Product trends for Mobile Games in 2025 by Jakub Remiar

Speaker 1 Because of the CPI IDFA thing,

Speaker 1 which kind of lowered the efficiency of UA, the big, let's say, the games that are driven by big spenders are currently using the smart ones, I mean, are currently using a lot of these tricks to kind of lower artificially the CPI,

Speaker 1 which got to the point that not only they are running fake creatives,

Speaker 1 that are actually running creatives on the core that they actually added into the onboarding on the game, which leads you to the main monetization core. In this example, it's all for

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Speaker 1 Hello, hello, this is two and a half gamers special episode.

Speaker 1 As we going into the new year, there also come some kind of predictions

Speaker 1 for the year.

Speaker 1 So my name is Jakubremiar. If you didn't notice, I'm the product guy of 2.5 Gamers.
I'm mainly doing game design.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I will be talking today about product trends for mobile games in 2025.

Speaker 1 And yeah, there will be a few of those, but some of those are kind of very

Speaker 1 intricate and I think specific that people don't really talk about. So yeah, let's get into it.

Speaker 1 Here we go.

Speaker 1 Yep. So hopefully I don't run out of enough Saruman pictures until we finish this.

Speaker 1 Anyway, let's start the show.

Speaker 1 So what are the product trends that we see in the current market?

Speaker 1 Adapting proven Steam games into mobile. So this has been an ongoing trend, but I think in the current environment it's even more

Speaker 1 prevalent or pretty much people are looking desperately for something that works without kind of researching it the hard way, meaning trial and error.

Speaker 1 And this has has been, as I said, ongoing for a long time, and now it's even, even more important.

Speaker 1 So the biggest example that we've seen last year would be, let's say, supermarket simulator.

Speaker 1 The whole store,

Speaker 1 I mean, mobile store is pretty much covered with a lot of these iterations of this game, let's say. But of course, for the first time, it was successful on Steam.
And in the end, what we saw there,

Speaker 1 yeah, there was my Supermarket Simulator 3D by Game District, which really nailed it i mean the adaptation from pc into mobile after like there were many iterations but this guy really nailed it we have a separate episode on the channel on this if you want to watch it but this is basically what happens that if you're fast enough to capture the trend you know that the core already works it's engaging like you see all the you know very positive reviews on steam and the communities there and people are engaging with it is getting organic virality and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So, you just need to adapt it properly because you can't really just copy it immediately and not adjust to the mobile interface.

Speaker 1 Like, we've seen the first clones there, I think, when the Crimson Melody guys that we covered again, like the first one, it was just not sustainable.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, it captured 15 million downloads in the first month, but then kind of died off. This game is much more stronger, has bigger legs, much better progression, smooth UI.

Speaker 1 You see stuff that they even improved over the pc version so yeah this is the way to go to kind of capture the trend and iterate on it don't just copy it

Speaker 1 a next example that we can talk about is pretty much uh backpack hero again very iterative and unique gameplay that's been running on steam where you have this mouse character that is slowly filling his bag with different weapons that are pretty much acting as like separate abilities and then there's a lot of like battery stuff pretty much baked into it where you need to kind of make sure that you you even have space for new weapons and this has been already adapted into backfight or bacon's revenge notice in the images how like bacon's revenge takes it even one step further because back fight is basically a simplification of backpack hero which we have here so like our character on the left enemies coming from the right moving to the right inventory somewhere that's there like i would say very very easy adaptation but if you look at bacon's revenge you have that like plus one we really thought this true because not only the the game has the inventory phase where you need to kind of choose new items merge them together and do the inventory core they also added uh doodle magic tower defense as you can see here on the right where you have the character now throwing the weapons and monsters that are coming from his

Speaker 1 on him from the top of the screen which again is an iteration because now we have ludo magic which works perfectly on mobile and we added a new element into it which instead of upgrading the towers in the typical roguelite fashion you now have the backpack hero tetris like gameplay so iterations like these are really important to try because again

