Softlaunch Sonar #8 - Exploring the Latest Game Releases & Innovations

Speaker 1 This one is called Shop and Goblins, Soft Lunch January 27th. Both the Throne of Roses and Warhunt for Survival was Soft Lunch February 14th and 26th.

Speaker 1 But Shopping Goblins is super unique because you go into a shop

Speaker 1 and you're the shopkeeper actually.

Speaker 1 And people come to your shop and then you need to appraise their items.

Speaker 1 I thought like, oh, didn't we saw this somewhere? Like Match Factory? Is this like 3D match or something? No.

Speaker 1 So they took this kind of a physics-based gameplay that looks like 3D match.

Speaker 1 skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise.
Jackets crafted realms, lift us to the highs. Two and a half gamers talking smack.
Slow hockey sick, got your back.

Speaker 1 Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Hello, hello. This is two and a half gamers.

Speaker 1 You're annual.

Speaker 1 It's two gamers today, huh?

Speaker 1 Yeah, because Mati is on a UA second

Speaker 1 finding users in Tahiti.

Speaker 1 And he'll be back in a week. No, he's at GDC.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so it's just you and me today. And what are we going to be talking about today? Yeah, as usual, we're going to be having a lot of fun

Speaker 1 because we're going to talk about new games

Speaker 1 that we see in our sonar, as per usual.

Speaker 1 Q sounds

Speaker 1 soft launch sonar. Yeah, soft launch sonar that's on the table.
Actually, I even brought up a dead game into the mix. So that's going to be a wild

Speaker 1 game. Yeah, you tell me which one of the games that I'll be talking about is already dead.

Speaker 1 And yeah, lots of interesting gameplay. I think I

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Some sections were switched, so we so we don't really

Speaker 1 foreshadow that strong which game is which, but I guess let's start and get to it. Because there's lots of cover.

Speaker 1 Soft launch sonar is quite good because usually with soft launches, you need UA, right?

Speaker 1 Because there we go. This is good because this episode is actually sponsored to you by PVX Partners, non-ecu equity dilutive UA funding.
All you have to do is go to pvx.com.

Speaker 1 You plug into a bunch of stuff. We actually did an episode with them, and it was actually quite interesting to hear about how they actually, yeah, basically calculate if they can fund you or not.

Speaker 1 But basically, all you have to do is just plug in your data. They have a look, and then money in your account quite easily within two weeks.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, PVX partners, thank you so much for sponsoring us. Not as good ad read as Matte usually does, but you know, considering I've never launched a UA campaign, I think it's quite good.

Speaker 1 Let's get back to this quite exciting episode

Speaker 1 let's go let's go there um okay so first games on the list uh this is actually a little bit of a cheat because

Speaker 1 um this is DC Dark Legion from Funplus but this is the fighter game

Speaker 1 nope

Speaker 1 this is a squad based RPG Forex

Speaker 1 Oh

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 this actually launched already today so I guess by the time you're hearing us, it's already a few days after global launch.

Speaker 1 Uh because I had it like on on the soft launch list for quite some time, but I it was just like uh pretty much went into global launch anyway. So we're just gonna briefly talk about it.

Speaker 1 So um I think this is like the first time that we see that like

Speaker 1 very heavily branded Forex enters the game. If it's even Age of Empires, come on.
Uh the Age of Empires is Age of Empires. Let's leave it where it is for it to die.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 this seems quite interesting.

Speaker 1 So actually, if you look into the game,

Speaker 1 there's this. Where is it?

Speaker 1 Fallout Shelter-like kind of view

Speaker 1 where the CT panel or like the CT

Speaker 1 is basically in Fallout Cell Shelter like Ant Farm. Similar to Hi C0,

Speaker 1 as we look there, like, I guess it's the new layout of like Better CT because instead of like

Speaker 1 3D crawling, you have a isometric map, you rather have like the end farm thing, which is like this, then.

Speaker 1 So, that's there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's of course all the DC branded characters: Batman, Wonder Woman,

Speaker 1 Green, Green, Arrow, and like all these other guys, I guess.

Speaker 1 Joker, yeah, you know, the drill.

Speaker 1 So, that's there.

Speaker 1 On top of it,

Speaker 1 I think, yeah,

Speaker 1 there seems to be some kind of a map, like mini-map, not even like the big map, and there's the combat, like which is like Scott-based RPG.

Speaker 1 Nothing fancy to it. This is basically AFK Arena.
You see it, it's like not even turn-based, it's just real-time automated combat, so nothing again new to it. But I think I had a

Speaker 1 better image somewhere here later in a different video, yeah, here

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 like one of the youtubers is explaining how the world map works.

Speaker 1 Because if you look at it, this basically looks like the radar function, like our famous balloon, where at some point it kinda goes up and like now you have the world map you need to complete these quests which are easing you into the forex gameplay on the big kind of marching armies map, which I haven't saw yet.

Speaker 1 So hopefully this works as I think it works. Otherwise

Speaker 1 yeah, the forexy part is a little bit doubtful, but I guess it's probably forex. We'll see.
We'll definitely keep that in mind as we are very keen on how the forex genre evolves.

