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 the episode.
The new promising genre that Lemon showed us is 2D Arcade Idle + 4X (you can see the game “Fingertips Warriors” in the screenshots). Yeah, you heard it right imagine your typical Dreamdale or My Perfect Hotel with a 4X metagame on top 🤑. This game is already making millions in the top 10 charts of WeChat minigames. Thanks again Lemon for coming on the podcast and sharing a lot of insights and valuable knowledge 👍. Join us as we discuss this with Matej 🦩 & Felix 😎.
📺 Watch on YouTube
