Full Steam Ahead: How Steam trends influence Mobile games?

Honestly, the best thing of this is just doing it with your friends.

That's what made it for me, right?

It was like all of us jumping together.

So it's almost like a Roblox game where you just come together, but now you're running your little Stardew Valley

Valley.

Yeah, so this is this is a set.

This is released March 24th, already 170k reviews, 98%.

First 30 days around

4,700 units sold.

Felix stacks colours like a wizard in disguise.

Jackup's crafting realms lift us to the highs.

Two and a half gamers talking smack.

Slow hockey sick, got your back.

Ads are beautiful, they like the way.

Click it fast, don't delay.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Full feeble head.

Monkey doing.

I need to

get a whip.

Hello, everybody.

This is another episode of Two and a Half Gamers, although today it's almost like three and a half gamers.

We have a special guest.

Before we introduce the guest, my name is Matteja and Charic.

I'm Felix Brauberg.

And I'm Erkum Remier.

Hey, Adam, we meet you.

Hey, me.

Oh, shit.

The whole thing is ruined.

That's fine.

Don't worry.

Yeah.

I just wanted to add myself right to the end of it.

Exactly.

I'm actually also excited you didn't say it was another half.

Just turn it into three games.

No, no, no.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with being a half.

I mean, come on.

Keep till you get it.

We already have two halves, and this, yeah, we have one.

So thank you very much for coming, Adam.

So we are your hosts, and we have a special guest.

And today we're going to talk about Steam, which Jakub said.

We'll steam ahead.

Why are we talking about it?

Because we already talked about a few games.

And then afterwards, we found out they got inspired heavily by other Steam games.

And this is something that's coming coming to mobile quite a lot.

So

yeah, Jakub

do it.

You should Adam Adam let Adam let Adam introduce himself.

He's got this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam, let's go.

You can go into them at the end of the day.

Does anybody want to know who I am?

Yeah, of course.

They want.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm Adam.

I have been in PC Console for a while.

I've been in mobile for a while.

Obviously, I know all you guys for quite a while.

Previously, I was at Bungie, previously to that.

I was at WB, also at Wooga back in the day.

And I met you guys through Pixel Federation way back in the day when I started consulting.

And then you guys thought, you know, you could probably do better than this and did better than me and went off consulting.

It was great.

It was like, so now I've been watching from afar, you guys killing it from a side, and I have been a huge fan of the channel for a while.

So it's great.

Great to be here.

Yeah, thank you very much for coming.

I was thinking about it, and I think we wanted to have you on the podcast since episode 10, pretty much.

We're now

300.

Yeah, I gotta, we stopped counting.

Yeah, fine.

Finally, why?

I feel like the world has had enough of me

by this point.

No, but look, so I think we wanted to have you on because every time we listened to you, you actually made sense.

And you know, that's that's a good part.

Also, yeah, that's always a good part for a podcast.

Exactly.

It's always the wise, wise voice.

And also, we love you.

So, come on.

These are good.

Thanks for coming here.

Love you guys, too.

This is great.

Thank you very much for listening.

Three minutes of chit-chatting.

And then, okay.

Oh, that no, sir seriously, let's let's let's do it.

Yeah, let's let's do it.

Oh, hello, hello there.

I didn't see you.

Thank you very much for coming to this episode.

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Join over 5,000 marketing teams already scaling with streaming tv visit vibe.com to get started that's vibe.co join them and thank you very much for joining us for this special episode uh now let's get back to it thank you but so as matthew said we've seen more and more games being done on the store or being successful on the mobile stores that are later that we that we learn or we learn directly that they are pretty much going from steam directly not iteration inspiration whatever sometimes even blatant rip-offs so that that's what's happening happening.

One example for all that we can start to kind of look at and pretty much get a little bit of an example, which isn't even that successful, but just tells you what we're talking about, is Owlworld's release.

That was last year, January 19, when it took pretty much World by Storm.

Everybody was talking about that.

This is the game that's pretty much characterized by the slogan Pokemon with guns.

Pokemon itself is in lawsuit with them.

active one so that still hasn't finished up and

later down the line actually the game turns into a pokemon sweatshop because all these guys are pretty much survival crafting loop and they're sweating for your factory and stuff like that but nevertheless the game still needs heavy work done is in early access and

it sold on the estimate that we have here uh 16 million units which is a lot and the estimated earnings is pretty much 500 million just from steam but i if i understand it, there's more because there's console numbers that we're not seeing here.

I think that 60 includes console because that's also like Xbox, the Game Pass, when it came out on Game Pass.

And then it came to PlayStation later on, and still did very well on PlayStation.

Okay, okay.

So that's there.

Yeah, so this happened.

And then at some point later,

this happened, which is pretty much.

The listeners, if you're not watching this on YouTube, go to YouTube because this is especially important.

You will be able to see everything.

Although, Spotify video works as well, but YouTube is better.

Yeah, so we have Lilith,

the guys which were actually at some point really owning the Forex market with Rise of Kingdoms and all their games, but not anymore.

Yeah, that was quite some time ago.

Come on, yeah, clanced time ago.

And it seems that they use Talworld to their like entry into this new generation of forexes where you have the fake onboarding and all these other things.

The game actually starts as Dream Dell.

Dream Dale, Dale, yeah, it's a Dream Dale.

It's literally Dream Dale.

If I can go here into

the actual Dream Dale loop, so you start, as you would see, like the character would be chopping down trees, catching things.

You see those resource requirements here as you're unlocking the land.

It's literally Dream Dell.

At some point, you get this pony Pokemon or whatever, which

is much as unicorn.

Yeah, much

unicorn.

Which lets you go out and then you can actually play it as a forex game because suddenly you are upgrading stuff from the distance and like everything is a forex.

It turns into forex.

Somewhere here later, there's this, whatever was it, some scanner features are usual, where we get the quest system and everything.