Speaker 1 And there will be also a lot of forexes today on the menu, but yeah, why is there so many forex going into the market right now?

Speaker 1 Why is there so many forexes going into the market?

Speaker 1 Because everybody sees the giant numbers that Last War and

Speaker 1 White Out Survivor is pulling.

Speaker 1 I would guess so. But, you know, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 Honestly, like, it's a nice attempt, but I don't think so. This stands a chance.
Because you know what we're missing here.

Speaker 1 You know what's missing? No.

Speaker 1 Our favorite fake onboarding mini-game.

Speaker 1 Ah, right.

Speaker 1 But you haven't shown it in the gameplay yet, so I don't know.

Speaker 1 That's the tricky card. That instead of a fake onboarding mini-game and fake creatives, they will have the DCIP.
The question is if it's strong enough, which I highly doubt. Probably not.

Speaker 1 My guess is this is joining Age of Empires Mobile, but whatever. Yeah, let's see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this was soft launch September 20th, 2024. I'm just saying.
Okay. Not a long soft launch, Dana.

Speaker 1 Not that much, yeah. Pretty, pretty short one.
Okay. This is an interesting one.
I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Simple.

Speaker 1 Guess who this is? This game is called Bold Stack.

Speaker 1 I came. No.

Speaker 1 Falcon. One more tip.

Speaker 1 Uh voodoo. Homer.
Ah, Homer.

Speaker 1 This was launched on February 3rd and it uses an iteration of the stacking or

Speaker 1 sorting probably gameplay of nut sort.

Speaker 1 actually

Speaker 1 from Triple Dot,

Speaker 1 if you remember.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that looks exactly exactly like it yeah yeah but there's an iteration because if you look here uh this is more close to those like water puzzle games where you have like the liquids kind of running over and stuff like that uh

Speaker 1 sorts colorward sorts yeah yeah like all these other ones even even like magic sword but this if you look at it there's a big difference there because there's always the

Speaker 1 pretty much the goal objectives that you need to fulfill

Speaker 1 because in the like the let's say, base sorting games, you just need to put the colors in order. Here, you need to put the colors on top and then they disappear like in hexasort.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so there's a little bit of a twist there. It's not really not sort

Speaker 1 kind of a one-to-one clone. There's an iteration, so that's interesting.
And my guess is, and this is a wild guess again, because all in hole is currently scaling so much.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 what I wanted to say here is that what I think will happen probably, because HOMA is already scaling all in all in crazy scale, like 300k in IP a day, that probably guys in HOMA will be also aiming for a heavy IP-driven puzzler with this, not an ad-based game.

Speaker 1 So that's my guess here. But again, we'll see.
But nonetheless, it's an interesting iteration, not just like one-to-one copy. Yeah.
Okay,

Speaker 1 continuing forward.

Speaker 1 So this game I wasn't able to find gameplay just the trailer, but I think trailer is enough

Speaker 1 and what do we have here?

Speaker 1 So I saw Metacore and it's match, but is it the upgraded match which basically this is not match. This is merge.
Oh merge. Sorry merge.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so they had previously they had the other soft lunch game called merch plaza

Speaker 1 which we covered before.

Speaker 1 This is called Sugarworks Merch Joy.

Speaker 1 Literally looks like

Speaker 1 Canti Crush IP from Wish.

Speaker 1 Can't help it, really. With a bit of Royal Match meta? Yeah, yeah, so the difference again, just by looking at the screen, you can see that it seems it's a level-based merge, or I would think so.

Speaker 1 Don't know. Or some kind of like progression of the board.
And then there's, yeah, Royal Match kind of kingdom

Speaker 1 not even renovating just building kind of a visual meta but yeah let's see i think uh metacore is currently searching very hard for like their next hit game because they they're having like lots of games in soft lunch there's the grandpa solitaire thing there's the merch plaza thing now there's this

Speaker 1 I would guess that they're probably also cooking something else. I guess guys from Supercell or maybe they're trying to be like Supercell.
It's kind of

Speaker 1 push for more iteration on new games to kind of go there because merge mansion isn't definitely in a great spot because it's getting completely attacked by microfund the Chinese guys who took over merch category.

Speaker 1 Why was it again to manage to take over the merge category? It's just

Speaker 1 pure manpower.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 pretty much newer and better version of the original games on the market. Like Love and Pies got literally steamrolled over by...

Speaker 1 I don't remember if it's it's Gossip Harbor or Seaside

Speaker 1 or the other one. Yeah, I think Seaside Escape is the travel time copy and Gossip Harbor is the

Speaker 1 Love and Pies one, but yeah, basically they took the original and make it better and

Speaker 1 took them over in the chart. So let's see.
Gaming is brutal, yeah. Gaming is very brutal in this, like, especially if you're competing with Chinese teams, that's how it is.

Speaker 1 Okay, um,

Speaker 1 yeah, this will be interesting.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 as we know,

Speaker 1 yeah, AI is here. AI Waifus.

