‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ debut sends franchise game sales soaring

Gamers can’t repel hype of that magnitude!

Star Wars games generated a serious amount of revenue during the week of The Force Awakens release, according to app-marketing intelligence firm SensorTower. The company used its platform — which can help developers understand how apps perform — to see that mobile Star Wars games all benefited from the new movie’s December 18 debut. Revenue for these apps were up, on average, 51 percent on that Friday from the previous two Fridays. Galaxy of Heroes, Force Collection, and Commander — Worlds in Conflict were the three games that saw the most with $186,000, $56,000, and $43,000 in revenue in the United States, respectively. This is a trend we’ve seen before for movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Disney was obviously ready to take advantage of the unprecedented excitement for Episode VII to capture as much of the $30 billion mobile gaming market as possible.

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The revenue bump came hand-in-hand with an increase in downloads. SensorTower notes that the Star Wars games generated 102 percent more downloads, on average, than the previous two Fridays.

But while December 18 was big for Star Wars mobile games, it was the day after when most people started looking for supplemental experiences.

“Combined revenue for the 22 apps we looked at was $334,000 on December 19,” SensorTower content manager Randy Nelson wrote in a blog post. “This was up 74 percent compared to the $192,000 average for December 5 and 12. The day after The Force Awakens premiered, combined downloads for the apps totaled 566,000 — up 193 percent over the 193,000 average of the two preceding Saturdays.”

It’s not surprising that people would go out looking for more Star Wars after seeing a big, fun film that everyone is talking about. But seeing it in plain numbers like this can give you an idea of just how important cross-media promotion is for a major Disney property.