And I think it freezes now on or a dozen.

Just capture.

Do they have a Pokedex in here?

Because I kind of want to just look through about how close to a lot of suit they are.

They have encyclopedia, but unfortunately, this is the problem, but this game that it's still crashing on me.

It's, you know, it's a problem you with your emulators play it on the phone.

I played it on the phone.

I got here on the phone, but on the emulator, you know, can't play all these games without the emulators.

That's just not possible.

You have

so you go on on like there's two battle loops.

One is the typical AFK Arena style one when you have five Palmons against an enemy, which is the usual one.

And then you have the capture one.

This is...

I won't go there because it freezes, but pretty much you go in, you summon your guys, and you have this kind of laser beam, and you catch the Pokémon, whatever guy that you get there.

But after all, of course, it turns into our usual Forex map.

So, what are you trying to say?

Because you just said a million things, and I'm lost.

So, what I'm saying is that we see already that they took the Power World

onboarding setup, translated into Dream Dell, and put it behind their before their Forex.

But the thing is that it seems it didn't really work out because the numbers as of January this year, it's like 37k a day scale and now they seem to be tinkering something so back to 30k from April but again this seems to be going no

yeah especially you see like this is a UA attempt this is a UA attempt goodbye yeah yeah so just saying that these things don't always work out like copy everything from steam and it suddenly work out like for instance the supermarket manager simulator which we saw that like there were multiple games that were working out very well or the Dreamy Room game that we've seen lately on the podcast, which was taken from the unpacking game from actually 2021, that also worked out pretty well.

What was it, Ikame or Abby?

Abby, Abi was it.

Yeah, Abi.

By the way, you know what that graph reminds me of?

The start of it?

What?

Star Wars Hunters.

Yeah, that looks like Star Wars Hunters.

Can you name the shape, though?

Can we please come up with a name for this shape, though?

Lonely.

Wall Wall Street 1929 unicorn.

Yeah.

But, like, what do you think actually broke this game?

Because, from my perspective, this should be an outlier, right?

You've got one of the strongest Steam games out there in terms of units sold.

I think it, like, from watching this, this is a pretty competent 4X.

And I think, even to start the game in all their ads, they even did the first few seconds of PAL World, right?

Where you had

a literal copy of the monsters overlooking you, right?

Even the monsters themselves, I think, here's your Palmanak.

So you see the monsters here.

This is your Pocket X, basically.

They don't have that many.

Like, it looks pretty good to me.

So I'm just wondering, like, is it actually that they didn't figure out the 4X?

Like, is the Forex just not strong enough?

Yeah, I think their Forex spirit is not that great as its last world or white of survival.

I think

I think the problem is that, from my side, there's not enough PAL World even to begin with, because there's so much more Dreamdale and survival mechanics that there aren't even that many battles and like the capturing.

Because this thing is actually much more closer than a Frozen City Gacha-style thing, where, of course, there are a few of these battles where you capture the stuff, but most of those are your usual AFK Arena-style 5v5 auto battles, which are

PAL Worlds.

But do you think that if somebody did like an authentic version of PAL World for mobile, then it would actually perform better than this twist towards Forex.

Let's just say the last time I talked to our friend Lemon, I've seen multiple games that are following the Power World example of like catching familiars or like some kind of creature mechanic, and they are much more focused on the creatures themselves and roaming around the world actually.

Because these guys kind of extract it very, very fast and throw it.

Like, this is literally, this stage is like in 30 minutes.

You get here.

Yeah.

So, like, maybe maybe actually adding more of the power world loop here so you can actually go that's the thing because that's also the strong point of all those whiteout survival kingshot and all these other games the onboarding loop of the initial game sticks even you're still playing it you don't

completely i think it's like well like half of the day or a day of playtime not like 30 minutes yeah yeah exactly you don't get to unfold to forex part that fast

it's like i was trying to get there i was like like, I won't be able to get there because I just had one day, like, literally 30 minutes, you're here.

And I guess, yeah, less Dreamdale, more PAL world.

Probably.

But

I would still focus more on exploring the world or going around into this more.

Because this turns into factory so fast.

It's literally Dreamdale.

It's just Dreamdale.

Do you have any Steam games that did make it on mobile?

Not today.

Not today.

It's only Fadi.

That we think we're going to make it on a moment.

That's why we're here.

Full steam ahead.

Let's start with the big guns.

So, Schedule 1.

Schedule I, which one is it?

So.

Yeah.

So this game is basically

a low-resolution version of

Breaking Bad, if I understand.

Pretty much you building up your drug-selling empire.

This is going to be so big on mobile.

Have you guys played this?

Have you guys played this?

It is actually insanely fun.

Really?

Yeah, it's really, really fun.

The way I'd actually describe it is it's Stardew with buds.

There you go.

Okay.

Yeah, as in like both literally and literally.

You play Stardew with friends and you also plant buds.

But yeah, no,

it's actually super fun.

It's like the systems of Stardew, but you can actually run around with your friends and obviously with the whole theme of Breaking Bad.

Yeah, but then if it's going to be butts and the Breaking Bad, it's going to have some limitations on the UA side of things because I know there was what was the Canadian studio.

Well, you need more meth in this

leaderly.

Less, less.

I mean, you need less meth.

Less, yes, less meth.

Yeah,

the studio you think about is leaderly.

No.

E-side games, they did all the weed games under leaderly games.

Okay, baby.

And yeah, that

was really problematic on the UA side of things.

You can't really run a lot of UA on weed

everywhere.

Okay, so we gotta.

I don't know what you do with this if you can't do the whole drugs.

You can use drugs.

You should be able to use drugs there, like weed wars or whatever, like these other things.

It is there.

I'm not saying it's not.

It's just a little bit, it was a little bit problematic.

It's tricky.

Yeah, it's tricky.

So you're saying

that risking the team because I guess

it falls apart.

