cosmetics,

gachas, bundles, smaller limited-time game modes etc.

If we look Call of Duty: Mobile in the past year, there are

two quite clear massive updates (outside of various

events) to the game: Clan War and the re-release of the

Zombie mode.

Source: GameRefinery SaaS – Game Update History

Update 1.0.22

Update 1.0.26

Top updates of
Call of Duty: Mobile
for the past year

Source: GameRefinery SaaS – Game Update overviews

Update 1.0.26

Source: GameRefinery SaaS – Game Update overviews

Top updates of
Call of Duty: Mobile
for the past year

Update 1.0.22

Top Shooter Implementation Examples:

Battle Pass Evolvement

PUBG Mobile – Royale Pass

Battle Pass has been one of the must have features in top

grossing shooters since Fortnite, as it synergizes extremely
well

with the cosmetic economies the games focus on. Nowadays

we have also seen various iterations of the typical Battle Pass

mechanic – one of the most innovative ones being PUBG

Mobile’s Royale Pass.

The basic idea is still the same of a “free and paid layer ”, but

there are lots of twists to the basic formula.

Some of the innovations include:

1) Battle Passes traditionally are very personal. You grind your

own quests and reach rewards thresholds alone. But PUBG

innovates in this aspect as well with the RP Team feature.When

you have purchased the season’s Battle Pass, players can form

or join an RP Team. It gives rewards for every team member

based on 1) the number of players in the team and 2) the Battle

Pass rank of all the players in the Team summed up together.

This adds “social pressure” to carry your own weight so

everybody can reach the best rewards.

2) Traditionally Battle Pass progression is earned either
directly

as a gameplay reward OR with a task-based system. On top of

this PUBG Mobile offers rewards for Match Time.

These are just a few examples of small tweaks to the PUBG

Battle Pass.
Read this blog post
for more on how it has evolved.

Implementation examples from top
Shooter

games:

Gacha monetization – CoD: Mobile

A lot of the top shooter games are almost purely

based on cosmetic economies (or skins with minor

power benefits like Garena). So how do they make

their money then? First of all the content cadence

is off the roof with the amount of various cosmetic

types/pure volume of items these companies push

out. One of the main mechanics of selling these

cosmetics are gachas.

CoD: Mobile currently offers two types of gachas:

Draw Gachas
and
Milestone Gachas
.

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

Draw Gacha

Draw gachas are always available for a limited-time.

There are always 10 items per one gacha. When you

pull from the gacha, the item received is removed from

the reward pool + the price ofthe next pull increases +

the odds for rarer items increase.

This is clearly the main way CoD:Mobile offers their

most detailed/unique skins on top of the Battle Pass

Milestone Gacha

When players reach a certain number of pulls, you get a guaranteed

purple rarity item (the rarest items in these gachas). Purple rarity

items are “duplicate protected” so players can’t get duplicates of

those. If players get a purple item, it’s removed -> increases

chances for rest of the purple items. It is possible to get duplicates

for other more common rarity items which are transferred to soft

currency automatically.

These gachas are always offered for a limited-time only.

Get more data and

implementations, login or contact us!

Implementation examples from top
Shooter

games:

Gacha monetization – Garena: Free Fire

A lot of the top shooter games are

almost purely based on cosmetic

economies (or skins with minor

power benefits like Garena). So

how do they make their money

then? First of all the content

cadence is off the roof with the

amount of various cosmetic

types/pure volume of items that

these companies push out. One of

the main mechanics of selling

these cosmetics are gachas.

The majority of cosmetics in

Garena Free Fire come from three

main types of gachas:
Luck

Royale, Web events and store

crates/boxes.

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

Luck Royale

Luck Royale gachas are always available for a limited-time

each having special mechanics. There are 4 different types

of gacha mechanics including Royale and Lucky Wheel

incubator gachas.

Royale gachas have a huge pool of rewards, with increased

chances of the main reward on each pull. Lucky Wheel

incubator gachas reward material items which are used to

craft the main rewards inside the “incubator ” of the gacha.

Web events

Web events are limited time monetization events with many

of them having a gacha mechanic. These gachas include:

Spin gachas with rewards from consecutive spins and

option for a special spin which costs more but triples the

chances for the main reward.

Dice gachas reward items and currency, which is used in the

gacha’s special shop to buy more items.

Store crates/boxes

The in-game store has various cosmetics but many of them

are gachas instead of direct purchases.

The crates contain various rewards depending on the crate,

from material items to cosmetic accessories and pets. The

most direct way of purchasing weapon skins is from boxes,

but those are gachas as well with a pool of skins of a certain

weapon theme, including high chances of only receiving

trial
versions of the skin.

Get more data and

implementations, login or contact us!

Implementation examples from top
Shooter

games:

Cosmetic collection system – PUBG Mobile

As the top shooters rely almost purely on cosmetic economies, it’s important to not

just offer a huge variety of different cosmetics to collect, but also have systems in

place to support and incentivize the collecting.

PUBG has two features incentivizing collecting even further: Show Room and Season

Gallery. Show Room lets players easily curate and show off their favourite cosmetic

items to other players. Season Gallery then taps into the completionist motivation by

rewarding players for completing collections and visualising how much they have

completed.

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

Show Room

Season Gallery

Get more data and

implementations, login or contact us!

Motivations

•
The motivation framework

•
Top game’s motivation comparison

•
GameRefinery uses a proprietary motivation model

consisting of twelve different Motivational Drivers, each

covering a separate player root motivation.

•
These Motivational Drivers are also grouped based on their

nature to form meaningful pairs or “motivational groups” –

for example Improving skills and Completing Milestones fall

under Mastery.

•
Motivation results are based on a survey including over 7000

respondents. The survey was targeted towards mobile game

players in English speaking western countries (US, UK,

Canada, New Zealand and Australia). The sample is

representative of the smartphone users when it comes to

age, gender, income and household size.

GameRefinery’s Motivation Framework

As we can see, there aren’t huge differences

in motivational drivers for top shooters. The

biggest differences being CoD and PUBG

having slightly higher Social – Working with

others through their fully fledged guild and

co-op mechanics, compared to Free Fire’s

more simpler Guild approach. Also PUBG is

able to tap a bit more into the Exploration –

Collecting Treasure motivation with its

showroom and season gallery collection

systems.

It is interesting to see if the upcoming titles

are able to differentiate in terms of different

motivations e.g. the survival shooter Lost

Light with Exploration – Discovering New

Worlds, and bring new types of audience to

the genre.

Motivational Drivers of the top shooter games

Motivational drivers describe the main reasons players enjoy playing the game

Source: GameRefinery SaaS Dashboard

Score 5 = very important, 1 = not important

We Know Mobile Games

We answer not just
what
is happening on

the market but
why
and
how
it is happening

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