Speaker 1 if you can manage it properly you have a unique product on your hands that's nowhere near close on the mobile marketplace because again we're coming from from PC to mobile and you can really kind of steamroll through competition at this point if you're fast enough because again I I really stress that a lot of these things are just coming and they don't you know you don't really have a chance if you start doing this like half a year later or something like that it's literally like one month after the trend comes and you need to hop on it and just just do it because there are numerous teams doing these things like like i showed you here like there's what like 20 40 supermarket simulator 3d manager games on on the store but there's only one that did 21 million uh like which is the game district one which is the most successful one and by the way these guys were still a little bit late i would say to the trend but because they were so honest about the iteration and the iteration was so good and there was so much quality compared to the all the other adaptations they still made it so yeah quality can still prevail over quant like speed let's say so like 80 20 good enough thing is kind of a yep not really the best case scenario here but yeah just try to be fast otherwise you won't be able to catch it um

Speaker 1 regarding the predictions themselves so what i think we are going to see and the things that we're going to see this year being implemented to some degree doesn't need to be the whole game but like some elements of these games are stuff like hell diverse palworld and bellatro and i go one by one and why i think so so palworld i already seen few games that are using the collection monsters mechanic where you capture monsters in like arcade idle rpg or like some hybrid casual games similar like especially the ones on wechat minigames i've seen it's like yeah we talked to our friends they're coming definitely probably not that fast on the western stores but in china they're definitely there so collection mechanic and like this kind of monster mechanic is super, super strong and

Speaker 1 compelling.

Speaker 1 So, now that we see the success of Power World, it's definitely just a matter of time until we see some mobile version of it, either like the Power World itself simplified or different genres like you've seen with Bacon's Revenge, combining the monster capturing collection mechanic, or even building survival mechanic, where you know, these monsters are basically acting like your slaves as in Power World, and

Speaker 1 yeah creating new games and new genres with it so I'm really looking forward to that one

Speaker 1 next one will be Helldivers this will be a little bit more harder I'm kind of 50-50 on this if it will even happen but I still it's very compelling because we don't really see these

Speaker 1 fun friendly fire

Speaker 1 corp games on mobile that much because hell divers is basically based on that It's like

Speaker 1 giant fun with your friends against giant hordes of monsters. It's not really PvP, it's PvE.

Speaker 1 The game's designed literally around the friendly fire mechanic because a lot of weapons produce giant explosions, like stuff

Speaker 1 pretty much melts around you all the time. And it's designed like if you're not careful, you're killing your friends, which is like a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 Probably not even in this kind of a friendly, fun manner, but still compelling core pve mobile games which could be using this kind of the same like starship troopers team should work really well i could even imagine this could be like against zombies because the zombies are pretty much best enemies and the lowest cpi so that could also happen but yeah i think again 50-50 here that something like hell divers could land on mobile this year we'll see but my guess is maybe by the end of the year or next year in its like giant sense power definitely it will come power mechanics will be translated immediately I think first half of the year how diverse it's a little bit of a stretch Balatro

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this game is literally amazing for those who don't know go play it is a PC premium

Speaker 1 poker

Speaker 1 game design masterpiece pretty much where yeah this game is just amazing it's done by one developer and published by PlayStat and the game is still making 100k a day on

Speaker 1 mobile which is a premium game by the way so this is definitely just a matter of time until somebody takes the core and adapts it to a little bit more free-to-play friendly or free-to-play compatible monetization and starts kind of tinkering with it because The core is very very compelling.

Speaker 1 The mechanics and the design of the game are literally genius. It's very simplistic, but in the end can

Speaker 1 yeah, just go play it. It's just super good and designed in a way that is very clever.
The progression and the content of the game I think is

Speaker 1 in its current state,

Speaker 1 yep, something like 50, 60, 70 hours until you reach the end of it. It's still very fun to kind of go and have around with this, even when you unlock all the content.

Speaker 1 But I think a lot can be done here with like mobile typical mobile kind of content scaling mechanics. So that could work really, really well, I think.

Speaker 1 And again, it's probably just a matter of time until we see either a direct adaptation of Bellatro on mobile or

Speaker 1 usage of its mechanics in different games or different iterations with different genres. It's just a matter of time.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's move on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, another Sireoman image here. To casual game genres disruption, which will definitely happen and it's already happening.
And this is not a prediction.