Speaker 1 AI.

Speaker 1 This is not AI Waifu. Yeah, there's Waifus there.
But basically, what's happening here,

Speaker 1 that there is this game called Throne of Roses.

Speaker 1 And you can guess the developer of this.

Speaker 1 I can't. It's Army and Waifus.
I have no idea. It's Stop for Fun again.

Speaker 1 The guys behind Top Girl, obviously.

Speaker 1 Of course. This seems just the

Speaker 1 real Forex version of Top Girl.

Speaker 1 Where we have our...

Speaker 1 More hardcore? Yeah, like basically hardcore, probably less streamlined, more kind of Forex-y. We have our usual kind of trick with Forex.
Can we build a tank armory?

Speaker 1 Would she ask that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So we have these AI animated characters. You can see this already, that this is done by AI and stuff.

Speaker 1 Then, somewhere here later, there comes the usual trick where our character, narrator, gets captured. Give up the city or she's dead.
That's all that was written on the photo.

Speaker 1 I regret that I didn't hold her back that day.

Speaker 1 So it's the usual thing that the narrator character ends up on a bomb or whatever, like puts him as a dangerous situation.

Speaker 1 And then it goes into the usual thing where another character steps in and you just build the town and roll over and blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 I think, like, fifth or seventh minute, there's the forex map already. Yeah, here we are, and yeah, that's that's our usual thing.

Speaker 1 The kicker here is that this is actually Kiss of War

Speaker 1 because if I look at this, this is Kiss of War, which is basically the same intro cinematic.

Speaker 1 And then instead of our AI girl, we have 3D girls that are there. And the YouTube video I'm showing you is four years old.

Speaker 1 No way. Yes.

Speaker 1 That looks like Reddit 2, which is 20 years old. Yeah, that's a different thing.

Speaker 1 But what's happening here again is the signature tip for fun move where you took your original game and what you changed there is just the onboarding in order to lower CPI.

Speaker 1 So now they're putting the top girl kind of a

Speaker 1 skeleton on on top of it basically.

Speaker 1 Isn't that quite a clever way of game making though?

Speaker 1 Of course, because like, you know, the only thing that matters in Forex is CPI, and they are masters of Forex can play and like the, you know, product part anyway.

Speaker 1 So the only thing that matters to them is just to lower the CPI. That's what they do.

Speaker 1 To top it off,

Speaker 1 here is the other game that they have because Top 4 from always have two Forexs within very similar onboardings. There's Warhunt Survival.

Speaker 1 where it literally starts with you killing animals.

Speaker 1 That's a good hook. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then the girl kind of tells you something.

Speaker 1 Then she goes into killing a deer,

Speaker 1 which she misses.

Speaker 1 And I guess our narrator misses there.

Speaker 1 He killed the deer. Then goes the cinematic, as it was there.

Speaker 1 And then we go into killing Scarlett Johansson.

Speaker 1 Wait, why?

Speaker 1 Because IP infringement.

Speaker 1 And we don't care.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 so, yeah, uh this is quite literally very interesting and it's exactly the same kind of onboarding except this part.

Speaker 1 But like once this part goes off, like we're back to city building, the usual same game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 But like again, without the, you know, the part where you're shooting arrows at Black Widow.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it goes on as usual. Our character gets captured somewhere here.

Speaker 1 I think somewhere here.

Speaker 1 yeah new character comes in and i think she's like the bad girl yeah there there she is give up the city or she's dead as usual

Speaker 1 that looks exactly like the person who was in that james bond movie i can't remember

Speaker 1 yeah so again another character steps in and help us and like cycle pretty much continues so again Every single month or every single quarter I'm doing this. And by the way,

Speaker 1 now we're killing Assassin's Creed character with the Tomo.

Speaker 1 So, every single quarter, when I'm looking at their account, they're doing this forex onboarding nonsense. It's just so funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but to top it off, they have one other game which is actually unique. And I'm super curious how this one will go.
This one is called Shop and Goblins, Softplan January 27th.

Speaker 1 Both the Throne of Roses and Warham for Soro was Soft Lunch February 14th and 26th.

Speaker 1 But Shopping goblins is super unique because you go into a shop

Speaker 1 and you're the shopkeeper actually and people come to your shop and then you need to appraise their items

Speaker 1 I thought like oh didn't we saw this somewhere like match factory is this like 3d match or something no

Speaker 1 so they took this

Speaker 1 Kind of a physics based gameplay that looks like 3D match but then you are literally going piece by piece equipment on the

Speaker 1 like in the mess basically in in the chest

Speaker 1 it tells you like how much and it's like i think there's there's this show on discovery like uh you know the best i can do meme is from

Speaker 1 pound shop something or whatever yeah so i guess this is it basically because then the guy says like oh let's give you a fair price like a hundred thousand and like you say like oh twenty thousand and like he goes sixty thousand and you go then five thousand and he's like okay i'll sell sell you for 400 or something like that.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 Junkyard Heroes, or like one of these auction shows. Take a pick of whatever it is.
Yeah, exactly. It's like one of these auctions.
I always forgot the name.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's so many of them. Yeah, so this is the core loop where some people come in and

Speaker 1 you then sell the thing and you see here on the top that you have made your profit because you give him the price and then like on top of it, you pretty much much go there.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, as you go, you're some rocks and a gold nugget, and then

Speaker 1 you upgrade your guy, you upgrade your armor, you upgrade blah blah blah. A lot of things,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 the usual. It's basically about earning money, yeah, it's about earning money.

