Magic Sort by Grand Games continues to scale to $120K per day

Magic Sort by Grand Games continues to scale to $120K per day 🤑 doubling its daily revenue from the last time we looked at it in January episode. It is currently the #1 sort genre game by IAP revenue, even taking over Hexa Sort by Lion Studios (Hexa still makes a lot of ad revenue on top of this, of course 😅) I would have guessed that there would be some major feature added in the meantime in Magic Sort, but it seems the team is just rigorously updating the game with more and more levels, which just shows how level design and content frequency is the backbone of this genre 🛠️. But I am still guessing that we will see elements from Royal Match, such as the event metagame and collectible album, being added in the next few months. […]

Jakub Remiar March 10

Journal

Love & Deepspace did $30M last month

Love & Deepspace did $30M last month, the undisputed #1 game in the interactive story genre. Making 10x more than Chapters, its next competitor in the charts. How is this possible? This is the next-gen interactive story game, as you see in the images. Fully 3D with voice-overs, the production quality is leagues ahead of its competition. The interactive story part plays more like a choice-based cinematic, with fully animated characters, all in the first person of your player with multiple camera angles. Surprisingly, this is just the first core gameplay that the game offers. Besides this, there is the dating part + a landscape combat RPG 😲. Yes, you read that right. The second core gameplay is an action RPG combat ⚔️, when the whole game switches from portrait to landscape, and you fight against enemies and bosses based […]

Jakub Remiar March 7

Candy Crush Solitaire Mobile Game by King

Analysis

King’s Candy Crush Solitaire: What Went Wrong?

Candy Crush Solitaire by King had its global launch on Feb 6th. Looking at the numbers nearly one month later, the game did just $600K in revenue on 4 million downloads at that time. Doesn't seem like the result King was looking for after releasing it as the first Candy Crush-themed game in the last 6 years. The first impression of the game is that it's a little bit old, even though it's brand new. It carries the signature King UI that we are used to from their Match3 puzzlers, but both the style and layout of the UI evokes a 2015 vibe. This wouldn't be a problem if it were only visuals, but it seems the feature set is also not up to standard for the current generation of level-based puzzle games. And don’t get me started on the […]

Jakub Remiar March 5

Journal

Vita Mahjong scaled past $150K a Day

Vita Mahjong has already scaled past $150K a day in ad revenue & daily 400K downloads. In nearly one year, the game went past 65M downloads. Why is it scaling so high? 😎 Get the story here: This is another example of turning the established board games 🎲 into a level-based puzzle version on mobile. Similar to Domino Dreams by SuperPlay and Solitaire Grand Harvest by Playtika, these games just take elements from the well known board games, but they heavily simplify it, so it becomes a level based puzzler. Despite that, it still retains the organic search traffic for the original game as players are looking for a Mahjong game. Clever iteration 💡. Vita Mahjong has very small feature set; there is just the level-based core gameplay and some minimal events in the main menu, and that's it. No […]

Jakub Remiar March 4

Journal

Key Vietnamese Mobile Game Publishers

In the last 5 years we have seen more than 10 Bil. downloads 🤑 being done by companies that have risen in Vietnam Mobile gaming scene. It seems the ecosystem there is positioned for great future and a new hot spot 🔥 for mobile gaming. Who are the key players 😎? Most of the revenue is coming from Ad monetization-based games that are in between the Ultra-casual to Hyper-casual to Hybrid-casual spectrum regarding their feature set. As for countries, this revenue 💸 is coming mainly from Tier2 and Tier3 countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Türkiye, Pakistan, etc. Even though some games have pretty high US download shares. It seems that they were able to find something 💎 that is no longer possible in the west, as most of the western companies are pivoting towards much heavier IAP monetization towards […]

Jakub Remiar March 3

Journal

Supercell teased their “Boat Game”

Yesterday Supercell teased their new game called "Boat Game" ⛵ in a very cryptic video of gameplay and random images. There is also a hidden message in the video I am sure Internet will decode by now 😅. So what is Boat game about? On the surface look it looks like a simplification of Sea of Thieves ☠️, the pirate hit from Microsoft. We can see that there will be 2 core gameplays, one for the naval combat with completely different abilities and one for the land combat 🔫. Again with different set of abilities. Both controlled by the typical virtual joystick on the left and ability buttons on the right control scheme. Both cores seems to have their separate inventories as seen in the image of Gear & Boat buttons. I am guessing both will be based on gacha […]

Jakub Remiar February 27

Journal

Goods Puzzle Scaled Past $300K a Day!