Speaker 1 This is rather a description, but yeah, predicting that this will happen on full scale this year.

Speaker 1 So, by casual genre of disruption, I mean three specific genres, which is solitaire, sword, and hidden object. And let me talk about these in detail.

Speaker 1 So, we have solitaire, which is being literally assaulted by a lot of big guys

Speaker 1 because there's Candy Crash Solitaire, that's currently in Soft Lunch for quite a long time.

Speaker 1 There's Super Place, Disney Solitaire,

Speaker 1 then voogas claire's chronicles which again is basically junk journey with solitaire core

Speaker 1 and then we have grandma's secrets which is metacourse play on the solitaire genre

Speaker 1 so yeah what are all these games doing what what's happening here so solitaire itself is you know one of the most popular

Speaker 1 classic games out there like from all the like the windows windows times uh if you look at the downloads of the genre is mainly driven by the Solitaire games that are pretty much looking like this.

Speaker 1 It's like literally the old Windows version, if you play Solitaire in your Windows. And people are searching for this.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yeah, this is something that still is bringing a lot of organic traffic.

Speaker 1 But regarding the revenue part of it, if we look at it, the whole category is pretty much dominated by Solitaire Grand Harvest by Playtica, which is making like 15 million a month, and then there's pretty much nobody there, or like very, very small IP revenue.

Speaker 1 So, a lot of these kind of, let's say, solitaire organic classic games are just driving a lot of organic installs, but they're just monetizing ad revenue.

Speaker 1 So, what's happening here is that the big guys are coming because they see the 15 million per month, which like Solitaire Grand Harvest is a pretty old game these days, and they want a piece of that pie.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, so what they're doing here as you can see is clearly not your typical solitaire this is something more of a like a puzzle game where it has levels it has boosters it has streaks there's currencies it's pretty much like a

Speaker 1 something uh similar to like a casual puzzler we've already seen this thing happen like this is not something that like i just like

Speaker 1 because I think so. We already seen this with the domino genre.

Speaker 1 Domino genre, again, similar to Solitaire, is a classic board game that people search because they know it from their offline time, pretty much when they were not interacting with computer by the actual physical product.

Speaker 1 And you can see there's a lot of domino games on the market. But if you look at what's happening with the genre IAP revenue,

Speaker 1 yeah, there's Domino Dreams, which is completely dominating it because what's happening here? It's not Domino by itself.

Speaker 1 It's again this puzzle, casualized version, level-based version of Domino, where it uses some of the mechanics of Domino, but it's definitely on Domino.

Speaker 1 And similar to Solitaire, they just use the core mechanics of the board game and they put it into level Saga, put it on the typical like renovation progression, and then we have boosters, we have moves, we have mechanics, and we have suddenly much more space to monetize.

Speaker 1 So, and the game, the Domino Dreams game is currently doing like 270k a day, so yeah, definitely works.

Speaker 1 And these guys already having one of these kind of games here, which is Domino Dreams, are in this race for Solitaire with the

Speaker 1 Disney Solitaire

Speaker 1 in their pocket, which is basically a templatized version of the previous game, which has a different core.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, this is definitely happening, and I'm really looking forward to how this race will end up.

Speaker 1 The key care here is that both Superplay and Vuga are owned by Playtica, which also has the Solitaire and Grand Harvest, the current dominating game. So it's actually three,

Speaker 1 or let's say, three games against two games, which three games are basically for one company. Because, yeah, they're being opposed by Kink Scandy Crush and

Speaker 1 Metacorse Grandma Secrets. But yeah, let's see.
My bet is that Playtica will just kind of reinforce the category with their two games. So let's see there.

Speaker 1 Moving on from Solitaire into Sword genre, which is a very interesting genre that's being disrupted again already

Speaker 1 with a wave of these kind of high production, high value IP driven games.

