Kim Kardashian's Game Isn't Going to Make All That Money After All
LatestThe allure of paying real money to pretend to be a celebrity in a mobile game might be wearing off.
Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood is a highly addictive freemium game that pretty much everyone gets hopelessly addicted to. When the game first debuted, it made a shitload of money—$1.6 million in the first five days, which is both astounding and utterly depressing. The Glu Mobile owned app brought in $43 million in the third quarter of 2014, which led many to expect the game to bring in well over $200 million this year for Glu. Oh but wait, that’s not going to happen after all.
According to Yahoo Finance, hitting $200 million in sales now is a near-impossibility for Glu which was banking on this new mobile game business model, along with other companies.
But after a strong summer, the app had been fading. Kardashian’s game spent much of the summer as one of the five highest-grossing apps in Apple’s (AAPL) U.S. app store, then faded in the fall and has dipped to the 19th spot as of Friday. It’s much the same story on the Android stores run by Google (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN), according to data collected by market tracker App Annie.
Glu doesn’t report its fourth-quarter earnings until Feb. 4, but with the game’s sales in free-fall, the $200 million marks seems far out of reach.
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Even amid the hysteria of Kardashian’s nude pose on the cover of Paper Magazine in November, the app’s revenue ranking rose only a blip and then largely tailed off again.
Don’t worry about Kardashian, though (I know how you fret over her): the reality show star still gets about 43 percent of the game’s earnings, which means she will have plenty of money to buy her daughter purses to draw on.
As for how well other celebrity themed games that hoped to jump on the Kardashian Hollywood bandwagon, it turns out 2014 wasn’t nearly as profitable for them. Lindsay Lohan’s Price of Fame was kind of a dud that barely managed to get into the top 350 top-selling games on iTunes before falling off into oblivion altogether.
Image via Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.