Goods Puzzle by FALCON GAME STUDIO already scaled past $300K a day 🤑 with around 200K downloads a day. It is another recent hit from a studio in Vietnam, where gaming ecosystem is booming 📈. How did they do it? This is a sort game, where you need to match 3 same items on a supermarket 🛒 bench for them to disappear. Compared to other sort games you can freely move items around the shelves disregarding their type when placing them beside each other, which is the opposite of the usual sort core, where only the same colors/items can be placed near each other. This is then smartly scaled through level design mechanics such as moving conveyor belts, chained shelves, and vending shelves, which creates difficulty through time pressure ⏲️ as you fail only if you don't have any more […]

Jakub Remiar February 26

Journal

Warning! Heavy Game Design Here

Warning ☢️ Heavy Game Design post ahead 😁. Session control mechanics are one of the most important systems in mobile F2P. They control the pace through which the player not only consumes game's content, but also gets rewards. As games scales their content in mid to endgame, players get more and more energy, but they don't have more time during the day dedicated to the game. So what do you do? You still want them to progress by optimal pace, meaning that they would ideally consume all the energy ⚡ from the whole day. As this would take later too much time for the amount of energy consumed, you introduce energy multiplier systems. This enables the player to use the same amount of their time as usual for the core loop, but they are consuming multiples of their energy and […]

Jakub Remiar February 25

Journal

Candy Crush Solitaire by King

Candy Crush Solitaire by King had it global launch two weeks ago (Feb.6th). Looking at the numbers the game did just $260K in revenue on 3 Mil. downloads in that time. This doesn't seem like the result King was looking for? why is this happening? 🤔 Compared to competitors, and there are many, there is one major change in core gameplay, where players can store 1 extra card as another "connecting" card, instead of just linear connecting of all the cards on the board. This gives them much more tactical gameplay ⚔️, where they can save this card for later, when they run out of their current chain to immediately start the next one. Because of predominantly older female players, this seems like a step too far into the puzzle, strategic depth direction, which makes the game much more niche, […]

Jakub Remiar February 20

Journal

Scopely to buy Pokemon GO from Niantic

Data: SensorTower Scopely is in talks to buy Pokémon GO from Niantic, Inc. for $3,5B according to Bloomberg. Another week and another big company exit from the game industry as we saw with AppLovin last week, selling its whole gaming portfolio to yet unannounced the buyer. ◾ The deal would include the whole gaming portfolio of Niantic, but realistically speaking, only Pokemon GO matters there, as it did 80% ($30 Mil.) of the whole portfolio revenue in the last 30 days. Monster Hunter Now is doing $4 Mil. a month (10,7%) and Pikmin Bloom doing $2,4 Mil. a month (6,6%). After the colossal success of Pokémon Go, the geolocation game that started it all in 2016, Niantic was never able to replicate similar success with other big IPs such as Harry Potter 🧙, NBA, or Marvel in the geolocation genre […]

Jakub Remiar February 19

Highlights

AppLovin’s Gaming Portfolio

Yesterday AppLovin announced that it is selling it's whole gaming portfolio for $900 mil. 🤑 in order to focus only on Ad tech. The buyer was not announced. 🤔 Who could it be? Let's look closer at the performance of the games portfolio to get some hints 😎 ▪️ The ten studios that are being sold are Magic Tavern, Zero Gravity, PeopleFun, Lion Studios, Belka, Zenlife, Clipwire, Leyi, Machine Zone and Athena. On a surface look, the whole games portfolio did around $50 Mil. in IAP revenue only for last month. This is exactly half 📉 of what it did at its peak in January 2021. Downloads wise last month there was around 19 Mil. downloads, which is 10 times less compared to its peak in January 2021, which was 190 Mil. 😱 Of course let's be real, the peak […]

Jakub Remiar February 13

Journal

State of 4X Games

While the 4X war rages on ⚔️ between Last War and Whiteout Survival, both doing well over $110 Mil. a month 🤑 the 4X genre is becoming the mirror of the whole mobile game industry based on its latest evolution to survive in the current market. Why so? ▪️ Because 4X is so Cost Per Install intensive, it created a new way of lowering CPIs by literally adding a different game into its onboarding. Those games being very accessible, increase the total addressable market of the genre itself. This went into overdrive in High Seas Hero , which actually added 2 different games 😱 before you get into 4X endgame. ▪️ Because 4X is so Cost Per Install intensive, its creatives are being copied by the whole mobile game industry. What is new in 4X will be in a week […]

Jakub Remiar February 11

Jakub Remiar

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