We did the math: how much revenue Cipsoft had from the Store?

April 06, 2022

Introduction

After we started tracking store items, we had the curiosity to dig deeper into more statistical analysis about the Char Bazaar. This time, we will have a look at how players spent their Tibia Coins with store purchases 🛍️.

Like our previous analysis, these statistics were extracted from our own Char Bazaar historical database. Since our database isn't 100% complete (read the explanation) and since it's not possible to track everything, this analysis is a lower bound estimate. It means that, in reality, players have spent much more Tibia Coins than we actually managed to track.

A few factors we could not account for:

Store Consumables: runes, potions, gold converters, teleport scrolls, etc
Store Utilities: blessings, xp boosts, prey wildcards, name changes, etc

With that being said, let's check out some data! 📚

Cipsoft revenue from store items

So far, Cipsoft had a revenue of at least 148,253,335 Tibia Coins from store purchases across all characters from the Char Bazaar.

Compared to their revenue from bazaar fees, the Store seems to bring much more cash for Cipsoft. Later in this post we will discuss what are the most popular store purchases.

Characters with the most Tibia Coins spent

Character	Spent	Sold for
Golden Paeveio Level 470 - Elder Druid	68,205	33,001
Ragnar Netao Level 1178 - Elite Knight	59,165	–
Skan Rushh Level 1059 - Elder Druid	58,940	–
Rey de Seanera Level 406 - Elite Knight	57,305	11,001
Cold Boo Level 1032 - Elder Druid	56,200	186,701
Jukei Hustler Level 430 - Master Sorcerer	54,305	8,001
King Krambis Level 1010 - Elder Druid	53,805	115,001
King Kath Level 978 - Elder Druid	53,805	–
Clara Bonecrusher Level 465 - Elite Knight	53,495	25,000
Phorlis Do Dende Level 654 - Royal Paladin	53,095	63,000
Love Spell Level 424 - Elite Knight	52,595	–
Mavokz Level 516 - Master Sorcerer	51,540	60,000
Magiczny Feo Level 334 - Master Sorcerer	51,000	–
Infratorz Level 1132 - Master Sorcerer	49,760	–
Ziggnall Level 574 - Master Sorcerer	49,610	–

Tip: click on any character to expand it's details!

Differences per region

The list of the top 1,000 spenders is equally distributed among SA, NA and EU regions. But if we look at the average Tibia Coins spent by all characters for each region, we can then see some differences:

Region	Average TC spent
Europe	591
South America	464
North America	438

Confirming popular belief, players from Europe indeed seem to spend more on average

This difference is explained by the fact that approximately 80% of both NA and SA characters have 0 Tibia Coins spent, while this is a smaller share in EU: 74% of it's characters.

If we exclude characters that didn't spend at all, then all three regions have the same average of approximately 2,300 Tibia Coins spent per character.

Is Cipsoft trying to target a whale market?

These figures aren't enough to tell if Cipsoft is actually trying to target whales. Remember: we are sampling characters, not players. A player can have multiple characters, so we can't infer the spending profile of a typical Tibia player.

A "whale" is a player that has a heavy spending habit. Despite being a small proportion of players (around 2%), they can drive the most revenue for a game company.

Still, if compared to other online games, cosmetics in Tibia are really expensive. And it gets even worse by the fact that lot of Tibia players are from regions with weak currencies and, consequently, low purchasing power (myself included 😔). This raises some questions about Tibia store items:

Should their prices be lowered?
Should Cipsoft occasionally offer discounts?
Should store purchases be bound to the account, rather than the character?

In terms of generating revenue, Cipsoft seems to be taking some good decisions lately. Hopefully they might consider some of these suggestions that could benefit not only the players but also the company.

Cipsoft's turnover for each year from 2001 to 2021. Their revenue had a huge spike in 2020 — Cipsoft's turnover by the year. A huge spike happened in 2020 with the introduction of the Char Bazaar.
Source: Cipsoft.

Differences per PvP type

This won't be a surprise for anyone: Optional PvP servers tend to attract players that spend more. These players purchase more cosmetics, while pvp focused players prefer more boosts and consumables instead.

Since it's impossible to track all store purchases, take this data with a grain of salt:

PvP	Average TC spent
Optional	715
Open	414
Retro Open	338
Hardcore	344
Retro Hardcore	254

The more PvP restricted a server is, more charlovers will join it 💅

Most popular store items

Here is the popularity between what we like to call store utilities:

46,8% Training Dummy
21,6% Gold pouch
1,8% Hirelings
25,6% Charm expansion
63,4% Prey Slot
2,1% Hunting Task Slot
20,4% Imbuement Shrine
39,2% Reward Shrine
9,3% Mailbox

Only characters with at least 1 utility purchased were considered

Again, no surprises here. Training dummies and prey slots are the most popular store utilities, even while being the most expensive ones (900 and 750, respectively), because they bring an actual advantage for characters.

Almost all the other utilities just give you some extra convenience and they can be easily shared in public between players. This is not the case for Gold pouch, Charm expansion and Hunting task slot. Still, it's highly debatable if those store utilities are actually worth it or not.