Elex's Clash of Kings has seen 65M downloads in one year

The number is larger than the original Angry Birds, but can't come close to the 500M for Candy Crush

Mobile game developer Elex has something to celebrate tonight. Despite primarily being known as a knockoff of one of the most popular mobile games of all time, the company's top game has produced an impressive number of downloads after one one year on the market.

Clash of Kings has now racked up 65 million downloads across all app stores, it was announced on Monday. 

Of course, this is something to be celebrated, so the studio also announced that it has released an update that "will give celebration gifts to all players."

Clash of Kings was first released on Android in August of 2014, and then on iOS in December of last year. It launched on the Facebook App Center in March of this year. It is now in the top 5 grossing apps in over 70 countries.

Since the game launched, Clash of Kings players have spent the equivalent of 20,400 years playing the game. And over 946 billion troops have fought in Clash of Kings, which is more than the stars and planets in the Milky Way.

Here are some more stats out from Elex: 72% of users in the United States play the app most while watching TV, while 65% of users in the United Kingdom play it while commuting. A full 82% of all users are male, while 68% of them are aged between 18 and 34 (do those last couple of stats shock you? I for one cannot believe that the majority of players are young men!)

How does it compare?

Ok, so the game has 65 million downloads. That certainly sounds like a lot, but is it really?

It does beat Angry Birds, which had 50 million downloads a year after it first launched. Of course, that was in 2009, when far fewer people had smartphones on which to play that game. Now look what happened when the company released Angry Birds 2 in July: the game was downloaded over 20 million times in its first week alone. 

If it keeps that pace the game will surpass over 1 billion downloads in a year. Spoiler alert: that isn't going to happen. But it would take less than a month for it to surpass Clash of Kings. That seems far more likely to come to pass.

And what about Clash of Clans, a.k.a. the game that Clash of Kings was obviously based on? Its developer, SuperCell, doesn't seem to give out that information, but it is known that Clash of Clans is the most profitable game on mobile. SuperCell's revenue tripled in 2014 thanks to the game, 

None of these games can come even close to one giant megahit game: Candy Crush Saga. Released on mobile in November of 2012, by November of 2013 it has been downloaded an astounding 500 million times. That is half a billion people in one year. 

This news was first noticed by VentureBeat. 

(Image source: elexgame.com)