🎮 The 2 product trends that rule Mobile Games in 2025 by Jakub Remiar

Speaker 1 We can recap the forex segment because the forex segment is completely dominated by this tactic. And you see here that, yeah, Chinese companies are rolling everyone over.

Speaker 1 Like, long gone are the days of Machine Zone being on the top with Mobile Strike and Game of War. It's now all Chinese companies, either Century Games or Raver Game, or some guys from the

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Speaker 1 Hello, hello. This is two and a half gamers special episode.
As usually, when we do the solo ones from time to time, but some of the things are not really worth like going through whole podcasts.

Speaker 1 So, again, we do this solo-wise. So, hope this will be useful because it's my turn this time.
I'm gonna talk Rodak stuff.

Speaker 1 And what I really want to talk today about is trends that we see in the let's say the overall big picture of a product strategy

Speaker 1 portfolio trends in the market no worries there won't be many there will be just two and if you understand these two i'm guessing you're understanding pretty much the whole market let's really get to it So what are we talking about?

Speaker 1 The only product trend you need to know in 2025, and that is UA product funnel.

Speaker 1 Yeah, surprise, surprise, or I would say no surprise, as those listening to our podcast know that this is something we've been talking pretty much for last three years.

Speaker 1 But now it's getting, and I'll show you specific examples why it's getting so intrusive and why it's expanding so fast into different genres and why it works so well.

Speaker 1 So, for those who don't know this, and like

Speaker 1 what they're talking about, Yaku. So, if you remember something like

Speaker 1 like the before age, like age of like six years ago, basically Euro Wars 2019. There was the old funnel where you have all these fake ads which would lower the CPI.
They can look hyper casual-ish.

Speaker 1 You have our guy Hero falling into lava or you unpainting lava on his head and him burning and then fail screen and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 That was the old model of 2019 and it was the like pretty much one of the like start of fake ads even though of course Hero Wars Nexus isn't the one starting fake ads.

Speaker 1 It was probably Ebony or even before that.

Speaker 1 And it would lead you to a real game of course which would differ much again the creative was completely fake like nothing like it was into the game later it got ductatist playable and so on but like that's the old funnel in these days now in 2025 we have giant sophistication and that sophistication means that we have a fake ad then we have a fake game that this fake ad leads us to which kind of you know, equalizes itself, meaning that's nothing fake anymore because we go from fake ad to the fake game, so nothing's fake.

Speaker 1 but then in behind the scenes comes the real game the one that actually makes money so that's the state of the current market pretty much the sophistication of this model and how it's scaling games all over the place because again why this whole thing is happening fake ad is lowering the CPI because it looks hyper casual is very approachable easy to get into you know gates mechanics or very similar random or whatever something that's very very approachable then the same kind of iterated gameplay is thrown at you right after the installation, which again, again, we increasing the total addressable market so much now.

Speaker 1 And then comes the real game, which is the, again, the part where it actually makes money and then where it starts. And, you know, you don't even know when you're playing Forex.

Speaker 1 That's basically TLDR of 2025.

Speaker 1 So the thing that you saw that just there is, of course, River Games Last War, one of the biggest games of last year, where you have the gates mechanic gameplay that is still prevalent within the game.

Speaker 1 But again, quite early you are transitioned from base building into the forex map gameplay of you sending units against other units, so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 This whole gates mechanic gets pretty much sunsetted into the background. It's not really mandatory that much.
It's still into the game because, again, this is not just duct tape, but it's...

Speaker 1 it's there and you play it from time to time and you know it keeps it real so they're not spam but like this is fake where is my you know gates mechanic gameplay they prevent pretty much this, like, mitigate the problem with like fake reviews on the game.

Speaker 1 But then, of course, this is not making money. What's making money is the real Forex game.

Speaker 1 And this trick or the setup has been pulled multiple times by Reaper Game because we had top heroes again doing exactly the same thing.

Speaker 1 Instead of gates, we have action RPG gameplay based on Rumble Heroes, and then the same as base building and Forex Max gameplay, maps gameplay.

Speaker 1 Then they did Dark War Survival, which just taken directly like the notes or hints from White Tower Survival. So, or Frozen City, there's the idle game start there.