It needs to be about like drug selling stuff, yeah.

I mean,

it needs to be about drug selling, but I would say this is gonna get more organic than a lot of like

me offering this is

so cool.

How many, how many hours have you played this game, Adam?

Maybe four or five, not like not that long, but it's long enough that basically,

but

I would say, like, this is a little bit close to that supermarket manager simulated thing.

But yeah, it is.

Like, first person, you have

upgrades of things and like similar art styles.

Don't immediately like those eyes, those red eyes.

Honestly, the best thing of this is just doing it with your friends.

That's what made it for me, right?

It was like all of us jumping together.

So it's almost like a Roblox game where you just come together, but now you're running your little Stardew Valley.

So

this is released March 24th, already 170k reviews, 98%.

First 40 days around

4,700 units sold.

So this is the breakout hit of Q1 on Steam, if I understand the biggest one.

I already found, by the way, one

copy.

God, I love mobile.

There's no shame in mobile.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

But this was taken down, of course.

This is just like, you know, asset flip or some kind of whatever.

I wonder if they just took the screenshots from PC and just like added icons.

Yeah, it could be.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I don't know.

It's Meograft.

But yeah, this was removed already.

So we're still waiting for someone to do it properly.

But yeah, that's my guess that this is in the making, definitely.

If it's like the supermarket manager simulators went good, this should be.

It was about

one month between the Steam and then the mobile game.

Come on,

we can do better than this.

I mean, these are like five, five, five games in China like this.

I'm pretty sure.

I'm pretty sure.

Just open VChat.

Yeah, we need to talk to Heaven or Lemon.

Like, hey, can you

actually send me some links so we can play?

Yeah.

Is that repo I see is the next one?

The one that you made fun of me so much on my Admon episode?

Yes, yes.

Yes.

That's the one.

That's the second biggest game on the list.

Because this released 26th of February, sold already around 3 million units in the first 30 days, and you see

reviews, 96% positive.

So, this is the second biggest game.

I don't think we actually made fun of you.

We didn't make fun of you, but Felix was showing one other game that was already for me on mobile.

Yeah, incorrectly.

What was the name of the game?

A repo's repo online.

It's called Repo as Well on Mobile.

Repo's Repo Online.

Or Stalker, maybe?

I can't remember.

Let me check it.

Does it have a mobile repo online?

It's a rip-off.

It's like a copy.

This one?

Repo's repo online?

Yeah, there it is.

Yeah, I saw it already.

This was taken down already.

So, this is the same, same, same.

But the crazy thing is,

this one was live for about two and a half months, and it got so much organic traffic.

It got nearly 10 million downloads.

And I estimated the ad revenue on this.

And at its peak, we covered it in the admon trends episode.

Yeah, at its peak, it was making 23k a day from interstitial ads, right?

But it went down quite quickly.

But still, like three months of earning that for it's quite decent for only organic but like 10 10 million downloads in that short period of time yeah and then you compare that to the

units sold that you've got on repo it did better on mobile than it did on pc here eight eight million downloads how many million a hundred half a million downloads a day and then go to uh go to the active user base because basically they had interstitials stuffed in it right so yeah this is the real money maker right keep in mind this is only android no i us

Okay.

So this probably

works.

You just need to do it properly, not blit and ripoff.

I mean, yeah.

It was one-to-one, I guess.

Adam, have you played the game?

No, I haven't.

But this looks right up my alley.

I love these games.

Basically, any game that I can go online with my friends and giggle my way through an evening is a good game.

This is exactly this.

This is one of those like

Among Us or not Among Us.

Lethal Company.

Lethal Company,

Lethal Company, Little Company follow-ups.

So, horror style, fun with friends games, pretty much.

And they're super trending, aren't they?

These days,

seen, seen multiple people.

I love it.

I think it's really just a whole bunch of people who used to make Roblox games or have seen Roblox games.

Like, that whole generation has grown up playing Roblox, and now they're getting way better experiences on Steam.

And what I love is that they keep the level of jank that's on Roblox, right?

Like, this is amazing watching this video.

Just

the way they all walk and shit.

It was the same thing with Lethal Company.

You just, you can't stop laughing watching the videos.

It's great.

It's like watching teletubbies fight.

Yeah, pretty much.

But yeah,

this seems like a good, again, good thing to kind of follow up, but again, need to do it properly, not just wait and rip off.

Okay, but then, like, what's the do-it-properly way?

Do it properly.

Take your own IP, you know.

Just shove it in a forex.

Let's get it done.

That would be the first time.

But we realized that didn't work.

So then,

like, what is it, right?

Like, that is a good question.

You can get 10 million downloads from this.

That's the thing, because

if you just put something else on top of it in terms of the art style, it's not going to work exactly in the same way.

It needs to be at least very similar, but not too similar, just not

good.

No, I mean, like, it was like a

Sanskrit

question

in 90 days.

They have earned 1.3 million in ads, right?

Plus 35 in IAPs from just ripping something off, right?

That's uh,

yeah,

pretty good, pretty good.

Okay, but what's the like, what's the relevant kind of fast follow on this?

How can you translate this to mobile without getting taken down?

I mean,

it's a serious question.

I'm just joking.

I'm just trying to understand, like, how, how, how should we think about it?

Horror-based, pretty much a little company follow-up with

social mechanics and stuff like that, because I've seen games that are still trending on mobile.

Like, I actually work with the guys that

with Goose Goose Duck guys, actually.

And that works pretty well on mobile, which is Among Us follow-up also.

So, can you tell me?

Can you pull up Goose Goose Duck?

Like,

how much did that actually stick?

Did they actually keep players in that game, or was it just kind of shifting?

Like, the Among Us mobile game was obviously very popular, too.

The Goose Goose Duck is what, 72k reviews.

I can check data.

Well, I mean, the sensor tower version.