Speaker 1 But the thing that that kind of distracted me, and because this is up for fun, was when I got here to this point, where you can clearly see the UI there on the bottom, where the UI says

Speaker 1 Alliance.

Speaker 1 I think it's a Forex as well. Yeah, so that's also my idea that probably this will end up being a Forex.
Also, that's my wild guess.

Speaker 1 But I don't see the world button, but maybe it will be somewhere there. But yeah, we'll see.
We'll see if this goes somewhere. But it's super unique, definitely.
It's super unique, very interesting.

Speaker 1 And as I said, I've never seen this kind of a gameplay before.

Speaker 1 So let's see.

Speaker 1 I said, this was soft planned January 27th.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now for something more conventional. Cool.

Speaker 1 Here we go.

Speaker 1 Family farm match. Guest.
Do you know what a hand grenade?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 1 Like, how is that okay?

Speaker 1 It's a hand grenaded match tree.

Speaker 1 Colorful hand grenade. I mean, it looks really good, that hand grenade.

Speaker 1 Instead of a bomb, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, family farm match with hand grenades. Why?

Speaker 1 Who could even make a hand grenade, family farm match with a hand grenade? Why is it family with a hand grenade?

Speaker 1 Just a developer.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Peak? I don't know.
No.

Speaker 1 Grand?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Century games.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's again.

Speaker 1 Honestly, as soon as you said century games, of course they would put hand grenades in with something called family. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 They really want to break into the match three categories. It's one of their latest attempts, and I don't know which one is this, like seventh or eighth one.
Anyway, sending regards to heaven.

Speaker 1 This one is super polished, as usual. Like, it's literally plays like Royal Match.

Speaker 1 I can't really speak for it. Does it have the meta? Is the same meta? Yeah, that's the kicker here.

Speaker 1 So actually, let me go here and it's not renovation of that castle thing, but you are basically building some farm stuff.

Speaker 1 So if you finish the level, you see you get these things and then you build a house or whatever or something and like renovate. See?

Speaker 1 It's basically Royal Kingdom. Royal Kingdom is the system also.
Like it's kind of very simple.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is basically Royal Kingdom.

Speaker 1 It's not renovation, it's just building without the broken, you know, desolated part, whatever.

Speaker 1 But if we scroll forward, this is basically how the game basically looks on level 48, which is Royal Match. Because you see, they already have the events here on the left side.

Speaker 1 They have the battle pass, they have the

Speaker 1 reward pass, they have this propole and offer.

Speaker 1 Seems that they have everything already. so it looks very good.
How do you think this will do? Hmm? How do you think this will do? Um,

Speaker 1 the kicker I was kind of trying to look for is: do they have these, you know, save the king levels?

Speaker 1 I wasn't able to find them because there's not a video of a level that's like

Speaker 1 the thing that makes a real difference. The creatives, they're already using the creatives of Royal Match, like you know, the concept of saving the king near that situation, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's that's definitely needed anyway. But my question is: if they put something into the core, like Royal Match did, like every 10 level is this, or that, or whatever, something, something.
So

Speaker 1 that's what I'm really curious if they will have this kind of advantage, because otherwise,

Speaker 1 I don't know. And

Speaker 1 it's just like going against Royal Match now that they release Royal Kingdom. It's just like you're going against two of those now.
So

Speaker 1 kind of a

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 it will be very

Speaker 1 bonanza. Yeah, it's if you have bonanza uphill battle, definitely.
But uh you know, if if there's anyone that can crack it, uh for sure. Like uh

Speaker 1 I mean they have a budget Chinese company with giant budget definitely. They they they they're within the means to to do it definitely.
Okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 Bold game.

Speaker 1 Ah, are we gonna cover this on an episode, standalone episode? Uh, probably until we get an alpha invite.

Speaker 1 But it seems that didn't uh didn't our correspondent in tahiti have one of these i think so maybe don't know but it seems that the alpha is kind of uh ongoing it's not like the usual three-day weekend test because it's full of youtube currently uh through like influencers and like the usual kind of supercell influencer army so i just wanted to mention it because this was basically announced announced last month so they're finally doing a normal soft launch no no no it's not normal it's invite only it's invite only it's not like the usual countries are unlocked, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 So what I just wanted to briefly cover is that what this is and what it seems this is and yeah, what do we think? So

Speaker 1 to me, it looks like Sea of Thieves a little bit. Sea of Thieves is this very, very popular PC pirate game from

Speaker 1 Microsoft that's basically like a more complex version of this where you go on islands, you fight enemies, you pick up treasure, and then you go on boats, you fight enemies to get on islands to pick up treasure, like here.