Speaker 1 Instead of a furnace that's taking temperature, there's just a tower without the temperature mechanic, but everything else pretty much the same idle gameplay.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, we have some auto battler and the forex and the base building.

Speaker 1 And then we have the latest one from their pretty much portfolio, which is Last Z, which again, kind of exact same thing as Last War, but they added AI rifles into the mix.

Speaker 1 And of course, they built even AI only fans into it.

Speaker 1 If you want to watch again a specific episode on each of these games, we have them on the podcast, so feel free to do so where we talk in great detail about them.

Speaker 1 But yeah, who would have thought Last Z is currently doing the best out of the new ones?

Speaker 1 But still, you see how giant is the growth of this kind of tactic and this whole setup that the River Game portfolio is currently experiencing.

Speaker 1 They went all the way to something like 7.3 million revenue a day just on the Western market that we see here because of course we're not taking into account the chinese revenue from twitch admin games or these alternative source android stores there we don't see it so it's probably even more uh and yeah not surprisingly lasy uh is is the second biggest game now but you see still like there's growth on each of these games today still going up uh

Speaker 1 going moving forward within the segment if you look at the main competitor or like the these two teams kind of switch sides but yeah river games figure century games a little bit smaller compared to them so century games a frozen city which was their idler this is the real idle this wasn't the forex but that idler was pretty much tacked on their forex game which created whiteout survival which is again one of the biggest games last year which has its same kind of idle core which leads you to a forex core basically the one that makes money because idle seems to establish itself as the b one of the best onboarding mechanisms for these things to again take everyone smoothly in and then pretty pretty much.

Speaker 1 Oh, hello, here's the forex part.

Speaker 1 Again, this is taken from Frostbank.

Speaker 1 So, this is also one of the, I think, kind of key differences between River Game and Century Games, where Century, as I see it, kind of iterates and takes ideas much more from PC theme, whereas River game takes idea much for marketing creatives, as for what's the new, you know, onboarding stuff that they're using from the gates mechanic and like the stuff like that, what's trending on the market.

Speaker 1 But again, I could be wrong, this is just surface-level observation that we see there which leads us to kink shot the biggest game of this year which is already doing like three million a day where this exact same trick is being executed where again we have the idle core similar to whiteout survival we have the forex core but in before that the creative that you've seen anywhere uh yeah it's taken from a little indie darling called throne fall that was developed by two or three people in germany i think in october last year and yeah that that's it, basically.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 this is the comparison. On the left side, we have Thronefall, on the right side, we have Kingshot.
And you see that it's nearly one-to-one. But again, it's just used for the onboarding.

Speaker 1 Like, you have these invasion events during the early game, which creates this kind of little bit of tower defense gameplay. Again, nothing really to it.

Speaker 1 It gets sunsetted off, and at some point, these invasions completely stop, and you just, you know, you play the forex part.

Speaker 1 Alliances, upgrades, units, forex map, march battle, base building, and so on and so forth. So exact same trick.
This was actually one of my biggest polls of this year because it's so controversial.

Speaker 1 But again, here's the example of the pipeline. So we have the fake ad creative on the left, even with uh a little bit of a AI sliced on top of it.

Speaker 1 Then we have the fake game, which you see that it's really, really, really similar to what's in the creative actually. It's basically it.

Speaker 1 But of course it leads to a forex game, which is the real game. And this is how it works.
Like this is how you scale games really, really big in 2025.

Speaker 1 yeah as i said line goes up this is september 30th uh yep it's october 7th

Speaker 1 yeah so it's even further one addition to the mix which again i just don't want to talk about successes that are also unsuccessful in the mix here which is high seas hero which has to yet find its footing in the market but what's interesting about this they actually went even further with this whole thing where instead of just an onboarding game like they did with Drone Fall on Kink Shot, they actually went three cores here, like three fully-fledged core gameplays, where the game starts with Legend of Mushroom, which is the

Speaker 1 image number one on the left, which is basically Legend of Mushroom.

Speaker 1 Then it goes into Frozen City style idle game, even though it looks like Fallout Shelter, it's not, it's just a visual of like this kind of end farm.