Speaker 1 Again, most of these games are like if you look at the downloads of the genre, sword genre is again water, sword, puzzle, there's color wood, all of these kind of

Speaker 1 very simplistic sorting games where you're either moving some kind of pieces or water or blocks between bottles and trying to put like all colors into one kind of a set and not not break the level that's that's that's that's the loose condition but all of those are kind of

Speaker 1 low production easy to do

Speaker 1 completely ad-driven stuff like that so again

Speaker 1 it's kind of similar situation to the solitaire thing not not not that much organics but still.

Speaker 1 And what's happening here again, there are new entries

Speaker 1 into the genre, specifically Grand Games Magic Sword, which also we covered in a separate episode on the channel, so you can watch that one.

Speaker 1 Where you can see the difference here in the picture, like how big of a production jump it is compared to the one on the left and one on the right, where guys are pretty much applying the typical Royal Match

Speaker 1 kind of formula here.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing that they will be having the full kind of live event stuff here. Streak mechanics, IAP monetization mainly, and high production values.

Speaker 1 The big thing that I've seen playing into their cards, they have a very, very nice algo within the game that tells you literally the moment when you break the level that you break the level because those levels are not time-based.

Speaker 1 Most of the sword games don't have this thing, which means that you can get very frustrated if you don't know that you already lost and you're still trying to kind of figure it out so they have it done very very well they're kind of equivalent of plus five moves from puzzler which is means like they offer you like one more bottle for 900 coins which again kind of saves your level um because yeah one more bottle is a lot in the in these things uh so it's pretty much they increase the board for you to play through

Speaker 1 and they're already the the second image from the left you see there's a copycat of magic sword already so yeah these things are coming the sword genre is definitely capable of doing ip revenue it just takes a little bit of a different skill set than your usual kind of driven organic game that we have there similar to solitaire as i said uh moving on this is a little bit different prediction because we don't have like a category that's mainly driven strongly by organic games with low productions.

Speaker 1 Hidden object category is traditionally driven by Vuga, which means there's Journalist Journey, which is dominating the category, and all the other kind of hidden object games that are very hard to do by the way, because they're like they're a giant content treadmills because you need to create so much content within these old uh hidden object kinda loops where you need to have so much art to kinda go through and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So yeah, the disruption here is a little bit different. So what's happening here, there's games like Triple Match City

Speaker 1 and Find the Cat, Cat, which is by the way, the top game regarding downloads in the hidden object category, where you see the simplification already.

Speaker 1 So instead of us kind of looking completely on the image and trying to find only that one thing that the game requires us and it's being super hidden, these things are not that hidden that much.

Speaker 1 They're much more approachable and casual you see there. So for instance here you need to like find sheeps or these kind of blue buildings or whatnot.

Speaker 1 And it's more of an exercise in match pairing stuff on the bottom bench here in the triple match example. Where again, what it does is makes the game much more casual and much more approachable.

Speaker 1 There's no heavy story like in June's Journey on Pears or Seeker's Nodes. It's again much more casual.

Speaker 1 There's you can see on the left, there's a typical Royal Match kind of metagame formula where you have live events and streak mechanics and all these other things that are pretty much reinforcing the core gameplay.

Speaker 1 And then yeah, the other very important thing that this game already has, and we'll get to it later, is uh yeah, they have a second core because the second core is the one that's responsible for most of their creative, so they offsetting the fakeness of their creatives to actually have that core in the game.

Speaker 1 And uh yeah, and the other game which is the middle image is the main game, which is actually the one that monetizes very well.

Speaker 1 So yeah,

Speaker 1 these things are pretty much the new generation of hidden object games, even though they're not called hidden object, they're like in the match pair category.

Speaker 1 But for instance, Ripley Match City is already doing 60k a day, so that's that's really something.

Speaker 1 Uh, compared to something like Find the Cat, again,

Speaker 1 this is a similar setup. Again, you can see that why probably this is add-driven only because, as I said, the blue and white core just works much better in the creative stage.

Speaker 1 These guys just have the blue and white core, which again is making them highly organic, highly driven, and so on and so forth. So, the game is again very simplistic.

Speaker 1 You're just finding these cats in the images, and you have a collection and some very shallow progression layers on top, but that's it.

