Product trends for Mobile Games in 2025 by Jakub Remiar

Because of the CPI, IDFA thing, which can lower 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.
which got to the point that not only they're running fake creatives

they 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 it.
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This is 2.5 Gamers special episode. As we're going into the new year, there also comes some kind of predictions for the year.
So, my name is Jakub Remiar. If you didn't notice, I'm the product guy of 2.5 Gamers.
I'm mainly doing game design. And yeah, I will be talking today about product trends for mobile games in 2025.
And yeah, there will be a few of those, but some of those are kind of very intricate and I think specific that people don't really talk about. So yeah, let's get into it.
Here we go. Yeah, so hopefully I don't run out of enough Saruman pictures until we finish this.
Anyway, let's start the show. So what are the product trends that we see in the current market adapting proven steam games into mobile so this has been an ongoing trend but i think in the current environment it's even more prevalent or pretty much people are looking desperately for something that works without kind of researching it the hard way meaning trial and error and this has been as said ongoing for a long time and now it's even even more important so the biggest example that we've seen last year would be let's say supermarket simulator uh the whole store 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, yeah, there was My Supermarket Simulator 3D by GameDistrict, which really nailed it.
I mean, the adaptation from PC into mobile after like, there were many iterations, but these guys 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 community is there and people are engaging with it. It's getting organic virality and stuff like that.
So you just need to adapt it properly because you can't really just copy it immediately and, you know, not adjust to the mobile interface. Like we've seen the first clones there.
I think the Crimson Melody guys that we covered again, like the first one, it was just not sustainable. 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. 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.
A next example that we can talk about is pretty much 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 back with different weapons that are pretty much acting as like separate abilities.
And then there's a lot of like Tetris stuff pretty much baked into it where you need to kind of make sure that 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 enemy is 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 told this through because not only

the very, very easy adaptation. But if you look at Bacon's Revenge, you have that, like, plus one.
We really thought this through, because not only 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 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 on him from the top of the screen which again is an iteration because now we have doodle 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 the Backpack Hero Tetris-like gameplay. So iterations like these are really important to try because, again, 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 PC to mobile, and you can really kind of steamroll through competition at this point if you're fast enough.

Because again, 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 do it

because there are numerous teams doing these things. 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 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 or on 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 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 divers pal world and and i go one by one and why i think so so pal world 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 similarly especially the ones on wechat mini games i've seen 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 compelling compelling 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 uh yeah creating new games and new genres with it so i'm really looking forward to that one uh next one will be hell divers 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 fun friendly fire co-op games on mobile that much because hell that was basically based on that it's like giant fun with your friends against giant hordes of monsters.
It not really pvp it's pve the game's designed literally around the friendly fire mechanic because a lot of weapons produce giant explosions like stuff pretty much belts 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 uh probably not even in this kind of a friendly fun manner but still compelling co-pve mobile games which could be using this kind of a same like starship troopers team should work really well i could even imagine these could be like against zombies because zombies are pretty much best enemies and the lower CPI. So that could also happen.
But yeah, I think, again, 50-50 here

that... could be like against zombies because 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 I think for a couple of years, although it's a little bit of a stretch.
Bellatro?

Yeah. it will come.
Powered mechanics will be translated immediately, I think, first of all the year. However, it's a little bit of a stretch.
Bellatro. Yeah, so this game is literally amazing.
For those who don't know, go play it. It's a PC premium poker game design masterpiece, pretty much, where, yeah, this game is just amazing.
It's done by one developer and published by play stack and the game is still making 100k a day on 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 friendlyplay friendly or free-to-play compatible monetization and starts kind of tinkering with it because the core is very very compelling the mechanics and the design of the game are literally genius it's very simplistic but in the end can 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 in its current state 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 a round with this even when you unlock all the content but i think a lot can be done here with like mobile typical mobile kind of content uh scaling mechanics so that could work really really well i think and again it's probably just a matter of time until we see either a direct adaptation of bellator on mobile or usage of its mechanics in different games or different iterations with different genres It's just a matter of time. Okay, let's move on.

Yeah. of its mechanics in different games or different iterations with different genres.
It's just a matter of time. Okay, let's move on.
Yeah, another Saruman image here. To casual genres disruption, which will definitely happen, and it's already happening.
And this is not a prediction, this is rather a description, but you're predicting that this will happen on full scale this year. So by casual genre disruption, I mean three specific genres,

which is Solitaire, Sword, and Hidden Object.

And let me talk about these in detail.