Speaker 1 But in the end, it's basically Frozen City, it's the temperature, the idle part of it, everything. And then goes to the Forex, so we have actually three cores.

Speaker 1 But it seems this was a little bit either too much or something's not working for it because the game is again struggling to get higher scale or bigger traction recently.

Speaker 1 So I guess Sentry is still iterating on it and we'll see what happens with it further down the line. But yeah, as I said, very interesting case.

Speaker 1 Not everything sucks as always, even if you're one of the biggest companies out there.

Speaker 1 Which again, we can recap the forex segment because forex segment is completely dominated by this tactic. And you see here that, yeah, Chinese companies are rolling everyone over.

Speaker 1 Like, long gone are the days of Machine Zone being on the top with Mobile Strag and Game of War.

Speaker 1 It's now all Chinese companies, either Century Games or River Game, or some guys from the old guard, which are barely able to kind of catch up.

Speaker 1 And there's one team, and kudos to our friends from Score Warrior that did total battle, which is able to keep up and be in the top 10 in the Western charts.

Speaker 1 And yeah, this just proves this whole point that this strategy is so potent and so strong that they were able to do this on their seven-year-old game, basically.

Speaker 1 Like, you see the line there as it scaled to its record revenue recently, which is like 600k a day.

Speaker 1 Of course, the forex, but they have the they have the gates mechanic, they have again base building, for example. They have a few of their own tricks where they do this like simulated forex in sound.

Speaker 1 Again, we have a separate episode on this if you want to really go deep on this, how they do it and how they execute this. Kudos to the team.

Speaker 1 Like, again, again, just proves the point that this strategy just works very well if it's executed properly, which is the key because not everybody can do that.

Speaker 1 Moving on, again, this is not exclusive to Forex. We see this all over the place.
That's why I'm talking about this because it's creeping everywhere. We see it constantly with puzzle.

Speaker 1 So, Royal Match, for instance, here you have the same thing. We have the fake ad where you save the king, gets killed in thousands of different ways.

Speaker 1 But then you have King Nightmares, which is every 10th level, there's this like optional level of you having either time base limit or some kind of different flavor of gameplay where there's actually something happening similarly to the creative and you need to save the king.

Speaker 1 And of course just flavor between. Of course the real game is the one that makes money and that drives the revenue and the whole engagement and everything.
Same goes for play rigs.

Speaker 1 So like this is an example for garden scapes where you have the pin puzzle creators basically and they are slotted into the level saga from the early onboarding like I think it's every second level even some right after each other again exact same concept as you see here.

Speaker 1 And then of course it leads to real game. Yeah, this brings me also to the notion that Old Guard, as I said, is barely catching up.

Speaker 1 Because here we have Lilith's portfolio, for instance, where in twenty twenty they were doing like one hundred twenty, thirty million revenue with the FK Arena and Rise of Kingdoms, and they were the kings of the Forex market back then, but now they're heavily declined and are barely catching up.

Speaker 1 And if you look at their games recently, they are pretty much trying to catch up and hopping on this exact same setup where what they took is pretty much Palworld.

Speaker 1 So they have this game called Palmon Survival, which is taken from Palworld, the steam in the hit of 2024 scale-up hit.

Speaker 1 Again, it was first released, or let's say scaled somewhere like between January and February, didn't really go well, but now it seems they finally found their footing and they're slowly scaling it up.

Speaker 1 And it's the exact same setup. You have the Pokemon style, Palmon

Speaker 1 style mini-game where you these guys fight against each other. It's even first person.

Speaker 1 Then you have this base, which again is reminiscent of Power Worlds, kind of farm factory, whatever, building stuff. It looks like Dream Dale, actually.
And then, of course, it leads to Forex.

Speaker 1 And that's it. Like, these guys are catching up.

Speaker 1 That was it, even though they were the innovators before in 2020. And same goes for FanPlus, because FanPlus, again, on its top during 2020-2021 has declined heavily.