No, the mobile version.

Sensor tower version.

The problem is that they have a lot of revenue from China, which you don't see.

Because I know

it's a very big problem to have.

Oh, my God.

where's my

guy?

Not counting China there.

But, you know, they're still their main point is PC, not mobile.

But okay, then downloads at least.

It's just

slightly

small.

It's not the breakout success, don't get me wrong.

This is not the original.

This is not the

That's why I work on the

but uh we can we can check Among Us if you want

I'm pretty sure that's one of the most successful games

Yeah, two years ago three years ago

It's not Koi anymore

Yeah,

what shape is that?

Yeah, yeah, it's this unfortunate shark fin.

It's unfortunate But I think these guys were like super heavy against free-to-play monetization mechanics if I understand no ads

you look at the active user base, and you'll see a heartbreak from my side.

Even showing one interstitial ad would have been $100,000 a day.

Like, you guys are idiots.

That's so upsetting.

They had 50, how many users at the peak?

400 million.

Yeah, 40 million.

40 million.

40 million.

Man, showing two interstitial ads to that, that would be like that's literally like 500k a day.

But just think about the reputation that they gained.

So they got 500,000 a day and reputation points.

It's great.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You can buy so much for, like, you know, like, you just go and buy dinner for it.

I'm feeding my family with reputation.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, let's move on.

Next one, Fly Night.

This was literally found just because I just put in the metrics.

Also, it has 1K.

What?

What does that mean?

Like, because you put the metrics?

So it's 90% rating, really good review ratio based on its its units sold in first 30 days units sold.

Perfect.

So definitely like a standout game.

I think the visual itself is great because you are.

This is exactly what I love.

Like all of these art styles is going to do so well.

Yeah.

Mobile and all of this.

It's amazing.

It's bugs.

That's the thing that I wanted to say.

It's bugs and you're pretty much a bug knight or ant or whatever that is going against evil queen that curses everybody so they can grow wings.

I'm not joking, it's literally in the bug Zelda.

This is great.

Bug Zelda, yeah.

And even though it looks shitty, I don't know why it's what it looks shitty.

It's not keep loading,

yeah.

Maybe let's just load shit like this.

So it's an RPG with like survival mechanics, if I understand, and it has very, very big community already.

As I was browsing the the interwebs

and uh yeah it doesn't look that bad and as I said first person games going from steam to mobile is like one of the trends that we definitely see

I would definitely try to use the bug visual because we know stuff like ants underground kingdom works really well the forex game and like all worked worked but yeah animals anyway animals animal theme and varsal you see farm plus also experimenting a lot with these like um i shrunk the kids backyard with ants.

Farmplus is experimenting with everything.

Yeah, I know, just saying.

So, yeah, we'll see.

But

I think that's closer to, I think that's closer to Grounded, right?

That Microsoft game, which is also on Steam.

But definitely, and I think Grounded sold better than

160, you said 160k.

Yeah, Grounded.

Yeah, this one came out of Wi-Bi.

Yeah, that was the Farm Plus.

Yeah, this is

following.

Yeah,

this was definitely one.

But But like, this one was not a breakout, right?

Like, if we're, if this pod is also about does this work between Steam to mobile, like, grounded just was not nearly as big of an IP as like Power World.

So you would think Powerman Survivals would, as long as it's a good Forex, would have performed really, really well.

Yeah, yeah.

We don't need to turn everything into Forex, but just saying, for instance, let's take

Stormfall, which has like, what, 30k reviews released October 11th of October, and currently it's serving the onboarding on like a 100k a day sentry games forex game.

So

enough.

Yeah, the number of you had 19,000 reviews.

Do you know how many units sold?

Turnfall?

Please do.

So just because I'm like, I love this art style.

intuitively and obviously kingshot is an amazing game

but i'm thinking with sentry like they, they must have validated it some other way, right?

Like, they would have done click-through testing, they would have done something to tell us that the strong fall would have worked right.

Like,

I don't think they would have been like, oh my God, I played this one game on Steam.

Yeah,

600K units sold 4 million gross revenue.

Yeah, which is like

it's nice to have.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

Like compared to how, like, compared to what they're doing right now on the App Store, like, 600K units is not a positive enough signal, right?

Yeah, but it's again, it's because of that creative because everything is basically this creative.

Yeah, it's right there.

Whole onboarding, whole everything.

Yes, but then, but the question is, like, how do you know and how do you identify this is gonna this exactly is gonna work on the creatives?

Like, you need to, you need to get that data.

Do you think the creative people they send some of those 400 people in their creative team to just look at Steam and just try everything?

Everything into creatives and they try everything.

but then why only steam right like why not also like roblox games and see if there's some free space roblox studio so i think they're already doing

so not only roblox studio but not only steam but also roblox and also wechat minigames so it's all of these yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure so we need a

WeChat minigames podcast that we go through it like this

there's also in the plan i just like need a little bit more time we already WeChat and everything access to that, so shouldn't be.

We don't have a slogan, like

whole steaming.

China, what are we going to do?

China.

Okay.

China.

That's the slogan.

That's like China.

You need to come with us to Shanghai for China, Joy, madam, for sure.

I will try.

I will try.

Yeah, but just saying, this seems interesting and definitely on the look.

Moving forward, this one is actually very, very interesting.

and I think it's literally suited to be adapted into mobile.

So, this is called

Nubi's Number Factory.

It's a Plinko game,

you know, Cup Heroes and all these other things.

Felix really likes those, especially to ban them in his waterfall.

So, how this game works is basically

you have this kind of a board of balls that you need to destroy with your

Plinko ball, or pretty much the ball that's falling from the bottom, And you have a lot of these power-ups that helps you out.

And once you pretty much start shooting it, again, complete randomness of dopamine loop,

you get

currency that you can then use to buy power-ups between the rounds.

So if we move here,

yeah, there's actually a gacha that you can do.

