RPG Game App Sells for ¥1,750,000 (About 7 Months of Monthly Revenue)

The Deal Numbers (from Rakko M&A’s Closed-Deals List)

How to Read This Case

This deal appears on the closed-deals list that Rakko M&A publishes on its official site. There is no detailed story such as an operator interview. The listing page, however, discloses the revenue structure and operating data in relatively fine detail, making it unusually information-rich for anonymous list data. We record what a “smartphone app that is actually earning” fetches in the individual-scale M&A market.

Reconstructing the Deal from the Listed Information

Within what is publicly disclosed, the shape of this RPG app is fairly concrete. Revenue came from a combination of rewarded video ads (opt-in viewing) and in-app purchases. The app reached a monthly peak of over ¥300,000 in sales four months after release. At the time of listing, monthly revenue was ¥250,000 and profit ¥200,000. With a daily ad budget of ¥2,000, it was posting a ROAS (return on ad spend) of 499–789%, so user acquisition ran on paid ad operations. The backend was PlayFab (a cloud platform for games), with server costs of ¥2,757 per month. The upside the seller cited was expanding the ad budget and rolling out to iOS/PC.

Cross-checking the numbers, the cost structure can also be estimated. The gap between ¥250,000 in revenue and ¥200,000 in profit is ¥50,000 per month. With server costs at only ¥2,757, nearly all of that difference is advertising spend, which roughly matches the ¥2,000/day x 30 days = about ¥60,000 spend level. This app’s profit, in effect, is profit premised on keeping the ads burning. The buyer is taking on an ongoing ad-operations obligation along with the asset.

The Variables That Set the 7.0-Month Multiple

The going rate for individual website sales is said to be 18–24 months of monthly profit. Against that benchmark, this deal’s 7.0 months (8.8 months on profit) is less than half. Three variables behind the gap are readable from the listing.

The first is the short track record. From the note that peak sales came in month four after release, this revenue has no proof yet that it will “keep going.” Search-traffic sites that fetch 18–24 months typically demonstrate durability with multi-year revenue histories. The second is where the maintenance burden sits. With an app, OS update support, ad-SDK updates, and keeping up with store policy changes all fall on the buyer, heavier than website maintenance. The third is the ad dependence noted above: a structure where revenue shrinks the moment you stop operating the ads gets discounted relative to a site whose search traffic keeps flowing even if left alone. Far from unreasonable, the gap in multiples is a differential assessment of how breakable the revenue is.

Cross-Comparison — Position Among 15 Rakko M&A Deals Closed in the Same Period

Lining up all 15 deals, the market’s pricing logic comes into view. Search-traffic websites fetch around 20 months of revenue, YouTube channels 2–18 months, and zero-revenue SNS accounts are priced on their follower base alone. Even for the same “monthly revenue,” the assessment of how breakable that revenue is (algorithm dependence, terms-of-service risk, key-person dependence) shows up as the difference in multiples. This app sits near the middle of the distribution, level with high-RPM YouTube channels, which reads as the natural resting place for an asset that “earns a lot but has a thin history and heavy maintenance.”

The Buyer’s and Seller’s Arithmetic

From the buyer’s side, ¥1,750,000 pays back in 7.0 months if monthly revenue holds, or about 8.8 months on a profit basis. The comparison point is “the time it would take to build an equivalent app from zero and monetize it”, if you think of the purchase as buying out the planning, development, store review, and ad-operations trial and error, the appeal is that proven ROAS know-how comes bundled with the asset. Conversely, sustaining the revenue requires continued ad operations, and the payback period stretches depending on the buyer’s skill.

For the seller, this is a swap of the expected earnings from continued operation for immediate cash. If the ¥200,000 monthly profit continued, ¥1,750,000 would be overtaken in just under nine months, but mobile game revenue curves generally peak right after release and decay from there. Selling right after posting peak sales, while the history is short and the numbers look their best, has the rationality of cashing out at the asset’s value peak. This price band (tens of thousands to a few million yen) has deep buyer demand, just like the telecom-affiliate site that sold for ¥950,000 in 21 days, and with seller fees at zero the cost of testing a listing is close to nil. Closing in 12 days backs up that depth.

The Limits of This Record

This is listing data only, with no interview with the operator. The development period and cumulative hours invested are unknown. If development had taken a year, the assessment of ¥1,750,000 as consideration would change completely, but that cannot be determined. The ROAS and other figures are seller-reported, and there is no guarantee the revenue at listing held up afterward. What can be written here goes only as far as the transaction fact: “an asset with these attributes fetched this price, and a buyer appeared in 12 days.”

Conditions for Reproduction, from an Indie Developer’s View

The finding that holds beyond this listing is that liquidity in the hundreds of thousands to millions of yen genuinely exists for small monetized apps. The “build, grow, sell” exit is functioning on a domestic marketplace, and the variables that drive the multiple (length of revenue history, the share of non-ad revenue (in-app purchases), ease of operational handover) can be reverse-engineered from listing data. On the other hand, it remains true that apps as an asset class are structurally lower-multiple than websites. Even at the same absolute revenue of ¥250,000 a month, the price tag changes threefold depending on the vehicle carrying it. That is the most practical lesson in this list data.

Related Cases

• A firsthand account of selling a telecom affiliate site for ¥950,000 in 21 days
• Market pricing for website and account sales: “monthly profit x 24 months + goodwill”