Speaker 1 And you can see it that let's say one of the recent releases which is DC Dark Legion where they even have the IP the DC IP not Marvel but still pretty potent IP but didn't really work well it's just declining from its launch in March all the time and if you look at the other hand one of the other even more recent games which is called tile survive it's exactly basically a copy of dark wars survival from river game where again idle core crex map base building auto battler and that's it zombies of course and that's it And this game is already over the DC Dark Legion game.

Speaker 1 It's like 100k a day. And scaling up also like 100k downloads a day because, again, same exact setup.

Speaker 1 So yeah, they're just barely catching up, I would say, because Century and River Game is pretty much steamrolling the whole Forex genre and moving even into different genre basically with this concept.

Speaker 1 We already see it with like tasty travels, for instance, that Century Games is doing.

Speaker 1 The most recent trend where we see this regarding like but Jacob, this just works in Rex puzzle and like not applicable to other genre. Of course, it is.

Speaker 1 And I think this is the important part of this whole discussion that I'm having here: it will proliferate to other genres. Because let's take, for instance, social casino.

Speaker 1 That's a very relevant genre. So, social casino games throughout the years, you see, they had this very unique evolution of trying to kind of hide the slot machine into something different.

Speaker 1 So, we have the spin wheel, we have the, you know, not the really, really social casino hardcore games, we have this like casual casino games here, starting with something like pirate kings then we go coin master board kings figigo dream dice monoco go is basically taking board kings with an ip like iteration there it's very specific and you see the layout and everything it's kind of quite similar but recently again a lot of games are going even further for instance we have animals and coins which has this bear with these

Speaker 1 Ladders or whatever like a runner because their creatives looks like it so this is again the fake gameplay like they changed the slot machine to be this kind of fake slot machine setting.

Speaker 1 Same goes for Fish of Fortune, which is like fish style but in social going looter game that's the subgenre. All the creatives are about fish.

Speaker 1 The last addition to this bunch is uh Angry Birds, surprisingly, which they and this is a very, very good iteration in my opinion.

Speaker 1 I'm really looking forward how this game will fare into Global Launch, where you can actually even move a little bit the bird and have some kind of control so it's not all automated.

Speaker 1 But but yeah, they turn their, you know, flying birds on on a slingshot mechanic into the like that's their slot machine basically that's what they did here and of course it's coin master meta so again this trend is moving there but we go even further and the trends move even further which means it actually has the onboarding fake gameplay because these games are just hiding it they don't have extra idle core somewhere there like this is it as you see it they all have coin master meta but the slot machine is just hidden better but here we have like we don't even try to hide the slot machine this is carnival tycoon where you literally start as a theme park with this is the idle core like idle based theme park then suddenly here's your coin master's trade machine and then you know that's how it works and here we can see it where literally like a hyper casual ad and then it goes into the exactly the thing that you see here it is the idle theme park and then you know hello coin master this is where we actually make money uh and it's scaling very very well already past 200k and as you've seen in the chart this is already the fourth biggest game by IP revenue in the CoinMutter genre, right after big three, Monopoly, Coinmaster, and Dice Dreams.

Speaker 1 And this is not like a coincidence. We also have Top Tycoon by Solitaire Farm, which is exactly the same thing.
Literally, the exact same concept.

Speaker 1 Idle game, theme park, float machines, and you know, the typical CoinMaster meta.

Speaker 1 Here's an example: social revenge mechanics, which scaled even faster because this scaled from July to already 100 a day basically in three months. And yeah, it just goes up.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's the trend number one. And the trend number two, which complements this first trend, is templatization.

Speaker 1 And this is even more important, especially for big companies having multiple games in portfolios. So, what this means is that, in my opinion, this is the most efficient way to create new games.

Speaker 1 Of course, it has a drawback because template will keep you locked within a genre, but again, still, it's the most efficient way if you know how to pull it off.

Speaker 1 So, the most famous company that's been using this strategy of course is Habi. If you see their Metagam template, it's just been like getting better and better.

Speaker 1 From the days of Archero, Survivor IO, Kinjaran, you see it all over the place. It's pretty much their action roguelide template that they're just using and just changing cores.

Speaker 1 And again, the meta is pretty much the same. The mechanics, the gacha, everything's kind of the same.
It's very, very efficient.