The best part is this, like, graphics are completely atrocious, it doesn't matter at all because the mechanics are just so good.

who's the guy in the sunglasses he's the main character that's the default character that that's what you get but let me get to some kind of upgrade that the guy is doing

yeah see so black market mechanic whatever

rewarded that plus pins yeah it's pregnancy what what is the what is this uh

creative some kind of uh for a match-free game yeah

so so you you pretty much go and you see how stuff stuff on the top gets gets more and more populated Now he has the pregnancy test, he has the characters, and so on and so forth.

And it's about like all of those bigger numbers, like similar to like Balatro, where like each round you need to achieve a little bit more higher number,

which these power-ups on the top help you with.

So, like, our typical road light works very, very well.

It's just saying that, because looking at the numbers,

okay reviews already released March 7th, so not that far off.

And if I

this

K unit sold in the first 30 days,

looks pretty well.

And as I said, it seems very, very easily adaptable to mobile.

That's how I see it, because it's literally like you just take the mechanics.

And do what with them?

You do a

hubby-style version, mobile game with it.

I feel like we already went through this cycle, though, with like voodoo back in the day, right?

Like, they did all those brickbreaker games.

Was it like five, six years ago?

They did the Cup Heroes with the Pegling game, if you remember that one so that's the pegling game on steam which is this kind of goblin blinko blinko game yeah and when i was talking to julian last time he said that that this this is the one behind cup heroes inspiration so they they have few of those but again this this seems much more complex

uh especially because of these like this literally the top top um power-ups and mechanics reminds me of the you know it's a survivor io roguelite loop where you have weapons on one side you have ammunition or whatever the complementing mechanics that creates abilities and stuff like that.

So, it could be an easy translation into something like hubby does.

I look forward to these ads with Windows 95 style, that would be amazing.

Fonts in here, especially like Comic Sans.

This is crazy,

yeah.

Yeah, this works well with uh Adro Empires mobile.

Yeah, it looks good, yeah.

Um,

next one,

but I would even say with that one, like the Balacho model can apply to a lot more games, and we should see more and more games dig deeper on that.

Yeah, this is just like one on Steam, but I'm assuming more and more and more mobile games are testing this model.

This one's my favorite, actually.

This is great.

Yeah, this is already on

this is all on mobile with like every developer jumped on this, like all Vietnamese developers had a dig hole game.

So, actually, I have two digging games in this setup.

So, this was released on the 7th of February, already passed nearly 13k reviews, sold

300k units already.

So, really good numbers.

It's actually super, super short.

Like, if you see the playthrough video that I have from Markiplier here, you literally get to the end in an hour.

The loop is pretty simple.

You go in into your backyard and start digging a hole.

And once you start digging it, you get some resources out of it.

You go there and then you upgrade your where is it?

Yeah, let me just get the screen there.

Your shovel strength, your

inventory, your battery, or just pretty much the usual kind of incremental upgrade loop that you get here.

And once you go there, you start to go deeper and deeper and deeper.

And then later on, there's like more advanced mechanics such as dynamites, lights.

You need to literally mark your way there.

And then somewhere there later on, there's even

monsters or whatever, something so it doesn't seem really finished to be honest, because as I said, it's very slow, very short, but the mechanics seem super, super engaging

because, again, it's first person in simulation seems like it's really, really good.

Any ideas?

Anybody played this or anybody seen the mobile games?

I saw the trend.

There's X Game Global from Vietnam that did a version of it that's gotten half a million downloads.

It was not the first, so there's quite a lot of them let me bring up the biggest one but uh

it was uh

i can see like eight or nine just when i searched dig hole yeah

backyard hold similar to get smart like there's a yeah

i think the important part is the whole kind of structure of this like digging process where because

the guy have his

Because on PC, it's easy to do 360 and you can dig everywhere and everywhere.

In mobile, it's a little bit more clunky.

So figuring out how to dig properly and how to create the movement and and the smoothness of this whole thing kind of to be fitting mobile platform should be the key here, not just like random put everything there.

This this won't work as supermarket simulator immediately, like just throw it onto mobile and it'll work.

So I guess.

And you also need to finish the game because as I said, the game's not finished.

Like one hour gameplay won't won't save us here on mobile.

So you need to be able to kind of dig deeper or reset the hole or

something like that.

This game can have a 4x on it.

This will work.

Just imagine like your 4x base, and you just got this big hole in the middle.

You're like, I'm bored.

I'm just going to go down my hole and just go tap the screen.

Go in deeper.

Go in deeper.

Yeah, I'm good.

Yeah.

That's there.

Continuing on, we have Spilled, which is again pretty new, 26th of March, around 2,000 reviews.

This one is actually a very, very

like laid-back, cozy game about you removing oil spill and upgrading your ship by

increasing the size of your oil spill catcher, your speed, and your whatever you have there, the tank at the back, like how much oil you can carry.

And that's basically it.

Like, it's, it's very, very simple.

But the important part, as everybody sees here who follows the podcast, this is pretty much Golden Goblins creatives.

It's literally that, which trends like crazy everywhere, everything.

And as I said, because this already looks like that, and it seems very, very natural for mobile gameplay, you have upgrade loop there already.

And this is basically it.

Like, you just have these three upgrades in what?

In eight different areas.

After those eight different areas, there's a boss fight with like a giant

oil tanker, which

spits out more oil that you need to then,

you know,

take out, and that's it, basically.

And then it's like after like 15 minutes, the ship goes to sleep or something.

So, yeah, that's the game.

So, again, you need to iterate.

It's just like won't help you, like, supermarket simulators put it on mobile.

You need to finish the loops and do the environments and do it a little bit more polished.

But afterwards, like, again,

seems to me that this would work very, very good.

It reminds me of Idol Fishing, or what was the other game from before Eli Invasion?

Before Alien Invasion, yeah.

