Hearthstone, Blizzard’s popular digital collectible card game, pulls in about $20 million a month, split almost evenly between the PC and mobile versions of the game, according to analyst firm Superdata.
The information is detailed in the company’s summary of its annual digital card games report.
Many regard World of Warcarft as one of the most prolific and successful MMOs in history, and this is likely part of the reason for the success of Hearthstone. The digital CCG has been able to recapture a portion of that spark of player fanaticism that drove World of Warcraft’s meteoric rise.
The simplified mechanics do well to capture player interest into an industry inundated with complex mechanics and uninteresting lore and personas. It also helps that Hearthstone has engaging visuals and characters aplenty. This is a signal for the paper CCG industry that it’s time to innovate massively to capitalize on the popularity Hearthstone is bringing to the genre.
In a blog post, Superdata digs down into the dual successes of Hearthstone on PC and on mobile. The chart, seen above, shows that mobile jumped above PC in popularity with the release of the phone version of the game. As of early 2015, both were bringing in about $10 million a month.
It’s worth noting that the sales figures included in the report and the blog post are estimates based on a number of predictors, algorithms and hard numbers. Superdata’s Sam Barberie told Polygon that the numbers are pulled from credit card company sales and publisher’s internal numbers. Those numbers are then built out with Superdata’s own algorithms.
