Nintendo Mobile Games generated more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue from global player spending across both stores. According to Sensor Tower’s blog post, their catalog of 6 games amassed a combined 452 million downloads worldwide. What's interesting to note here is they’ve been experimenting with monetization strategies since entering the market in mid-2016, and it seems their efforts have paid off! 

Are you curious to find out which developers surpass the $1bn mark this year? Maybe you'd like to know which vertical had the most downloads in the shortest amount of time? With our Top Publishers module, you can identify key global players to watch out for and dive-deeper into their revenue achievements. Use Publisher Breakdown to examine any publisher’s app catalog and understand which of their apps are generating the most revenue or downloads for any date period. This guide walks through best practices for comparing publishers and analyzing their progress using Top Publishers and Publisher Breakdown. 

What is Top Publishers?

Similar to Top Apps, our Top Publishers module displays an aggregation of the top 10,000 Publishers (instead of individual apps) in ranking order. These rankings will vary depending on the selected metric (Download or Revenue) and store view. Following the same UI as Top Apps, all results can be viewed by Absolute, Growth, or Growth Percentage. Filter Publishers by Category, Device, and Country to view Top Publishers for any given date.

Absolute refers to all the top 10,000 Publishers with the highest number of downloads for any selected date range. The Growth view pulls the top 10,000 Publishers with the highest growth for the selected date range compared to the previous same date range. Growth Percentage displays an exact percentage of Publisher growth, ranking them from the highest to the lowest by downloads or revenue. For an extensive overview of growing Publishers, opt for Growth Percentage to see the percentage increase in revenue and downloads for publishers of interest over time. All data can be exported as CSV files. 

Select Date Range, Category, and Country (or device) to filter results. Our built-in Global Fields are an efficient way of narrowing down Publishers to find leads that matter to you. Some useful tags include: 

• Publisher Country - identify growing Publishers in a specific country

• All-time Publisher Downloads - set a minimum downloads threshold for your results

• All-time Publisher Revenue - focus only on relevant publishers meeting your revenue criteria

• Most Popular Country by Downloads / Most Popular Region by Downloads

• Most Popular Country by Revenue / Most Popular Region by Revenue
  
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Example:

If you were looking to discover the Top Grossing Gaming publishers in the US for 2019, you would take the following steps:

1. Go to Absolute view within our Top Publishers module.

2. Select a Store view and set Date to the Year 2019. From the Country/Region dropdown list, pick the US. In this example, we've selected the App Store and iPhone Device. Chart by Revenue so we can see how much these publishers generated in 2019. 

3. Include tags from our Global Fields to set a minimum threshold and narrow down your criteria. Perhaps we want to look at the top publishers with more than 500m downloads and $100m+ revenue in 2019. (see above) 

4. Scroll down to view results, we can see five publishers that meet our criteria
   

1. Customize the ranking table to include important metrics

After discovering growing or successful Publishers, click on the Publisher name and use Publisher Breakdown to assess growth factors/trends.
 

Identify Publisher Trends

With Publisher Breakdown, you can compare multiple Publishers and all their apps side-by-side. Spot Publisher trends by Country and Device to see their download and revenue distribution, especially understanding where they concentrate most of their efforts. 

Use Publisher Breakdown by App to view any Publisher’s most popular or highest-grossing apps side-by-side and compare their inventory side-by-side. Adjust date granularity to identify any seasonal spikes in downloads or revenue generated from live ops events. Which apps are underperforming? Which apps are successful? Notice the share of revenue and downloads each app contributes to the Publisher's catalog. 
 

In the graph above we can compare the highest-performing games for Nintendo Mobile Games and Tencent. 

In Q3, 2018, what were the top three highest-grossing games? The top three highest-grossing games worldwide in both stores were Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing, and Dragalia Lost. The shaded plot at the end of a graph represents outstanding data for the rest of the month or quarter. For in-depth analysis, all sub-publishers are aggregated and displayed beneath the Publisher names.
 

Check or uncheck the sub-publishers to include and examine further. Publisher Breakdown follows the same layout as all other Store Intelligence modules. Select a store view, date range, category, device, and preferred metric (Download or Revenue). Enter one or more Publishers to compare their app catalogs and determine their most successful apps.

In 2018, which markets were the most successful for Nintendo? Using Publisher Breakdown by Country we discover the highest number of downloads were from users in the US, whilst Japan was the highest-grossing country. 
 

Compare multiple Publishers to see their popularity and worldwide revenue and understand where and how they’re performing in each country. Enter one publisher to identify their highest-grossing markets and where the majority of downloads are coming from, use these signals to determine a publisher's most influential markets. 

Chart success varies greatly for each publisher so figure out which metrics you'd like to track. Using Publisher Breakdown by Device, we can determine the most successful platforms. Select a Unified view to compare performance across Android, iPhone, and iPad devices to determine where their growth is coming from. We can see in the chart below, the majority of Nintendo's all-time, worldwide, unified downloads and revenue were from Android devices. Although iPad installs and revenue were relatively low, $36m is no small figure!
 

If you’re curious to check overall Publisher performance, Publisher Breakdown by Publisher offers a detailed analysis of the entire marketplace. Here you can compare multiple Publishers and see their presence in both stores. Nintendo experienced phenomenal growth since 2016, however, their all-time revenue market share is around 8% when compared to Supercell.

Publisher growth isn't limited to a high number of downloads. For strategy games and subscription apps, their primary focus is on revenue, especially factors like user engagement, retention, and increasing the lifetime value of their app through monetization strategies.