Idol Fishing, I think, washing out, yeah.

Multicast gaming, yeah, yeah.

So that's also like one possibility.

Amazing credit scene, but yeah, Adam already plotting uh Forex.

I don't think this one will work.

This is a bit weird.

We'll keep this one as hybrid casual.

Okay,

let's do that.

Yeah, but it looks great.

The mechanic and everything.

Actually, that fishing game from Multicast is, I think it's been revived now.

Because they sold Alien Invasion everything.

Yeah, we talked about it, I think, like last year.

I'm not sure what that game is doing.

But that loop is still kind of being touched upon, the Alien Invasion one.

A lot of people are still going after it.

I know Roleg is going after it.

A few other companies are still going after it.

Well, even Miniklip was going for it.

Yeah, I think even Octopus Feast or what

is Rolig, but then there's other thing like Ghost something.

Yeah, one more.

Yeah.

Okay.

Avi Assembly.

This I take note from April, but again, looks really, really good and has amazing numbers.

Nearly tricky reviews, but amazing numbers, calm down, please.

Man, there's just four that small of a game.

It's like amazing numbers.

It's got like less than 3,000 reviews exactly like what are you talking about but it's amazing numbers are 70 000 it's amazing numbers i'm kidding man

i don't care

come on just

be realistic be realistic okay this is very very easy game about you building a plane and upgrading it between the airports as you deliver stuff and it has a lot of physics And then you need to load the cargo and pretty much do the usual upgrade loop where you go,

you fly, and then you get more upgrades, and then you get more stuff, and so on and so forth.

Very, very easy, again.

Nothing really to it.

Why should we do this on mobile?

Because

it's original.

Yeah, still.

I think it's under the line.

Like if we say thronefall was what.

Okay,

and this one's got.

Yeah, it's super new.

Yeah,

it's about prediction.

60.

Right.

Yeah, I think like there's just not enough.

It was the lowest game I had on the list, actually.

That's yeah,

also, also, I think it's just slightly too complex, right?

Like a little bit 3D motion instead of like proper,

proper simple gameplay, like our oil tanking game.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like, yeah, 3D world is much more idea, but yeah, yeah, we need to also have you have Metal Storm now on

mobile doing okay, which is uh,

yep,

so I mean,

can work, but that's like realistic

jets.

I just don't know if like vehicle combat games where you can like directly customize every piece is really a viable

up and do too well after all.

Yeah, cats.

I remember cats.

Yeah.

I also remember cats.

Everybody, yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, i and this is, I think, like, in the same line as, like, Kerbal Space Programming and all those ones, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's physics space.

Besiege.

Yeah, that was a fun game too.

Or Or physics-based.

But yeah, this is really on the line, like if it can have legs or not on mobile.

Okay, Sultan game.

This has pretty strong metrics.

You played it, Adam?

I haven't.

No, this one looked too complicated for me.

Yeah, I also write it because you s said it.

So I don't giggle enough with this one.

So

I have to giggle test and like

funny.

Like, this is like a hardcore, hardcore game.

This has like very good trending metrics because, again, nearly a month-old release, already like 14k reviews, and what's 566k units sold.

The problem with this game, because as you see, it is super complex.

Because it's this, as I heard in the comments, is the follow-up to Culti Simulator.

And what you do in this game, you play as this kind of psychopathic Sultan who just wants to kill people pretty much.

And you have this witch comes up to him and says, Open cards, and on each card, pretty much somebody needs to die.

And you have these characters on the bottom that you choose which one of them needs to die.

And yeah, there's like 20-minute very long tutorial.

And afterwards, you are tasked to pretty much do his bidding or whatever, survive until day seven.

And you then need to again pair these cards with like very, very

complex interactions, which just like, for instance, you draw a card, that card tells you that somebody needs to die, for instance, like

here.

You think this would work on mobile?

Yeah, I don't think so.

This would work on mobile.

Just saying.

It was in the list, just like saying

one of the very good metrics games.

It's in the list, so we need to talk about it.

Yeah, now it will steam on mobile.

Anybody wants to add anything to this?

I think

this won't work.

Enzoy.

Apparently, this is.

You haven't heard about this?

No, I heard.

Yeah, of course.

It's one of the biggest releases.

Yeah.

Again, 520k units sold

20k thousand reviews nearly released March 28.

This is basically a better version of Sims.

Sims.

Yeah.

Wow.

So if I understand Sims are currently kind of slacking off somewhere on the store with their old version.

And this is what happened?

Did they stop this, gave up, or what happened with Sims?

No, they haven't given up.

It's a huge money maker for EA.

It's just that they stuck to Sims 4 for a long, long time and have just kept up the DLC.

So, do we think this will do something, or like this, this could be a good thing to follow up here?

I don't know.

I had huge hopes for this pre-launch.

Really?

Well,

it doesn't speak.

I know, like, right?

Like, it's just not that exciting.

So, I hope that actually eventually some streamers start to pick it up because this thing is like a content creation machine, right?

Like, the amount of crazy shit you can make with this game,

posting online.

Well, yeah, you can customize so much, right?

And create situations, create all this stuff.

Yeah, so I was hoping.

It's only one TikTok trend away of success.

It's like you just, yeah, you just need one or two TikTok videos, and then you're there.

So the advantage here is they haven't launched on console or anything, so maybe they can go there.

But right now, it just isn't getting a lot of traction as much as they would have hoped.

So

I still think there's lots of potential in the life sim space for going after Sims, just given the size of Sims and the amount of people that love playing these types of games.

But I think it just launched in such a rough shape that even the people that did show up just didn't really stick to it.

So they've got a road road map ahead to fix fix and then hopefully get that viral TikTok campaign and

shift it.

Because if you say viral TikTok campaign like IronCat still keeps running on top of my head.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Like a VR game that really make it on mobile.

