Analysts with Cowen Research are lauding Kim Kardashian: Hollywood as a major turning point for mobile game company Glu Mobile, and doubling their expectations of its earning potential in the wake of the freemium app’s remarkably strong debut. Cowen Research is the equity research division of financial services firm Cowen and Company, and since it doesn’t have access to Glu’s books it is using the demonstrated past performance of the apps that Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has replaced on the U.S. Apple App Store’s top-grossing chart — King’s Pet Rescue Saga — to make an educated guess about how much revenue Glu’s new game is generating. Now those analysts are betting that Kim Kardashian: Hollywood will generate roughly $225M in revenue for Glu’s 2014 fiscal year. They’re also predicting that Glu will generate roughly $78M in revenue during the fiscal third quarter, which is roughly double what they were predicting before the launch of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Dino Hunter: Deadly Shores, a lower-profile Glu game that is nonetheless outperforming analyst expectations. “We believe that Glu has turned a corner with respect to game monetization,” read the report from Cowen Research, noting that Glu may be able to generate much more revenue now that it is diversifying its freemium game offerings across multiple themes, including celebrity lifestyle RPG and Jurassic Park hunting sim. “While our new estimates may appear to be strolling far out on a thin limb given current guidance, we have confidence in our model.”
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2014