So we have Solitaire, which is being literally assaulted by a lot of big guys because there's Candy Crush, Solitaire,

that's currently in SoftBunch for quite a long time. There's Super Place Disney Solitaire.
Then Wooga's Claire's Chronicles, which again is basically Gen's Journey with Solitaire Core. And then we have Grandma's Secrets, which is MetaCore's play on the Solitaire genre.
So, yeah, what are all these games doing? What happening here so solitaire itself is you know one of the most popular 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 it's like literally the old windows version if you play solitaire in your windows and people are searching for this so um yeah this is something that still is bringing a lot of organic traffic but regarding the revenue part of it if we look at it the whole category is pretty much dominated by solitaire grand harvest by platica which is making like 15 million a month and then there's pretty much nobody there or like very very small ip revenue 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. So what's happening here is that the big guys are coming because they see the 50 million per month, which Solitaire is a pretty old game these days, and they want a piece of that pie.
And yeah, so what they're doing here, as you can see, is clearly not your typical Solitaire. This is something more of like a puzzle game where it has levels, it has boosters, it has streaks, there's currencies.
It's pretty much like something similar to like a casual puzzler. We've already seen this thing happen.
This is not something that I just like, because I think so. We already seen this with the domino genre.

Domino genre, again, similar to Solitaire,

is a classic board game that people search

because they know it from their offline time

or pretty much when they were not interacting with computer

but actual physical product.

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, yeah, there's Domino Dreams, which is completely dominating it because what's happening here, it's not domino by itself. It's again, this puzzle, casualized version, level-based version of domino where it uses some of the mechanics of domino, but it definitely not Domino 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 renovation progression and then we have boosters, we have moves we have mechanics and we have suddenly much more space to monetize.
So, and the game, the Domino Dreams game is currently doing like 270K a day. So yeah, definitely works.
And these guys already having one of these kind of games here, which is Domino Dreams, are in this race for Solitaire with Disney Solitaire in their pocket, which is basically a templatized version of the previous game which has a different core so yeah this is definitely happening and i'm really looking forward how this race will end up the key here is that both superplay and vuga are owned by playtica which also has the solitaire great harvest the current dominating game so it's actually three or let's say three games against two games which three games are basically from one company because yeah they're being opposed by king's candy crush and metacore's grandma secrets but yeah let's see my my bet is that playtica will just kind of reinforce the category with their two games. So let's see there.
Moving on from Solitaire into Sword genre, which is a very interesting genre that's being disrupted again already with a wave of these kind of high production, high value, IP-driven games. Again, most of these games are, like if you look at the downloads of the sort genre, is again, water, sort, puzzle, there's color, wood, all of these kind of 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 low production easy to do completely ad driven stuff like that so again

kind of similar situation to the solitaire

thing, not that

much organic completely ad-driven stuff like that. So again, it's kind of similar situation to the Solitaire thing.
Not that much organics, but still. And what's happening here again, there are new entries 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, 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 kind of formula here i'm guessing that they will be having the full kind of live event stuff here streak mechanics uh iap monetization mainly and high production values uh the big thing that i've seen kind of playing into their cars they have a very very nice kind of 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 and 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

puzzle which means that they offer you like one more

bottle for 900 coins

which again kind of saves your

level because yeah one more bottle

is a lot in these things

so it's pretty much they

Thank you. 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 and they're already 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.
It just takes a little bit of a different skill set than your usual kind of ad-driven organic game that we have there, similar to Solitaire, as I said. Moving on, this is a little bit different prediction because we don't have a category that's mainly driven strongly by organic games with low productions.
Hidden object category is traditionally driven by VUGA, which means there's Journey, which is dominating the category, and all the other hidden object games that are very hard to do, by the way, because they're giant content treadmills because you need to create so much content within these old hidden object kind of loops where you need to have so much art to kind of go through and stuff like that so yeah the disruption here is a little bit different so what's happening here there's games like Triple Match City and Find the Cat which is by the way the top game regarding downloads in the hidden object category where you see the simplification already 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 they're much more approachable and casual you see there so for instance here you you need to find sheeps or these kind of blue buildings or whatnot. And it's more of an exercise in match pairing stuff on the bottom bench here in the triple match example.
But again, what it does, it makes the game much more casual and much more approachable. There's no heavy story like in Journey or Perfska or Seeker's Notes.
It's, again, much more casual. You can see on the left, there's a typical Royal Match kind of meta game formula where you have live events and streak mechanics and all these other things that are pretty much reinforcing the core gameplay.
And then, yeah, the other very important thing that this game already has, and we'll get to it later, is, yeah, they have a second core.