Speaker 1 Of course, it needs to work on the core and not every game works on the core.

Speaker 1 From all those games that you see here, Bumble, Snaker, Survivor IO, Kinjaran, and Archero, only Archero and Survivor IO actually scale. Kinjaran, Bumble, and Snaker didn't really scale that much.

Speaker 1 But again, because of the template, you have many more shots on goal because each consecutive game is faster than the previous one as you recycle all these things.

Speaker 1 Again, a good example on the market where it actually works very well is Microfund, which completely took over Merge 2 genre, where you have Gossip Harbor, Seaside Escape, and multiple other games coming up now to take on pretty much everyone that's there and completely take all the market share.

Speaker 1 Here we have an example of like on the left side, we have Gossip Harbor, then we have Seaside Escape, the two big kids there, and then we have Flambay Merchant Cook, which is one of the recent games, and even a new soft lunge games called Icy Hearts.

Speaker 1 Ironically, because it's all based on freezing families creators, but you see it, how it's done.

Speaker 1 The guy with the baseball cap on the left in Gossip Harbor is basically the exact same guy in the Icy Hearts on the right. Yeah, it's just very, very efficient if you are are able to pull it off.

Speaker 1 Of course, they change stuff and like the metas and like some different things are there, but it's merge true pretty much all over the place as you see here. Very, very similar setup.

Speaker 1 And that's why, again, Flamby, which is scaling from this year's May, is doing already 100k a day easily, basically.

Speaker 1 We don't really need to go that far into Asia or, you know, like nobody in the West. Of course, some people in the West are doing this already.

Speaker 1 Here we have an example from Grand Games, like the game Magic Sword, which Grand Games is pretty much taking on these like unconventional puzzle subgenres, which is like sword, you know, block gem or block itself.

Speaker 1 Basically, they have the block star game released in new, but you see it like it's based all on a template, basically, and it's done very, very well already in the market.

Speaker 1 Same thing goes for spy games, by the way.

Speaker 1 After like a successful Social Casino game, they pretty much went on like a street of Tilebusters, Flipbusters, Cube Busters, again, all doing like unconventional puzzle subgenres on the same metagame.

Speaker 1 So again, we don't need to go that far, it just works very well. One that I would mention from the bunch would be Mihoyo, which again, they just changed the course.

Speaker 1 They have exactly the same metagame. You see those two pictures on the bottom.
Left side we have Genshin, on right side we have Honkai Starial. You see that even the

Speaker 1 the setup here on the layout of like inventory pieces is the same. What they do is just like cleverly recycle the meta.

Speaker 1 But this is kind of a drawback because they have been completely saturated their category with their scale so you see that even though they already are on third game yeah the revenue is going down we still don't see the pc revenue in china and you know yada yada yada all these other things but mobile wise doesn't seem that the fourth game would actually help them here so as i said it's a tricky thing with these templates the last things of course is all the other games i could show you in the first part of the trend i could talk about using templatization river game is using templatization even for their onboarding setup their way.

Speaker 1 Century Games is using templatization for their Idol core, for their Forex Core.

Speaker 1 Like in order to pull out these fast new games, you just need to pull them very, very specifically and precisely within those templates.

Speaker 1 Like you see the UI layout, everything on between White House Survival and Kingshot is nearly identical. The good thing about templates is that they upgrade if you know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 For instance, Hubby, the latest template on Wheel Defender or Archero 2, Capy Barrago, it's like an upgrade.

Speaker 1 They took a lot of elements from Legend of Mushroom and put it there into their signature template. So it grows stronger, even though your games fail, you know, you salvage it and move faster.

Speaker 1 But as I said, there are drawbacks. So let's see.
And yeah, this is pretty much it. Thanks for listening.
If you have any questions, write down into the comments below. Join our Slack channel.

Speaker 1 I think we'll see more and more genres being, or let's say, going to use this setup and this trend proliferates even more and more.

Speaker 1 And I'm guessing that either some, again, it's driven mainly by UA, a current market situation.

Speaker 1 If nothing changes, this will be just like the only way to scale your game to very high scale, profitably, or like consistently, just the way around it. Thanks again, and see you around.
Bye-bye.