September GameRefinery Bulletin: The Elder Scrolls: Castles disappoints, while Balatro’s premium purchase strategy succeeds

The roguelike-poker hybrid Balatro came to mobile on September 26, available for a one-time fee of $10. Generally, premium titles are a rarity on the mobile market today as they struggle to deliver the same financial performance as free-to-play titles. Despite that, Balatro has been a big success, reaching #56 in the US iOS grossing charts on launch day. Since then, revenue has sharply declined, although that’s to be expected given the game’s one-time purchase nature. 

After a lengthy soft launch period, The Elder Scrolls: Castles finally saw its official global release by Bethesda. Mechanically, the game is similar to Bethesda’s other mobile title Fallout Shelter, but with players managing their medieval fantasy castle instead of a post-apocalyptic bunker. The game topped the download charts when it was released and reached the top-grossing rank of 97, but has since declined rapidly and completely dropped off the top-grossing 200 chart.

League of Legends: Wild Rift experienced a colossal revenue surge on September 11 following the launch of the “Legends of Two Realms” special gacha. As the name suggests, the unique gacha was split into two separate prize pools, which players selected between before each draw. It resulted in an increase of more than 1100% day-over-day on the US iOS grossing market, the second-highest spike in the game’s history.

Supercell launched two simultaneous in-game collaboration events across two of its biggest titles. Squad Busters partnered with Hasbro’s Transformers as a tie-in to the upcoming film Transformers One, while Brawl Stars got a splash from Spongebob Squarepants. The Spongebob event was particularly successful, helping to fuel a 300%+ spike in daily revenue on the US iOS market on 5 September (when the event launched).

Two mobile titles climbed to all-new heights in September, almost a year after their initial launch. Hexa Sort, a hybrid casual puzzle game from Lion Studios that launched in November last year, reached an all-time high in September (peaking at #73 in the US iOS grossing charts) following a steady but sustained growth in its overall performance. Matching Story, a puzzle game from JoyCastle that launched in December 2023, also reached a similar all-time high in terms of revenue.