Because the second core is the one that's responsible for most of their creatives. So they're offsetting the fakeness of their creatives to actually have that core in the game.
And, yeah, and the other game, which is the middle image, is the main game, which is actually the one that monetizes very well. so yeah 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.
But for instance, triple match city already doing 60k a day. So that's really something.
Compared to something like Find the Cat, again, this is a similar setup. Again, you can see that why probably this is ad-driven only because, as I said, the blue and white core just works much better in the creative.
These guys just have the blue and white core, which, again, is making them highly organic, highly ad-driven, and so on and so forth. So the game is, again, very simplistic.
to you just finding these cats in the images and you have a collection and some very shallow progression layers on top but that's it 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 we see that like the casualization of these hidden objects traditional loops where you would have much harder kind of requirements and and you know the difficulty was much harder here it's it's it's more of a chore and like relaxing experience here for instance like 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 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.
You see that the UA 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.
So yeah, I think we'll see more of this and Hidden Object won't be just dominated by these old titans like Wooga and G5 and so on and so forth. Okay, moving on.
And here we are. The Fake Creatives plus minigame proliferations.
Yeah, this is an ongoing thing and it's not going to go away. You can argue and, you know, be 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. So what's been happening last few years is that, yeah, because of the CPI, IDFA thing, which can lower 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 which got to the point that not only they're running fake creatives, they 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 4X, the main monetization core. But you can see here that those are pretty much three different games because we have 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 4X. And then we have this, like, Gates runner scroller mechanic, which, again, is another 4X.
So if we move to another image, you see that, like, everything leaks to 4X, basically. So in the end, it all all ends up the same which is the heavy monetization core of forex itself where you literally people are fighting against each other with their wallets that that's why it works so well and because there's of course the mechanic of destruction of property whereas if you you know beat your opponent and you kill his soldiers and he doesn't have enough hospital capacity or whatnot,

he's literally losing weeks of progress and a lot of money

just by you demolishing his 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.

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 core warrior total battle 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 different core onboarding 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 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 and on the right even though you have seen this kind of creative thing this is still from the game and the runner kind of shooter gates gates thing that they build there it's something close to like afk arena where like your heroes are still very important part of the of the gameplay even onwards like i mean weeks after installing the game so

it's not that easy to like yeah we'll just build this playable whatever pin puzzle from hero wars

it's like those days are gone you need to build literally two games in order to pull off this

string um 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

Thank you. 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, yeah, they're very famous or infamous for their creatives where you're burning the king. It's being saved before being splashed into acid or whatever, stuff like that.
Pretty much near that experience situation, those creatives works very well. But they actually put these into acid or whatever stuff like that pretty much near that experience situation those creatives works very well but they actually put these into the game whereas each 10 levels you have one of those core gameplays like a second core so you see there in the middle image you are playing the main matching match three core that's great but then every 10 level you are playing this like king's nightmare or how they call it usually it's like oh it's a dream by the way we completely switched a different game lots of puzzle games does this these days like all of the gardenscapes games by the way i mean playrix games garden scapes home games and fishdom they have it not every 10th level they have every second level on during onboarding every second level there's a pin puzzle not this thing the pin puzzle where you know you need to pull the pins to set up a stove or oven because people are freezing around and stuff like that 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.
Royal Kingdom doesn't have that yet. They have those PvP levels.
And they don't use those even in creators. So I don't know what's happening there.
But yeah, my guess is that if they don't pull off this trick, they probably won't be able to scale even to half the size or even a third of a size of Royal Match if they don't get here. So as I said, we see this being proliferated into different genres, not just 4X, not just casual.
There's also this game. Again, we covered it on the channel, Blossom Sword.
It's this nice kind of 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 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?

It's just very calming and relaxing. And as said at some point they unlock the line match puzzle which is again completely different core and yeah it works great in their creatives so why not because again they need to offset the fakeness of those creatives another example yeah the about already, TripleMatch City.
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. But they have it there because, again, you're not complaining.
So you see the pattern here. And it's going to 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 you spend that's insignificant.

But if you really want to scale, and I mean scale like 30, 50K a day

on UA performance, UA, you just need some of these tricks

because the CPI will just go so high that you just, you know 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 go whatever which you probably don't have so yeah just saying so this thing is going to proliferate even more and yeah i can't wait to see all the combinations of these things 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 whereas like as i stuff like Whiteout Survival, they were kind of lucky that they already had Frozen City. They just ducted Frozen City on top of the 4X part.
Voila, Whiteout Survival. 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. 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 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. You don't really play that much because people entered your game and installed your game because of that game you just ditched so yeah it's hard to pull off this trick it's not that easy and most of the times we see chinese studios pulling this off but yeah as i said it's getting more more and more frequent in the West also.

OK.