That's exactly it.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

That or I'm security, but I'm cat is better.

And this genre as well is like really, really susceptible to AI.

Like

AI could have a ton of value here.

So I'm hoping they can get some good integration to that and then people can create some crazy shit.

This can be my giggles.

104x will be good.

I don't think this is forex.

That's more, that's more top girl.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Which

could work here for sure.

Which is kind of forex.

Yeah.

It's forex, it's not kind of four.

It's like completely forex.

Yeah, let's see.

Okay.

Few more games until we finish this off.

So there's haste

released April 1st, 5,000 reviews.

Where's trailer?

trailer?

This is already past 153k units sold.

And the interesting part about this game is that it's very, very speedy and it has a lot of endless runner?

No, this has these terrain physics, basically, that you need to go.

And on top of it, you have you've seen that

the choice mechanic with the roguelike.

This could work on mobile.

If it's just an endless runner.

It's the way to solve

I think that this works because of the graphics.

Sorry, Terra and physics.

I like the camera angle.

Yeah, it's

very satisfying to go and watch.

Actually,

this reminds me of the...

I'm not satisfied at all, man.

This reminds me of Tribes, actually, if you remember the game.

That was the shooter game where you would throw discs that you can teleport on that was pretty cool

and you also had this like very very fast movement in it which was so niche that only five people know about it no it's like they they did like three games or whatever three people

this one this one you see so it's like it plays like unreal tournament but you you have this like very

long

sliding movements and it was all about keeping up speed and not not being able to kind of fall off of the speed because the moment you stop basically quake free yeah kindish kindish, but much, much, much bigger jumps, much, much more speed, and everything.

Well, this looks slow as fuck.

Where's the speed?

Where's the speed?

Yeah, compared to like Quake, compared to.

Yeah, no.

This is not even an arcade shooter.

It's not even a boomer shooter.

Okay, now we can come on more at it.

I think you're the one.

Yeah, so again, this guy just don't know how to play it properly, but whatever.

So yeah, this could work.

I don't know.

Let's see.

Under the bus immediately.

This was even more interesting.

So there's Dig Silm, 5k reviews

in December 2024.

50k units sold already.

And this is about, this actually looks like some of those mini-games that Royal Match is running.

It looks like

Capybara go where you're one of those

active events, not the passive ones, where you dig out stuff.

So what you do here, you...

Let me go to the actual game plan on the trailer.

Marketing, that's what we need.

Yeah.

So you dig out stuff and

you have like limited stamina

on the dig, where it is.

And once you run out of stamina, you can dig it out again and you see how many relics they are hidden in the thing.

So you can either restart or like go again or whatever.

And once you get those, you go into your museum, you add there to your museum, and again you upgrade.

Very, very similar to digging a hole mechanic, where again, incrementally you get more and more of everything, and you just kind of progress and do stuff.

And then somewhere here, you see that we are already whatever

different things, much bigger digs, much bigger energy, so on and so forth.

This looks like an amazing in-game event for mobile.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's

all

not a game, but like a great event.

yeah yeah yeah yeah

let's see like this this looks in interesting can you make it more complicated like could you do that with like Balacho mechanics and go nuts they also have some like additional mechanics it's not that simple as I said like just didn't bother explaining it completely because you have as you see like multiples of these so not just one one upgrade tree they have some other things on top of it but I would guess that like you need a little bit more depth to to make it see the skill tree and everything.

So

I'd say,

any other questions or anything else?

I mean, not really.

Yeah, but looks great.

And as I said, it's already being used by mobile games in a similar setup.

As an event, yeah.

Yeah.

Magic Archery,

5.5k reviews, 98%, 4th of October.

6k.

This is actually an idle game.

Really?

Yes.

What?

Yes.

What is an idle game?

So you're an archer.

What the fuck?

You're an archer and you're shooting arrows.

And you upgrade your stuff and everything.

And that's all you do.

Like, he's basically shooting arrows on the target.

Let me show you the actual gameplay.

I can see this as a very good creative for an archery game.

So here we have, you see, you start with this kind of basic thing and you upgrade your your stuff.

And where's the actual damage counter?

Rovio is paying attention here.

Here we go.

Angry birds flying, smacking targets.

Let's see this.

Probably.

Somewhere here.

Where is it?

Like, stop upgrading, man.

Yeah, see?

So damage per minute, 100k or whatever, something, something.

Do you want to double that with a rewarded ad?

Yeah.

It's missing a marketing stat that you can upgrade.

That's the thing it's really missing.

And then somewhere here, we're at like 5.6 million a minute.

We already have some kind of wizard portals shooting arrows, like 10 Legolas

and stuff like that.

So it's an idle game, basically.

It's an idle game, so that's there.

But it looks good.

Like, I've seen worse on mobile.

But we are not here for seeing worse.

Yeah, but as I said, like, it's a good idea, I think, because I haven't seen this one.

If you have some zombies coming at you and you're shooting zombies, maybe.

Doesn't need to be zombies.

zombies like this is about you know damage numbers but could be just crowd of zombies respawning infinitely just combine this with bang bang survivor and there you go white white or doodle magic yeah yeah come on

yeah

i think this is actually much more close to slime castle the azure game if you remember really okay yeah that's uh you've seen that adam

nope i haven't seen that one So there's a there's a game that's like idle tower defense game, which is the one that's similar to doodle magic where instead of going on roguelide progression you have idle progression and sideline stuff kind of coming at you this is quite successful like not not that much breakout of a hit but it works pretty well and especially we don't see the china revenue because this is done this is done by a chinese team published by azure which is unheard of

i'm still waiting to see a new lane shooting mechanic something that's like just as magnetic

this I don't feel like this is gonna hit that same bar as like line shooters.

We'll see.

Yeah, and I think I have the last one now, and this is more of

please.

More,

don't don't mind him.

Full steam ahead.