Speaker 1 Imagine if Ubisoft would have fought like this, like with that color. Oh, it would have been so good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so as you see here, you control you have either land combat or sea combat, you can even swim, so go around the place.

Speaker 1 Uh, what you need to do is you go on some one of these islands where search area for a dick spot, where you literally need to find like the X marks the spot is here.

Speaker 1 Then you dig out the treasure, and then you bring the treasure chest into your boat.

Speaker 1 And then, once you do it, uh, you sail off into the horizon as done here, which is the goal objective, leave the map, and then you get the treasure in your

Speaker 1 kind of a hideout cave or something like that, if I understand correctly. Like, this is basically the main menu.
Uh, it's like something

Speaker 1 both, okay, both actually

Speaker 1 so uh

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 seems very interesting uh reminds me a lot actually of uh

Speaker 1 close that this is close to their moco game if you remember the rpg where again you have the central hub from which you go on missions taking loot blah blah blah the vcr store that's no no no vcr is different anyway

Speaker 1 we don't know bear yet uh yeah there's uh double inventory one for the gear for the land combat one for the boat, for the sea combat, and there's brain. And brain is basically a skill tree.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the video... Yeah, here it is.
So there's like massive, massive... Shitload of skills.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 massive, massive skill tree. Similar to something like that of Exile, I guess.
The

Speaker 1 not green... points are the ones that are just stat holders and then the other ones are the ones with

Speaker 1 special abilities. For instance, here you can see the combat of a player.
So he literally switched into like PvP

Speaker 1 mode because suddenly he became red.

Speaker 1 There's like an alert bedding nearby and then the guy gets killed, I guess, because he didn't,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 didn't

Speaker 1 catch this.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it seems that it's both PvP, PvE. It's not Battle Royale as I thought.
It's a little bit different. But let's see.

Speaker 1 It seems super interesting, but also it seems super core because there's so many abilities and so many things, and they're still on two joysticks basically.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, how much do you think a game like this costs before they put it in alpha?

Speaker 1 A lot to make a lot, right? A lot because it looks really good already. Yeah, it looks really good.
It's like fully 3D, full, like everything's new art, you know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Depends on, like,

Speaker 1 as I told you. Did you play this? Or are we not

Speaker 1 Oh, I w I would be definitely the target audience, like for sure. For sure.
Like it's it's RPG RPG based looter basically. So I'm definitely the target audience.

Speaker 1 But what what I meant to say that because Supercell acquired L Rift Labs oh sorry, Phantom Labs, the the the studio that makes the rif

Speaker 1 Rift Rifters uh game, which is again similar to Moco,

Speaker 1 which and and and this is like the third or fourth game which is kinda this kinda RPG light style thing. So, my guess is that there's a little bit of reuse of technology, so it's not that

Speaker 1 expensive that's starting from the ground because I think they're just literally following a direction that they want to

Speaker 1 call the problem solver, yeah, RPG,

Speaker 1 yeah, problem solver. That's great,

Speaker 1 see the negotiator. Oh, I love it, double-barreled shotgun.
Oh, I love it. So, yeah, uh, it's the usual quirky humor of Supercell, so I guess that's what's done.

Speaker 1 But, yeah we'll definitely once we get our hands on this or mr tahiti guy returns we'll get a full review on this for sure it looks quite good man like i really like the artwork like i say that with every supercell game like you cannot not like it yeah of course it's just like like flood rush i still like i still think that artwork was the prettiest so sad they killed flood rush was so good i also missed that to be honest i would rather flood rush i wonder why they killed it uh probably too similar to squadbusters i would guess.

Speaker 1 But yeah, let's see. Squadbuster is still not dead, though.
Ah, it's definitely not dead, but it's not scaling up or even kind of keeping up. Okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 Grow a monster.

Speaker 1 Grow a monster. So, where do we see this?

Speaker 1 Do you see the game?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's alien invasion. Ah, there you go.

Speaker 1 Somebody's painting.

Speaker 1 It took me a while. I was like, I've never seen this, this, but I'm like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. That's great.
Yeah, so there's this game called Grow Monster.

Speaker 1 This is actually from Studio Hype Hype, which is the former Frogmind guys.

Speaker 1 They had their UGC engine on, which is Hype Hype, literally. And it seems they finally released a game of their own, which seems to be this kind of a

Speaker 1 first slash third person alien invasion, if I understand correctly. It looks like it's built in their UGC engine

Speaker 1 because last time as I was looking at it the art and everything looks like it

Speaker 1 so is this last marketable though

Speaker 1 yeah that's the question

Speaker 1 I don't know this was soft launch February 22nd

Speaker 1 and yeah

Speaker 1 I'm kind of uh let's say the because the UGC content in the hype engine always looks like it has this prototypish

Speaker 1 production budget quality. And this is definitely within that same

Speaker 1 ballpark. So I guess it will look like this

Speaker 1 always, but I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't see any difficulty here, though. That's the thing, right?