Speaker 1 But they're still doing like 7 million downloads a month, so 100k downloads a day, I think, currently. So, yeah, a lot of disruption here.

Speaker 1 We see that, like, the casualization of these hidden objects, traditional loops, where you would have much harder kind of requirements, and

Speaker 1 the difficulty was much harder here.

Speaker 1 It's more of a chore and like relaxing experience here, for instance. You don't really lose that much here.
So yeah, and there's a lot of boosters and stuff. So yeah, I guess we'll see.

Speaker 1 We'll definitely see some more hidden object games kind of going here because, as I said, the content treadmill isn't that heavy with this setup. It's much more approachable.

Speaker 1 You see the DUA plays there. These guys know how to kind of lower the CPI through these other kind of fake creatives, different mini games added on top of the main core.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I think we'll see more of this and Hidden Object won't be just dominated by these old titans like Vuga and G5 and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 Okay, moving on. And here we are.
The fake creatives plus minigame proliferations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is an ongoing thing and it's not going to go away. You can argue and you know be

Speaker 1 miserable about it as I am basically. But yeah, this is it and this is the current state of the app stores.
And yeah, we need to bear with it because there's no other way.

Speaker 1 So, what's been happening last few years is that, yeah,

Speaker 1 because of the CPI IDFA thing, which kind of lowered the efficiency of UA,

Speaker 1 the big, let's say, the games that are driven by big spenders are currently using the smart ones, I mean, are currently using a lot of these tricks to kind of lower artificially the CPI,

Speaker 1 which got to the point that not only are they running fake creatives,

Speaker 1 that are actually running creatives on the core that they actually added into the onboarding on the game, which leads you to the main monetization core.

Speaker 1 In this example, it's all forex, the main monetization core. But you can see here that those are pretty much three different games, because we have

Speaker 1 the frozen city idol game on the left, which is whiteout survival. We have the top heroes, rumble Heroes game in the middle, which is again another Forex.

Speaker 1 And then we have this like gates

Speaker 1 runner scroller mechanic, which again is another Forex. So if we move to another image, you see that everything leaks to Forex, basically.

Speaker 1 So in the end, it all ends up the same, which is the heavy monetization core of Forex itself, where you're literally people are fighting against each other with their wallets.

Speaker 1 That's why it works so well. And because there's, of course, the mechanic of destruction of property.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you, you know, beat your opponent and you kill his soldiers and he doesn't have enough kind of hospital capacity or whatnot, he's literally losing weeks of progress and a lot of money just by you kind of demolishing his

Speaker 1 progression. So, yeah, which means that the economy is pretty much endless here.
So, these games just monetize super well if you know how to do them.

Speaker 1 Not saying that it's easy, it's definitely not easy. And the whole Forex genre is being dominated by Chinese players, except one which is score warrior total battle

Speaker 1 um but yeah you see that there's no other way pretty much and all the big forex games are using this tactic that they are using some kind of a

Speaker 1 different core onboarding and and and and don't get me wrong those are not some kind of easy games that you can just like you know you've seen it in the creative it's some kind of playable no those are fully fledged games built on top of the forex core so here we have again on the left image we have Frozen City, in the middle image, we have Rumble Heroes, which ends up being top heroes.

Speaker 1 And on the right, even though you're seeing this kind of creative thing, this is still from the game. And

Speaker 1 the runner kind of shooter gauge thing that they built there, it's something close to like AFK Arena, where like your heroes are still very important part of the gameplay, even onwards, like I mean, weeks after installing the game.

Speaker 1 So it's not that easy that, like, ah, yeah, we'll just build this playable, whatever, pin puzzle from Hero Wars. It's like, those days are gone.

Speaker 1 You need to build literally two games in order to pull off this trick.

Speaker 1 And by proliferation, and I mean the prediction, we already see this being translated in different genres, not just Forex. So the biggest example is, of course, Royal Match, which is,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 they're very famous or him famous for their creatives where you're burning the king, it's being

Speaker 1 saved before being

Speaker 1 splashed into Acid or whatever stuff like that. Pretty much near that experience situation, those creatives works very well.

Speaker 1 But they actually put these into the game, whereas each 10 levels, you have one of those core gameplays, like a second core.