Yeah, regarding these minigames, like the last thing,

which is just the pinnacle of what's happening here,

is that this is another example of why 4X is driving this so much,

is that we have these three games to show you, which is Ape Control, Ape Clash, and Monkey Clash, or I forgot the third name. Basically, it's all top for fun 4X game, where what's happening here is pretty much the game itself, the 4X core, with all the assets, cinematics, everything, it's pretty much all the same.
But what they're doing, like each month, they pretty much create a new onboarding to kind of test if the CPpi is low enough and for this kind of onboarding game if it works that well or not so here we have like a mob control version here we have some kind of like auto combat zombie something zombie apes against you 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 so again as i said it got to the point that the only thing that matters for forex is this onboarding minigame that offsetting the fakeness of the creatives because the creatives need to be fake tool over the CPI.

So that's where we got here.

Yep.

So setting the fakeness of the creatives because the creatives need to be faked to lower the cpi so that's where we got here um yeah so the another trend that i'm talking about a little bit is templatization 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 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 and i think it's going to 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 catch up to pretty much never like you just

can't so the biggest example is of course of course hobby which started their template in 2019

with archero whereas their template has pretty much carried them over until like now it's like

Thank you. template in 2019 with Arcero, whereas their template has pretty much carried them over until like now.
It's like they've been working on it for the last five years. So you see here like Arcero, King Giant, Survivor, all of it is their ARPG roguelite template.
Same goes for Snaker and Pumble. All of the games that they're pretty much working here are using their template template and it's great because it's pretty much cumulative value that each of these games just makes the template stronger so even though let's say pummel failed snaker failed king jaron failed it doesn't matter because they know they're not starting from scratch 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, Arcero is a hit, Survivor.io is a hit, and now they have Arcero 2, which is a hit already, and Capbara.go, which is a hit already.
And as you can see there, it's all running on their template. And because their template is done so well, yeah, what they're doing is pretty much their progression is kind of the same.
I mean, metagame progression, it was until Capybara.go, because Capybara.go heavily took mechanics from Legend of Mush mechanics from legend of mushroom because legend of mushroom as you know was a very successful game that everybody is using mechanics from you'll definitely talk about more games taking notes from it this year but what what it did is pretty much it upgraded the template of of hobby 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 yeah a lot of games basically uh that like they're eclectically selecting like cherry on top and putting them 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 the you know the saying that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger is pretty much the thing here. For every killed game they do, they're just getting stronger because their template grows stronger.
So it doesn't matter if they fail this game, that game, or the other game, it's just going to continue. And it's a cumulative effect from 2019.
So for the last six years, pretty much. So try to catch up to that.
It's just no sense at this point so as i said archero 2 is a hit uh capybarago is a hit both games are doing something like 800k a day haven't been scaled yet already because they've been just freshly released last end of last year so yeah we're following this very very closely because it's just the way to go and how to build this.

The other thing is of course MiHoYo, if you look at their games they are also following their meta progression templates so what they're doing is that they're just changing the core whereas Genshin is an open-world RPG, uh hunkai star rail is a term based uh I would say corridor based uh squad RPG and uh yeah uh Zenless Zero is a hack and slash again corridor based RPG so again 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 LTV curves behave.
They know how the monetization works, offer system and everything. All of this knowledge pretty much translates between these games.
So yeah, it's definitely the way to go. Don't get me wrong.
There are also problems with this kind of 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 course and their art and themes being so similar to each other. It's just like all anime and gacha RPG.
Like hobby has it at least a little bit more diversified. I would say regarding their course but yeah it's 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 like that but that's the we're pretty much facing.
Yeah, so Mihojo is another great example of this kind of templatization. Not saying that they're going to be releasing just Game On Dead progression, maybe after the, I don't want to say failure, but I would say a little bit of a disappointment of Zenless On Zero.
Maybe they will reconsider now what they're going to release next. But yeah, we'll see.
it's just that these games are just so much manpower hungry and keep in mind me always like what five to six k people or something like that so giant giant content and i'd be like their event pipeline is i think the biggest pipeline in the world regarding the live up so yeah without the templates it wouldn't basically work. Yeah, last example I have here regarding templatization is Superplay by Playtica, which is their Domino Dreams game and then their Disney 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 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.
And this, I think, is the right thing to do. Okay.
Yeah, we ran out of Palantir pictures with Saruman. So this brings me to the end of this.
So to summarize this, all of these trends that you see there is pretty much consolidation of 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 Steam games or PC games and translating them to mobile a lot of expertise is needed you can just like copy blatantly one-to-one doesn't work same goes for the 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 uh 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 uh 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 and

especially very excited for like fingertip warriors for instance it's coming from china the 2d arcade idol 4x game that's already been released on mobile but not english version there's umamusuma pretty there be coming to the west um which which is the Japanese horse girl kind of racing game coming to the West. Then there's Dungeon and Fighter, hopefully going to get adapted into English translation, pretty much the biggest mobile game there is, which did 800 million in its launch month in China.
So can't wait to get the hands on that game and yeah I guess pretty pretty exciting

year 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 Thank you.