BeReal Finally Got its Exit - But Why?
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While most of us were busy checking out iOS 18, popular hyper casual game developer Voodoo Games announced it had acquired social app BeReal for €500M.
My first thought was "Wow", and before that thought faded the next was "Why???".
In case you don't remember, BeReal took teenagers by storm in 2022 with its incredibly simplistic random check-ins you share with your friends.
The "feature" that was an app exploded in popularity in late 2022 and although the popularity mostly faded, the app is still getting downloads. But for an app that isn't even monetizing, that's a lot of money!
Probably a lot of users, you might respond - and you may be right. According to our estimates, BeReal collected 107M downloads across the App Store and Google Play. The majority of the downloads came between July of 2022 and January of 2023 - BeReal saw 53% of its all-time downloads in that period.
During that period, monthly downloads peaked at 12M, but the run didn't continue. Right after the peak downloads started sloping down and within six months dropped to 3M. BeReal ended May of 2024 with 1.2M downloads, according to our estimates.
Voodoo, the publisher behind some of the most popular hyper-casual portfolios on mobile, could have bought BeReal to gain access to those 100M+ users. It's unlikely that all of them are active, but we're still talking about a lot of eyeballs.
But...
Did you know Voodoo also has a social network?
Voodoo's Social Play
Wizz, Voodoo's social platform, has been around since 2019 and has amassed 18M downloads, according to our estimates. It had a nice growth sprout in late 2022 but has seen its trend slope down as well. 18 < 107, so Wizz has a lot to gain now.
According to the announcement, Wizz's CEO will take over running BeReal, which is... interesting. We might see Voodoo transitioning BeReal's users over to Wizz.
According to rumors, only a third of the grand total was actual payment with the rest being tied to performance, leading me to believe a user shift is indeed in the cards for BeReal. Ultimately, a great outcome for an app built around a feature.
And fun fact, many of Wizz's reviews are very negative yet have a 5-star rating (like this one and this one). I won't speculate why...
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
