What’s in the cards for 2017? Lots of money.
Research firm SuperData has released a new report on the digital card games market, which it expects to earn $1.4 billion in 2017. Blizzard’s behemoth Hearthstone, which is available for PC, iOS, and Android, leads the field.
For 2016, Hearthstone was in first among all digital card games with $394.6 million earned in revenue. That was almost four times as much as the $100.1 million earned by Shadowverse, which ranked at No. 2. Still, that’s a great result for Shadowverse, which came out last June for iOS and Android and in October for PC.
Hearthstone, meanwhile, has been running hot since its release in 2014. Blizzard supports the digital card game with a new expansion about every four months. According to SuperData, Hearthstone earns at least $25 million a month, but that number has gone as high as $40 million. That includes last December, which saw the launch of the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion. Hearthstone has a player base of 20 million, and many of them spend money buying packs of cards in the free-to-play game….