Speaker 1 Like, Alien Invasion gets really hard.

Speaker 1 Later, of course, later it gets really hard. But yeah, my guess is that this seems more of like advertisement for the UGC tool.
Yeah. That like it's possible to create games within it.

Speaker 1 That would be my guess, not really like we're aiming to make this into a sustainable business as a game, but but yeah, let's see. Oh, that's my guess because I don't think so this is going anywhere.

Speaker 1 Um, okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 Cube Masters.

Speaker 1 So, guess what

Speaker 1 is this peak?

Speaker 1 Nope,

Speaker 1 but I don't know who it's Turkish, but it's not peak. Yeah, it's Turkish, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Looks like a Turkish puzzler.

Speaker 1 You know, but you can see the Scandinavian artwork. Like, you know, if you're seeing a Rovier game or Supercell game.
Likewise, you can see if the Turks are making it work, you know?

Speaker 1 Just like you can see it's a Vietnamese game and there's so many interstitial labs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is called Cube Masters. This was soft launched February 7th.

Speaker 1 And as you can already see, it's an iteration on a single-player level-based version of Block Blast.

Speaker 1 And the studio behind this is Spike Games. Oh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I guess Rina is at it again, sending regards.

Speaker 1 I think this is quite interesting because, if I understood correctly, after their

Speaker 1 first

Speaker 1 failed game, the Casino one and Spike Games, they open like a a lot of games that were currently trending during that period, which went I think pretty well with Dalbusters but didn't sustain.

Speaker 1 Then there was

Speaker 1 some some other game basically or like there was the match game that I guess also didn't make it.

Speaker 1 Now they're jumping on the blockbuster and which by the way a lot of people are jumping and I'm already working with like one client that is already doing like this.

Speaker 1 I mean the thing is like when you're about to overtake the most most successful game in mobile history in terms of active user base, that's something people take notice of.

Speaker 1 Like, they are maybe, I was looking at the numbers today, they are maybe two or three weeks out of taking over. Like, yeah, Subway Surfers.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, Robbus is definitely making ways, and you can see it even here. Like, this gameplay is now being kind of thrown around a lot.
And just because of that image, and I guess we'll get to it once more,

Speaker 1 where we can already see our usual

Speaker 1 Royal Match Meta or Magic Sword, or however you, but yeah, the icons basically in the bottom tells you way. This one on the right is from the collective album.

Speaker 1 So it seems that just using Royal Match Meta with the blockbust level-based core gameplay. So that's there.
It's a good proposition. Like if you can make it and be fast enough, you can still do it.

Speaker 1 But yeah, we'll see. It will be a tough fight.
I'll definitely have some more on this later in this episode. Okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 Match the tales. Harry Potter.

Speaker 1 Seems Harry Potter from Wish.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this is, again, as you can say, is what?

Speaker 1 Man, I was just going to say, man, this is exactly what the world needs, another match 3 game. You mean another copy of Royal Match?

Speaker 1 Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it has this very unique Harry Potter-like-ish IP, which is not Harry Potter. And a little bit of Spyro there.
Did you see Spyro up in the corner? Yeah, yeah, he holds a dragon egg.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dragon egg, which is, yeah. So I guess there are dragons or something.
There are no hand grenades.

Speaker 1 Who is this? In the corner. Yes.

Speaker 1 I don't operate in this space.

Speaker 1 They always advertise how they don't have ads, so I usually don't get hired.

Speaker 1 Okay, this is my game.

Speaker 1 Okay. This was soft lunch February 12th.
And again, seems your typical kind of Royal match follow-up with this Harry Potter-ish wipe. I wasn't able to see what's the like in between meta.

Speaker 1 Because it seems that there's just like

Speaker 1 the image gets fuller or something like that. Yeah, the image gets un unhidden or like populated.

Speaker 1 Because yeah, you see there's less stuff in it. And yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like the low-cost version of something you just saw that uh Century Games use on their family grenade farm. So

Speaker 1 yeah, it's just uh little bit of less production budget version of Royal Match stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really think this is a good strategy now.
Like

Speaker 1 it's too late. Yeah, I I think it's too late.
And you don't have uh a

Speaker 1 strong enough USP to even differentiate between all the clones. So

Speaker 1 that's fair.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's tougher because it takes time to build it.
And it's

Speaker 1 super tough. It's super tough.
And, you know, keep in mind that all these things that you build is still not even the main thing.

Speaker 1 The main thing is the level design and the difficulty adjustment and being able to

Speaker 1 tinker with the levels and all these funnels and so many KPIs. Like, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's nice. Basically, the kind of theme so far is match 3 and 4x.

Speaker 1 We'll get there. We'll get there.

Speaker 1 Just wait a second. Okay.

Speaker 1 Moving on.

Speaker 1 XP Hero.

Speaker 1 So guess. This is Segames.

Speaker 1 Looks like Seigames. Why?

Speaker 1 Because of...

Speaker 1 Yeah, the mechanic, like My Perfect Hotel.

Speaker 1 Insert all the other games.