Web fishing, uh, 11 o'clock

53k.

No, an hour talking, not an

hour talking.

98%.

And

the problem is that this is not really a game.

4K units sold.

And this seems to be some kind of a chat app that

you go and you fish stuff, multiplayer chat room, focused fishing game, relax, go fish on the web.

And that's it.

And I was just checking the gameplays here and everything.

And it's just,

yeah, it's

this.

Like you go there and there's a lot of people doing the same thing and uh that's pretty much you you fish you you can

like i guess there's some

progression around it or whatever but it's definitely not the main thing it's about the social experience i think that that's the that's that's the main part here

the vtuber is super weird yeah it's really

super weird

wouldn't wouldn't couldn't find a better video which he has really the best one so that that was the one i want to show but yeah there's fishing mechanics there's some kind of progression, as you saw there on clothing.

This kind of Minecraft-y world from third-person, and uh, yeah, it has giant numbers-like very, very big numbers.

I think

I could see this, like, do a schedule one or schedule I inside this.

Oh, damn, why did that VTuber get big?

Yeah, too creepy, but you know, you do schedule one in this style of like Animal Crossing, but it's all drugs.

That'll that'll blow up,

that'll blow up more meth, though.

Go away.

Please

put her somewhere else.

Yeah, but I didn't even heard about this, and it seems it's really big.

Let me double-check the player.

You can hear about a lot of things that are big on Steam.

Yeah, especially.

That's what I'm doing.

So, if you have one advice for any aspiring mobile studio that's looking for ideas on how to utilize Steam, what would you advise

you and Adam give them?

I don't think you can just copy-paste stuff from Steam.

Like, I think, even in the examples you're talking about, like Repo and where they just literally copy-paste the thing to mobile,

I think you still have to, like, this is a good spot to fill up your creative well and figure out some new interesting mechanics.

But everything still has to be tested after this point to figure out if this is really like the right theme, the right gameplay that can really suck people in.

Also, if it's marketable enough, because

or be the what was the sound swept game or what I would I had there?

No, we had the repo one that that made like 1.3 million

from ads, yeah.

Yeah,

that's not sustainable, but uh for instance, if we if you look at uh yep, so the tarot died on me

if you look at the what's it

which one

yeah

manager.

Only million of them.

The game district one.

Yeah, supermarket manager.

Good, good, good.

How well did this do on Steam?

I don't

remember being big, but not that big.

So it's still doing pretty good, like nearly 150k

downloads of the yeah, but if you go to the country filter, then you will see it's got all mainly Brazil and all these tier free countries.

Brazilians love Supermarket Manager.

But still, it was still like 60% ad revenue.

And they never fixed that app open interstitial, which is like they didn't listen to Felix.

Yeah.

No, I just have to check the supermarket simulator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're talking about the supermarket simulator right away from the Polish studio, and it was already doing

a couple of hundreds installs per day.

But again, Brazil,

Indonesia, and whatever else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

but still no interest 25 million gross revenue 2.6 million units sold that's supermarket similar to game

six in like how in 30 days or how long a lifetime lifetime okay that's still pretty it's pretty low right like that it's pretty small it's just not clearly as like connected of a signal as correlated of a signal as you'd love to see which is still sends says to me like you got to test this stuff before you do it

or or we're looking at it from like wrong perspective like that's the thing that i don't think so you need to be that big in order to work.

Like that's the Tron, for example.

But okay, but how do you know what you should look for?

That's the thing.

Are you going to the Felix area where you just...

Oh, I didn't know what to ask.

Oh, but you should you should

so first thing you need to do this

just go through the things and see what's not translatable at all.

Like we had, for instance, the Sultan game.

I don't think so this can work on mobile.

Like in its in its current iteration.

Like maybe the gameplay mechanics can, but it looks too complicated.

I played it.

So you filter those out.

Then you end up with stuff like this.

Definitely work on mobile.

Yeah, should definitely work on mobile.

Then you take the teams.

The teams, I think, should be the important part because we're again talking about something that works and that's proven and we want to capitalize.

So it's like we don't really need to figure out CPI that much.

Like the steam trend of like reviews and everything, what Matte.

You don't need to figure out the CPI that much.

Well,

you do.

Of course you do, but this is a direction that already gives you the right thing to do, like Tronefall.

But should we be looking at signals on YouTube or TikTok or some video watching apps?

Because I bet you on Repo and on Power World, you're getting crazy YouTube videos because people love Pokemon with guns, love

repo.

Just only looking at the reviews and the

growth here, it's not enough.

yeah it's definitely not enough but also even having the the power world best game ever thing it still can end up within the

where is it the lilit lilit failure yeah but again like i don't think this is a good example because the power world here is just minimal it's just yeah that's almost not there not enough power but again boils down to execution anyway yeah sure sure that's the thing

But yeah, Steam trends, oh, sorry, TikTok trends, YouTube trends, and all these other things that we when we were doing the IMCAT uh game, yeah, it was all over the place.

Yeah, we definitely saw that there's like

fifty five million videos plus on on sh or shorts on YouTube, just just on YouTube and TikTok, yeah,

like fifty million views on some of these.

So, I guess, uh, for the next kind of episode, we should we should also look at include

the YouTube AI and then TikTok trends as well, because this is only

part of the picture.

I don't think so MetaQuest will do it.

Should we wrap it up here?

Yeah, yeah, I think we should wrap it up.

Again, this is the initial setup.

So let us know what you want to see, what you don't want to see, what we get right or wrong because we're trying to learn here.

So I guess we'll figure it out and fine-tune as we go with the new segment.

As usual.

As usual.

So do you do?

All right.

Thank you very much for coming.

Also, Adam, thank you very much for bearing with us in this episode as well.

This great.

Thank you, thank you.

And also, guys, please subscribe.

Let us know, as Jak mentioned in the comments, and join the Slack channel.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.