Speaker 1 So you see there in the middle image, you are playing the main matching match 3 core. That's great.
But then every 10 level, you are playing this like King's Nightmare or how they call it.

Speaker 1 Usually it's like, oh, it's a dream, by the way. We completely switched a different game.
Lots of puzzle games do this these days.

Speaker 1 Like, all of the Gardenscapes games, by the way, I mean, Play Rick's games, Gardenscapes, Home Games, and Fish Dem, they have it not every 10th level, they have it every second level during onboarding.

Speaker 1 Every second level, there's a pin puzzle. Not this thing, the pin puzzle where you need to pull the pins to

Speaker 1 set up a stove or oven because people are freezing around and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So, Royal Match has this every 10th level where again, you play this funky level where it's not really difficult or something it's just like again for you to not complain that you didn't see the king being killed by the spikes or lava or whatever so it's there so you don't complain and it's like oh really it's as it's advertised yeah so this works um

Speaker 1 royal kingdom doesn't have that yet they have those um pvp levels and they don't use those even in creators so i don't know what's happening there but uh yeah my guess is that if they they don't pull off this trick they probably won't be able to scale even to the half the size or even third of the size of Royal Match they don't get here so I said we see this being proliferated into different genre not just forex not just casual

Speaker 1 there's also this game again we covered it on the channel with blossom sort

Speaker 1 is this nice kind of

Speaker 1 sorting game where again what's happening here at some point I think after level 30 they unlock a second core because that second core works great in the create creatives which is the line match the one that you see on the right but the main core as you see in the middle picture is again sorting things and matching them they're breaking by the way the main rule of sword genre here where you can put flowers of different types into the same pot which is in my opinion genius because Yeah, why not?

Speaker 1 It's just very calming and relaxing. And as I said, at some point they

Speaker 1 unlock the line match puzzle which is again completely different core and uh yeah it works great in their creatives so why not because again they need to offset the fakeness of those creatives

Speaker 1 Another example, yeah, the one we talked about already, Triple Match CT.

Speaker 1 Those creatives are mainly this kind of blue-white thing, which isn't the main core because again, the main core is monetizing and working a little bit differently.

Speaker 1 But they have it there because again, you're not complaining. So you see the pattern here.

Speaker 1 and it's gonna be more and more and more of this because there's just no way to kind of breach the cpi barrier i mean like yeah you can have your game at like 500 per day or whatever spent that's insignificant but if you really want to scale and i mean scale like 30 50k a day on ua perform performance ua you just need some of these tricks because the cpi will just go so high that you just you know you can't do a thing in every genre pretty much at this point So, this is just you either have this, or you either have like a very strong IP, like monopoly or what, whatever, which you probably don't have.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, just saying. So, this thing is gonna proliferate even more.
And

Speaker 1 yeah, I can't wait to see all the combinations of these things.

Speaker 1 But keep in mind that this also puts a much more harder requirements on top of the teams because you not only now need to build your main game, you need to build a second game because of those creatives and create a smooth transition between these two.

Speaker 1 Whereas, like, as I said, like stuff like white out survival, uh, they were kind of lucky that they already had frozen city, they just like duct tape frozen city on top of the forex part who allowed white out survival.

Speaker 1 But yeah, a lot of times these things don't really work out that well. So, for instance, top heroes, we've seen it struggling in the beginning, but now it's making 600k a day.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, it takes a lot of time to kind of pull off this trick because these two games cannot be just, you know, duct tape on top of each other. They need to be very smooth.
The

Speaker 1 onboarding game, like the one that's offsetting the fakeness of creatives, it still needs to be relevant down the line. It cannot be just like, okay, now we'll get rid of it after like two days.

Speaker 1 You don't really play that much because people

Speaker 1 enter your game and install your game because of that game, you just ditched. So, yeah, it's hard to pull off this trick.
It's not that easy.

Speaker 1 And most of the times, we see Chinese studios pulling this off. But yeah, as I said, it's getting more

Speaker 1 and more

Speaker 1 frequent in the West also.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Regarding these mini-games, like the last thing, which is like just the pinnacle of what's happening here, is that this is again another example of why Forex is like driving this so much, is that we have these three games to show you, which is

Speaker 1 Ape Control.