Speaker 1 The other game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't remember the first one with the name is right now

Speaker 1 dreamdale yeah yeah so this is actually

Speaker 1 uh seems to be a combination of something like dreamdale which is the

Speaker 1 arcade idol

Speaker 1 and then alien invasion why alien invasion because the guy has a cargo capacity as you see there

Speaker 1 and as he goes around and like collects stuff and then upgrades his inventory and stuff like that this is basically taken from alien invasion so it's a little bit of both where

Speaker 1 you are

Speaker 1 you know killing monsters and getting your cargo full which you need to then see bring back to your base this is the alien invasion mechanic but it's all done within the dreamdale kind of wheel building our base and doing stuff around it kind of building stuff and economy i think somewhere here later yeah you see he gets like rocks now

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 now we have the wood thing and like all all these other kind of resources and stuff like that. So it's like a mix of Alien Invasion and Rindo, which is great.
So who does this game?

Speaker 1 Who's doing this game? It's actually done by Super Send.

Speaker 1 Our friends from Korea.

Speaker 1 Didn't see that coming. Yeah.
And you see the difference between the Alien Invasion iteration that we just saw with Grow Monster from Hype Hype.

Speaker 1 So the production quality is here. This is like, yeah, it's just giant.
This looks really good. Yeah, this looks really good.
Like, from this new, I think this is going to do really well.

Speaker 1 Like, Thor's hammer hanging there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like,

Speaker 1 the best games are yet to come on this episode. Let me just say that.
But this is like one of the... This is the best one so far, I think.

Speaker 1 This is very good. Like, I think the idea and the combination is very good because Alien Invasion still wasn't utilized.
The core wasn't utilized that much.

Speaker 1 There's just Alien Invasion and like a few follow-ups, but not like significantly big game. Dream Dev itself was a great game, but it wasn't able to sustain it.

Speaker 1 And I think adding alien invasion progression on top of it could help it a lot. Because Dream Dell, I think, suffers mostly on the thing that economy just gets too complex and like to kinda, you know,

Speaker 1 need to do this, need to do that. Here you have like the merge gasha thing.
And yeah, this is just. I don't see any ads though, which is very unlike Supercent.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would guess that this is something that they're trying to drive more towards like fifty-fifty.

Speaker 1 But there would definitely be ads here. The game's designed to take on ads.
It's just a matter of time, probably.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I'm super interesting on this one, you know. I'm really liking it already, just by like so much.

Speaker 1 There's something about it. Yeah, and the art style is great.
So,

Speaker 1 well, let's see. Okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 Hero roguelike RPGs

Speaker 1 This is not so boring, man. This is amazing, actually.

Speaker 1 I'm sure, but like, nothing to like, it's just so not up my target audience. Like, I'm not the target audience.
So, we were actually shown this game

Speaker 1 in Seoul.

Speaker 1 This is from 1100%.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is a game that is a monopoly go-like RPG.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember that. So it has the similar.
It's actually very close to something like Capybara Go.

Speaker 1 Because the difference between this and Capybara Go that in Capybara Go, the character just going forward and there's like random rolls in between.

Speaker 1 Here, it doesn't go forward, it goes on the monopoly board, and there are...

Speaker 1 random rolls where he can end up here and on top of it there's the you know roguelide character getting stronger selecting skill stuff like that

Speaker 1 i think the problem for this game is the art style because it's this very heavy niche like you said like not my cup of tea immediately even though progression wise and probably systems wise it's quite close to the xp hero that i just showed you but the art style there was just much more attractive to you

Speaker 1 So yeah, I guess this could be a problem. But if this is more aimed towards kind of Korea, Asia, maybe it's not because these guys really like European Dark Fantasy team, which is basically this.

Speaker 1 So we'll see.

Speaker 1 But it seems very interesting, and I guess it's one of the predictions that's coming to light, which I said, that more and more games will be using this monopoly-like random kind of system visualization to kind of move forward.

Speaker 1 Because it's just...

Speaker 1 people like randomness and it's it's streamlining the game very easily because you don't need to choose like it's being chosen for you by the difficulty oh sorry by the chance chance based system.

Speaker 1 So that's there.

Speaker 1 This was soft launch February twentieth and again it's called a hero roguelike RPG.

Speaker 1 For those who don't know by the way Supercent is a subsidiary of eleven hundred percent. So

Speaker 1 Supercent is? Yes. Those two companies are tied together.

Speaker 1 Like Supercent is the heavy Ed based one and eleven hundred percent, you know, all the lucky defenses and tower-based tower defense games, heavy IP ones.

Speaker 1 You know what? I was going to say I didn't know that, but now I remembered I did know that, but I didn't remember. I think you even read it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Anyway,

Speaker 1 this is actually the top game that I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 This is in soft launch now. You sure about that? Yes.
This is actually global launched, Asia-launched.

