For years, King.com’s Candy Crush Saga has been one of the App Store’s top earners. The addictive match-3 game was considered the crowning success of the freemium app genre, and although the growth of Candy Crush Saga has been slowing over time, it still dominated the App Store’s ranking charts.
But there’s a new king in town. A post-apocalyptic king. Fallout Shelter, Bethesda’s adorable nuclear bunker sim, has dethroned Candy Crush Saga as the App Store freemium game to beat.
Just a few days after release, Fallout Shelter has already passed Candy Crush Saga on the top-grossing mobile games list.
That means it’s making big money. To put this in perspective, King.com has made about $2.55 million a day in 2015 on Candy Crush Saga. So while Bethesda won’t get into exact numbers, it’s got to be doing better than that, clocking in over $2.5 million a day on what is, at least theoretically, a free game. That’s a lot of lunchboxes sold! (Lunchboxes are Fallout Shelter‘s IAP currency).
“We’re very pleased. Fallout Shelter is doing amazingly well, with no real buildup,” Bethesda’s Pete Hines told GamesBeat. “To take such a light approach to monetization compared to other free-to-play games — we felt like we wanted to err on the side of caution and make it very unobtrusive, make sure it was fun first and foremost. So far so good.”
I’m a huge fan of the series, I’ve been playing Fallout Shelter since it first came out. It’s a little slow, but as both a promotional app for Fallout 4 and a nice little time-waster in its own right, it’s a pretty fun little game. What do you think? Is it better than Candy Crush Saga?
