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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Journal

How did Azur Games get past 10 Billion installs?

How did Azur Games get past 10 Billion installs 😱? And how is their newly launched Hybrid casual title, Slime Castle scaling past $30K IAP a day? We got to talk to 🎮Sergey Marcinkiewicz, a Publishing Manager and head of Studio 😎.Sergey shared a lot 💡 about some of the unique strategies of Azur, such as launching Hyper casual (Not Hybrid!) games with a focus on long-term Roas and retention targets. Games that were rejected by other publishers were successfully scaled in Azur's portfolio 📈. Because of this "flexible" publishing strategy, Azur got an edge in different than "mainstream" markets.Slime Castle, which is published by Azur is actually developed by RedTail Games, a developer from China. It is a very clever iteration of Doodle Magic, (the rogue-lite tower defense without a road) which we talked about during our Christmas prophecy […]

Jakub Remiar August 1

Journal

Zenless Zone Zero by miHoYo: $50M in 3 Weeks

Zenless Zone Zero by miHoYo already went past $50 Million in the first 3 weeks 🤑 Just on mobile with more than 12 Million Downloads, still doing around $1 Million a day on mobile only. How does it compare to the other portfolio titles? We see the winning formula of miHoYo being in use here again, where the tried and tested metagame gacha progression is the same as with Genshin and HSR. Again as with HSR, there is a different core gameplay, where here we have a fast-paced visceral hack-and-slash style points combat ⚔. What could go wrong here? It seems not everything is going according to the plan.The combat itself is the biggest highlight of the game, but it is unfortunately buried under loads of additional loops, that don't add that much value to the overall power progression. The […]

Jakub Remiar August 1

Jakub Remiar

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