Elder Scrolls Castles by Microsoft: $70K & 40K Installs a Day

The Elder Scrolls Castles 🏰 by Microsoftlaunched on 10th of September. It is doing around $70K a day in overall revenue and 40K downloads a day currently. It has some bold iterations on the genre by combining 2 different games into one 👑 😁. I am talking about the the mashup of Fallout Shelter gameplay with Reigns, the rogue lite card game that literally plays like tinder. As seen on the image, you play in the usual 2D mode, where you build your castle. On top of it your king works as the decision maker, where you select different options in moral or resource dilemmas. Most of these will affect either the happiness of your workers or even whole factions of workers. Spoiler: Angry workers will assassinate their king ☠️ happened to me already 😅. On top of this […]

Jakub Remiar September 24

Journal

WeChat Minigames made $2.3 billion in H1 2024

The latest statistics show that there are 845.4 million WeChat users in China Mini-program mobile games, also known as Minigames, generated $2.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2024 in China Publishing giant Tencent needs no introduction, with its incredibly popular titles PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings continuing to be hit. However, something the industry discusses less when it comes to Tencent is its messaging app WeChat, and how it owns most Minigames on the messenger platform. WeChat is the main ecosystem app in China, pretty much replacing all of the usual Silicon Valley staples in just one app. The latest statistics show that in 2024, there were 845.4 million WeChat users in China, which accounts for 60.1% of the total population. If we look at the overall user base, WeChat has 1.36 billion users worldwide. Mini-program mobile games […]

Jakub Remiar September 20

Journal

Minigame Market MAU will exceed 500 Million Users in China

We did a deep-dive episode on WeChat minigames with Lemon Choi, who runs a Minigames blog and is an expert on the matter 😎. Some of the facts and numbers that he shared are mind-blowing 😱. The expected MAU of the minigame market will exceed 500 Million 🕹 users in China this year, with an average daily play session of 60 minutes per user. These minigames are produced very fast (2-3 months) by small teams of 5-30 people, with the development cost around $140K per 1 minigame 😱. Multiple dominant genres (nearly all of them RPGs) dominate the market, with Loot Box RPG (Nobody's Adventure Chop—Chop 🐷 ) being the biggest genre per revenue share, with around 30% of the whole market. This specific sub-genre also has a big impact on the design iteration of other genres, as seen in […]

Jakub Remiar September 10

Journal

Impulse – Brain Training Scaled to $6 M A Month

Impulse - Brain Training scaled to $6 Mil. a month 🤑 overall revenue with around 3 Mil. downloads a month. It's the current downloads & revenue leader in the health & wellness category. Why are we talking about it? Because in the end this a collection of hypercasual games 🕹 posing as an app to improve your brain 🧠. What a difference a change of expectations makes 😁.The impulse goes a long way to make sure everything looks like a health improvement app rather than the typical hypercasual game. Every day you complete a set of 3 games as part of your "training program". These are categorized into different cognitive areas such as Memory, Mental Math ➗, Problem Solving, and Attention (30 different ones). After you have done your daily training you can still play different games, but only 6+1 […]

Jakub Remiar September 7

Journal

Office Cat by Treeplla: $130K a Day

Office Cat by treeplla Inc. already scaled to $130K a day 🤑 overall revenue just in 4 months. In this special episode, we got Seok Kang, CPO at Treeplla to live review the game with us. The company has a lot of cat-themed games such as Cat Snack Bar, Lumbercat, Cat Mart in their portfolio so this is not a "Catccident" 😹.Even though Office Cat can be considered an idle game, it has a unique loop compared to the usual idler. There is no reset mechanic, as your office just moves to bigger buildings 🏢 with all the progression. This was an iteration on one of the biggest churn points of the genre, which is the lost progress during reset. You essentially manage a co-working space, where companies grow and pay rent (names such as KitTok, and Spawtify 😹). You […]

Jakub Remiar September 3

Journal

Lucky Defense Scaled to $300K a Day

Daily $300K - just from IAP! 🤑 Launched on May 25th the game already did $20M+ revenue and 3,5M downloads. This is the same company that did Random Dice, the other very successful Tower defense game, which was later "westernized" into Rush Royale 😎.The main iteration of the game is in its core gameplay. It's a Cooperative game instead of PvP ⚔ (even though you can play the PvP event). Instead of monsters getting into some kind of a portal, where you lose lives, they just circle the map. The loose condition is based on the number of these monsters on the whole map, if it crosses 105 you lose the game. The random merging mechanic now continues into Mythic unit recipes, which are the main Damage units of the game + there is a gambling mechanic 🎰, where special […]