Speaker 1 It's already making something like 70 to 80k a day

Speaker 1 it's that usual kind of we first global launch in Asia

Speaker 1 and then we go out to the rest of the world so we played this at China joy last year you remember that we were shown this yeah because this is like one of those most popular wechat games we actually had this in last

Speaker 1 quarter sonar but it was still not translated into into English. Now it's translated into English.
I don't know what's happening because Sensita

Speaker 1 or the day, I don't remember which one keeps saying that this was released October 26th.

Speaker 1 But my guess is this was just done in February because I would just know about it. I was literally a Joinett's account and it wasn't there in this English translation.
But yeah, here we are.

Speaker 1 We finally will be able to play this game and I'm really looking forward to it. For those who don't know, this is

Speaker 1 one of the top games in China regarding WeChat platform, even regarding normal kind of mobile platforms. It's a Arcade Idol Forex RPG basically, and it's making waves basing pretty much.

Speaker 1 I don't think so. It will be probably that

Speaker 1 successful in the West, but I guess it will capture the audience anyway, but it's super successful in China, definitely. And the name is Go Go Sam Cork.

Speaker 1 I don't know how they ended up. They'll probably end up changing the name, I think, for the Western audience now.
Maybe.

Speaker 1 this is the Western audience name already. This is how it's how it's named.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Like the Google Translate put there last time I was translating the Chinese name fingertip warriors, which I got told that it's kinda pretty accurate, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 Like I'm I'm really looking forward to kinda play this because this is literally like like the game you saw Dream Dale 1 with like the arcade like there we go.

Speaker 1 Like so nice and then somewhere here later, I don't know if you have the image here

Speaker 1 there's the usual forex map, and it goes into heavy, heavy, forex.

Speaker 1 So that is there, but yeah, this looks absolutely amazing. I can't wait once we are able to play that and do a review of it.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 last team on the list

Speaker 1 an angry birds block blast, angry birds block quest,

Speaker 1 which is an angry birds block game.

Speaker 1 So, uh, yeah, as you expect, uh, Angry Birds. Would the IP be helpful here?

Speaker 1 I think they use their IP everywhere, like catch up.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's all over the place. Uh,

Speaker 1 this game is actually dead, or it was taken down from the store.

Speaker 1 So, I just put it here as some kind of a

Speaker 1 wild card because I wanted to show that there are many companies going after the blockbuster

Speaker 1 hungry games core gameplay because everybody sees how profitable it is and how big it is. This game actually, by the way, once you see this, this is a little bit of controversy.

Speaker 1 But this game actually,

Speaker 1 I don't know if it's specifically this one, probably also this one. This game got criticized because it uses AI art.

Speaker 1 But why why criticized?

Speaker 1 Because gamers hate AI art.

Speaker 1 Criticized like what? Like a review? No, on the internet. I think also review-wise, then like review bombed, basically.
It is not real. Like, if you get critique there, it's like

Speaker 1 Crimea River.

Speaker 1 Crimea River.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. I'm just saying.
It's like a nice tidbit.

Speaker 1 But still, the thing is that it's basically a single-player-based version of Blockblast, which I guess didn't make it. or they took it down and maybe they'll do another kind of version of it.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's said I like that mechanic with firing on the Angry Bird on top of the board.
That actually looks quite fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like I guess there's some iteration in it.

Speaker 1 I didn't really went

Speaker 1 too deep into it. What I wanted to mention here is that pretty much just by surface level look, you can see multiple companies going after this core gameplay in a single player fashion.

Speaker 1 So, and and we, of course, already saw that there's voodok blast from Triple Dot, which is kind of a

Speaker 1 legacy game trying to

Speaker 1 get its ground back. But yeah, there seems to be some kind of different mechanic here with shooting the birds.
It's not that

Speaker 1 the usual kind of blockbuster thing. But yeah, let's see.
I wonder if they kind of bring it back or not. But yeah, that was that.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that was. It's hard competing against like 200 data scientists fucking just doing levels making it easier and harder based on your user input like it's just

Speaker 1 yeah uh that was it lots of interesting games i'm definitely picking up later the

Speaker 1 go go samcock the joint games arcade idol forex and the xp hero we definitely kind of keep that one up and yeah lots of i guess interesting games that could be kind of either prominent games or prominent failures.

Speaker 1 We'll see.

Speaker 1 Man, well done, man. That was really good.
There's a couple on there I'm really gonna look forward to play. Bokehim looks quite good.

Speaker 1 Our friends at Supercent also probably will make a boatload of money on that game. It looked really good.
Thank you for putting that together.

Speaker 1 For those of you joining us and who are right now in Tahiti, Matier is in San Francisco. So if you're in Tahiti, you're shit out of luck because he's at GDC.

Speaker 1 And if you're at GDC, we are hosting some events.

Speaker 1 Don't know what, but it is something you can take part in. I think there's one on Monday or Tuesday, but I guess listening to this is already over.
It's already over. So don't worry about it.

Speaker 1 We had a great event. And thank you so much for listening.
This is the world's biggest podcast. for mobile game makers and game lovers.

Speaker 1 And we enjoyed having you on the podcast. and we're gonna see you next time yeah join the selection leave feedback and looking forward to next time ciao bye bye