Speaker 1 Ape Clash and Monkey Clash or I forgot the third name.

Speaker 1 Basically, it's all top for fun Forex game Where what's happening here is that pretty much the game itself, the Forex core, with all the assets, cinematics, everything, it's pretty much all the same.

Speaker 1 But what they're doing, like each month, they pretty much create a new onboarding to kind of test if the CPI is low enough and for this kind of onboarding game, if it works that well or not.

Speaker 1 So, here we have like a mob control version, here we have some kind of like

Speaker 1 auto-combat zombie something, zombie apes against you.

Speaker 1 Here we have the Hero Wars kind of numbers game where you know kill a unit, eats his numbers, and then you fail on the big guy, blah blah blah, stuff like that. So you can play it now yourself.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 again, as I said, it got to the point that the only thing that matters for Forex is this onboarding mini-game that offsetting the fakeness of the creatives because the creatives need to be fake to lower the CPI.

Speaker 1 So that's where we got here.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the another trend that I'm talking about a little bit is templatization.

Speaker 1 And this is again going back to those necessary things that needs to be done in order for you to be successful in the current market. Otherwise, you're just kind of

Speaker 1 throwing a coin pretty much. So templatization has been ongoing for some time, but I think not enough studios has been hoping on it already and people still hasn't grasped it yet.

Speaker 1 And I think it's gonna be mandatory now from this year or pretty much going onwards because if you don't do it fast enough there will be studios that you can't catch up to pretty much never like you just can't so the biggest example of course of course hubby which started their template in 2019 with archero

Speaker 1 whereas their template has pretty much carried them over until like now it's like they've been working on it for last five years.

Speaker 1 So you see here like Archer, Kinjeran, Survivor, I would just like all of it is their ARPG roguelike template. Same goes for Snaker and Pumble.

Speaker 1 All of the games that they're pretty much working here are using their template. And it's great because it's pretty much cumulative value that each of these games just makes the template stronger.

Speaker 1 So even though, let's say, Pumble failed, Snaker failed, Kinjeran failed, it doesn't matter because

Speaker 1 they're not starting from scratch.

Speaker 1 and each of these games probably takes less time to make so yeah it's just cumulatively better and better and the key to win this current market is not to hope for one hit with one chance that you have here it's a lottery and the one that wins in the lottery is the one that buys the most tickets so that's what needs to happen here is that you don't need to create one hit game you need to create a system and a machine that constantly has as many shots on goal as possible which eventually hopefully will create some hits because it's a hit stream business so out of all these four games archero is a hit survivor io is a hit and now they have archero 2 which is a hit already and capybara go which is a hit already and as you can see there it's all running on their template and uh because their template is done so well uh yeah what they're doing is pretty much their progression is uh kind of the same

Speaker 1 i mean metagame progression it was until capy barrago because capy barrago heavily took mechanics from legend of mushroom because legend of mushroom as you know was a very successful game that everybody is using mechanics from we'll definitely talk about more games taking uh notes from it uh this year but what what it did is pretty much it upgraded the template of of huby so and they by the way they're not taking mechanics only from legend of mushroom they're taking mechanics from monopoly go here they're taking mechanics from brawl stars they're taking mechanics from royal match uh

Speaker 1 yeah a lot of games basically uh that like they're eclectically selecting like cherry on top and putting there into that template which just makes that template stronger and what this means is basically it's a matter of time until they release another game which again will be again less time to build and all of these tested mechanics pretty much built into it already so

Speaker 1 the you know, the saying that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger is pretty much the thing here.

Speaker 1 That's for every kill they killed game they do, they're just getting stronger because their template grows stronger.

Speaker 1 So, it doesn't matter if they fail this game, that game, or the other game, which is just gonna continue. And it's a cumulative effect from 2019, so for last six years, pretty much.

Speaker 1 So, try to catch up to that.