Jakub Remiar August 28

Journal

Idle Outpost Scaled to $150K a Day in July

Idle Outpost 🧟‍♀️ by Rockbite Games Armenia published by AppQuantum already scaled to $150K a day in July 🤑. With more than 10 Million downloads and $6 Mil. IAP revenue behind it, (Ads are probably more than 50% on top of this 😅) we couldn't miss this very interesting iteration on 2 of our favorite games. Can you guess which ones? 😎 As seen in the images, Idle Outpost is a clever combination of Lessmore's Eatventure and JoyNet Games's Legend of Mushroom 🍄. Instead of food, you are selling supplies to other Zombie Apocalypse "customers" 💲 and you keep finding survivor gear with your trusty dog on the way through Zombie Wasteland. I keep saying this all the time, but the Zombie theme works with everything and makes your CPI low 🤣 "change my mind".Because you are playing 2 idle […]

Jakub Remiar August 22

Journal

Squad Busters: Radical Changes On A Quest For Lasting Success

Jakub Remiar takes us through Supercell’s latest changes to Squad Busters and what to expect next from the game. Supercell released a new update for Squad Busters with key changes impacting its core gameplay design The update saw the game revenue spike however those levels are turning to normal now Supercell released its sixth global hit, Squad Busters, on May 29th and has since gone on to pass $50 million in revenue. Now that the game has been out for a few months, the team's approach to LiveOps will be crucial for its future. Supercell released a new update for the game, which may appear to be the usual content update for some, but rest assured, there's more happening beneath the surface. In this guest article, game design expert Jakub Remiar digs deep into Squad Busters' latest update and its potential impact. […]

Jakub Remiar August 22

Journal

Supercell’s Squad Busters: A Major Update

All of the consumables including MEGAs, 3 types of keys, and rerolls were removed from the game 😱 Baseline revenue of around $250K a day increased to $500K during the update. The DAU that was on the decline now finally stabilized at around 1,5 Million DAU and is slightly increasing. Here is a summary of what you need to know 😎:All of the consumables were considered “pay to win”, by the community as they gave players, who use them a really big competitive advantage over other players ⚔. All of the MEGAs were turned into actual character skins together with the introduction of new cosmetic-only currency-style tickets. The game now puts much more emphasis on cosmetics with the introduction of Super Rare skins 💎, which have their own emotes.The Lucky Find 🍀 comeback mechanic was iterated, now it gives a random […]

Jakub Remiar August 21

Journal

August 13th: Stormgate Launches into F2P Early Access

Stormgate from Frost Giant Studios, Inc. launches into F2P early access next week on the 13th of August. It is one of the last stands of the Real Time Strategy genre on PC 🖥. We got to talk with Tim Morten, Production Director & CEO, about its development, business model, and future roadmap 😎.The business model of Stormgate is similar to StarCraft's 2 F2P transition in 2017. Players can play the competitive part of the game completely free (including custom maps! 😁) and they can buy more single-player & coop content such as additional heroes together with corresponding cosmetics with one-time purchases. Additionally, there will be much more content added from each category later this year.RTS was always the cradle of multiple other genres such as MOBA, Tower Defense, etc. which were all done in the map editor of these […]

Jakub Remiar August 15

Journal

Soft-launch Sonar #5

13 brand new soft-launched games with no particular filter 😅 There are games from a lot of big players in the market such as FunPlus, tap4fun, SYBO, Century Games, Voodoo, Playrix, KRAFTON Inc., Rollic, 37Games. Come check out what we caught this time 😎 Empires And Magic by 37Games Bugtopia by 37Games Dark and Darker Mobile by KRAFTON Brawly by Century Games DotDot Blast by Century Games Roomscapes by Playrix Octopus Feast by Rollic Drop Sort JellyFish by VooDoo Subway Surfers City by SYBO Tavern Legend by Tap4Fun Mist Survival by FunPlus The trend of 4X companies from the East diversifying into casual categories continues, as seen with Merge Episodes, DotDot Blast, and Coin Pusher. I'm expecting many more games to follow as the UA know-how, from the giant 4X creative teams 💡 will be utilized in casual. This can […]

Jakub Remiar August 2

Journal

Testing R.I.S.E. Pre-Alpha, The New Game from Supercell

We tested R.I.S.E. pre-alpha, the new game from Supercell, which is the reboot of Clash Heroes. You could play for 3 hours each day over the weekend and I must say we were positively surprised by the amount of innovation in the game 😁.Before playing the game I was concerned that another Action RPG on Supercell portfolio, where there is Mo.co already 🤔, would end up competing against each other, similarly to Squad Busters vs Flood Rush. But R.I.S.E. is a Coop Rogue-lite Action RPG with extraction elements! 😱 You heard it right. Let me pinpoint the biggest differentiators.Even though the build was very early production, you could see the idea they were going for. Players are matched before every floor (level) into 3 man parties consisting of 6 different heroes. During the gameplay as they clear the level ⚔ […]

Jakub Remiar August 1

Jakub Remiar

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