Speaker 1 It's just nonsensical

Speaker 1 at this point. So, as I said, Archero 2 is a hit.
Capybarago is a hit. Both games are doing something like 800K a day.

Speaker 1 Haven't been scaled yet already because they're just freshly released last end of last year.

Speaker 1 So yeah, we're following this very, very closely because it's just the way to go and how to build this.

Speaker 1 The other thing is, of course, Mihoyo, if you look at their games, they are also following their meta progression template. So what they're doing is that they're just changing the core.

Speaker 1 Whereas Genshin is an open world rpg me uh honkai star rail is a term based uh

Speaker 1 i would say corridor based uh

Speaker 1 squad rpg

Speaker 1 and uh yeah uh zlason zero is a hack and slash again corridor based rpg so

Speaker 1 again what what this does is that it saves time these guys and i mean a lot of time because they know how their progression behaves they know how their like you know ltv curves behaves, they know how the monetization works, offers and everything, like all of the knowledge pretty much translates between these games.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it's definitely the way to go.

Speaker 1 Don't get me wrong, there are also problems with this approach, whereas it locks you into one genre, which can, on one hand, produce cannibalization, which is quite real for these guys, especially with their cores and their art and teams being so similar to each other.

Speaker 1 It's just like all anime catch RPG. Like hubby has it at least a little bit more diversified i would i would say regarding their course

Speaker 1 uh but yeah it's

Speaker 1 it's just the way to go like if you're building your second game from scratch you're doing something wrong you shouldn't be doing that that that's just not not good and and people will just be more faster and you will be left behind and your studio will die i'm sorry to say it like that but that that's the reality we're pretty much facing

Speaker 1 um yeah so mihoyo is another great example of this kind of templatization.

Speaker 1 Uh not saying that they're gonna be releasing just game on that progression, maybe after the I don't wanna say failure, but I would say a little bit of a disappointment of Zen Les on Zero.

Speaker 1 Maybe they will reconsider now uh what they're gonna release next, but uh yeah, we'll see. It's just that these games are just so much manpower hungry.

Speaker 1 And keep in mind Mihoyo is like what, five to six K people or something like that.

Speaker 1 So the giant, giant content and I mean like their event pipeline is I think the biggest pipeline in the world regarding a live op so yeah without the templates it wouldn't basically work

Speaker 1 um yeah last example I have here regarding templatization is super play by playtika

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 which is their domino dreams game and then their distinct solitaire game which again uses the same progression as a template even the same layout same UI pretty much and it's a little bit of a

Speaker 1 going into that direction they're not there yet, but just saying that some Western developers are already taking notes here and doing the right thing to do.

Speaker 1 And this, I think, is the right thing to do.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we ran out of Palantir pictures with Saruman.

Speaker 1 So this brings me to the end of this. So to summarize this,

Speaker 1 all of these trends that you see there is pretty much consolidation of...

Speaker 1 bigger requirements for success where again you need to be fast you need to be iterative and you need to be very adaptive to catch those theme games or PC games and translate it into mobile a lot of expertise is needed you can just like copy blatantly one-to-one doesn't work same goes for that casual genre iteration like you can just you know you need to reinvent the wheel literally and that's what happens with these guys and yeah templatization again templatization is something that you if you're not doing currently you're kind of kind of far behind already sorry to say it like that so try to kind of look into it if you can salvage something that you don't have already.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I think that's it for this year. I think it's going to be a very, very interesting year.
A lot of games are coming into the market that are kind of very expected.

Speaker 1 especially

Speaker 1 very excited for like fingertip warriors for instance that's coming from china the 2d arcade idol forex game that's already been released on mobile but not english version There's Umamusuma Peter Derby coming to the West,

Speaker 1 which is the Japanese

Speaker 1 horse grill kind of racing game coming to the West.

Speaker 1 Then there's Dungeon and Fighter, hopefully gonna get adapted into English translation, pretty much the biggest mobile game there is, which did 800 million in its launch month in China.

Speaker 1 So can't wait to get the hands on that game. And yeah, I guess

Speaker 1 pretty exciting gear. So yeah, that's it.
Thank you very much. Uh, if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to join our Slack channel.
And yeah, see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.