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How To Make A Horror Game (Fast, No Modeling)
The process of developing a 3D horror game without traditional 3D modeling skills relies on leveraging modular design, grid-based layout tools, and royalty-free assets.
- Use Unity’s ProBuilder package to construct environments through modular block-outs, ensuring consistent scale by adhering to a strict one-meter grid system.
- Maintain visual consistency across disparate royalty-free assets by applying a unified color palette and standardized lighting throughout the environment.
- Generate professional-grade material maps—including normal, height, and roughness—from flat photographic references using tools like Materialize.
Retargeting Masterclass: From Angry Birds to AI Ads
Retargeting has transitioned from a peripheral marketing tactic into a foundational pillar for maximizing player lifetime value and optimizing advertising expenditures within the mobile gaming industry.
- Retargeting inactive users is a critical strategy for evergreen games, with a 14-day window often serving as the optimal period for paid re-engagement campaigns.
- Updating game icons can significantly boost organic returns, with some developers reporting a two to three times increase in organic returning users after implementing new icon designs.
- To accurately measure the effectiveness of retargeting and avoid cannibalization, studios should utilize ghost bidding or hold-out groups where a percentage of the audience is excluded from seeing ads.
🐷🧶 Unravel Master’s success explained: 25 key insights on modern Hybrid-Casual design
Unravel Master exemplifies the modern hybrid-casual model by synthesizing hyper-casual user acquisition tactics with the deep, sustained engagement mechanics of traditional puzzle games.
- The hybrid-casual model achieves financial stability by targeting a 50/50 or 60/40 revenue split between in-app purchases and advertising.
- Early-stage difficulty spikes, a technique adapted from Chinese puzzle design, are used to drive Day 0 monetization and identify high-value users.
- User acquisition performance is maintained in high-CPI markets through a high-frequency creative strategy that produces hundreds of unique assets in short timeframes.
This Young Solo Dev Built a Steam Hit in 4 Months
The rapid success of the co-op title Pedal Pedal Pedal, which achieved 120,000 units sold following a condensed four-month development cycle, serves as a compelling case study for modern indie game production.
- Solo developer Zoroarts achieved a Steam hit with 'Paddle Paddle Paddle' by limiting development to four months, following a two-week demo phase, to avoid the scope creep that plagued his previous two-year project, 'Maki's Adventure'.
- To prevent feature creep, the developer strictly adhered to a pre-defined list of 30 core elements and biomes, refusing to add new features during the development cycle.
- Marketing success was driven by leveraging TikTok, where the developer used negative comments about game graphics as content to go viral, and by building a database of over 1,000 influencer and press contacts.
🐶 X-Clash: The Fake UA funnel & Fake Ads Masterclass. How to 10x your revenues?
Chinese studio Binuang Network and developer Glacier Games have successfully scaled titles like X-Clash by leveraging aggressive, misleading user acquisition funnels.
- Glacier Games and Binuang Network scaled X-Clash by using 'fake ads' that feature viral mini-game mechanics like 'Save the Dog' to drive downloads for a core 4X strategy game.
- The studio maintains a massive library of over 9,000 unique creatives to combat creative fatigue and sustain high-volume user acquisition on Google and YouTube.
- This strategy effectively bridges the gap between casual players and the high-value monetization loops typical of the 4X strategy genre.
Session: From Installs To Impact: Driving Sustainable App Growth On Snapchat - Sara Antonelli, Snap.
Snapchat’s strategy for driving sustainable mobile gaming growth centers on four pillars: audience scale, performance-driven solutions, privacy-centric measurement, and innovative ad formats.
- Snapchat's 'App Power Pack' leverages internal monetization learnings from Snapchat Plus—which generated $700 million in ARR and 15 million subscriptions—to provide mobile gaming advertisers with optimized user acquisition solutions.
- Snapchat's audience is highly active, with 59% of users playing games multiple times daily and 50% of users making in-app purchases, a rate double that of physical product conversions on the platform.
- The platform's 'Rewarded Play' ad solution has demonstrated significant performance, including cases with 35 times more iOS installs at an 80% lower cost per install and 60 times more purchases at a 90% lower cost per purchase.
Pokemon BDSP: Play Like A Designer Episode 4, Forward to Floaroma!
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl serve as a case study for the enduring tension between casual accessibility and the rigorous demands of competitive play.
- Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl features a quality-of-life mechanic where players can use Hidden Moves like Rock Smash via the Pokétch app, allowing wild Pokémon to perform the action without requiring the player to teach the move to a party member.
- Double battles in Pokémon expand the game's possibility space by allowing players to manage two active combatants, though the number of Pokémon each trainer can deploy is limited by the specific encounter's constraints.
- Time-bound mechanics in games, such as specific Pokémon spawn windows or MMO events tied to real-world clocks, create significant challenges for content creators and streamers who cannot maintain consistent availability for these events.
What I learned about Steam Next from looking at 208 games that participated
Steam Next Fest functions primarily as a visibility multiplier rather than a discovery engine, according to an analysis of 208 games participating in the February 2025 event.
- Steam Next Fest acts as a visibility multiplier rather than a discovery engine, with performance primarily dictated by pre-existing wishlist counts.
- Games entering with fewer than 1,000 wishlists gain an average of 462, while those with 10,000 gain 1,500, and only titles with over 100,000 pre-existing wishlists see significant growth, averaging 23,000 additional wishlists.
- The platform's algorithm shifts visibility based on player engagement by Thursday, causing a sharp decline for games that fail to convert impressions into wishlists early in the event.
Masters of Publishing 5: Scaling Isn’t a Milestone, It’s a Grind (Samantha Benjamin, Growth)
Scaling hybrid-casual games demands a sophisticated, long-term operational strategy that prioritizes sustainable profitability over the rapid, short-term break-even cycles typical of the hyper-casual market.
- Hybrid-casual scaling requires a long-term financial strategy that accounts for 90 to 120-day break-even windows, moving away from the rapid recovery cycles of hyper-casual games.
- Growth managers must utilize predictive lifetime value (LTV) modeling and continuous product optimization rather than relying on simplistic, plug-and-play user acquisition tactics.
- High install volume is an unreliable metric that can mask poor long-term return on investment; sustainable growth depends on rigorous post-install data analysis.
Game Review Radar #9: The Curse of the podcast strikes again. Or maybe not!
The mobile gaming landscape is currently defined by unexpected resilience and aggressive scaling, defying earlier market skepticism that predicted rapid declines for established titles.
- Last War continues to dominate as a revenue leader, generating approximately $6.6 million per day with a consistent upward trajectory.
- Short-form drama applications have become a massive market force, with DramaBox and ReelShort generating monthly revenues of $32 million and $36 million, respectively.
- King Shot has emerged as a top-performing title, reaching a peak of $3 million in daily revenue and maintaining a stable, long-term growth profile.
Battle of the Release Dates, Blizzard Sues Turtle WoW & Capcom Blames Sony | Games For Breakfast
The contemporary video game industry is defined by intense competition for player attention, where the release of "juggernaut" titles creates significant market volatility.
- The upcoming 2025 release of Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to dominate the industry news cycle, forcing widespread recalibration of release calendars across the sector.
- High-demand launches like Silksong, which reached over 587,000 concurrent players, create significant market volatility and infrastructure strain that can overwhelm digital storefronts.
- Unlike the film industry, the high time investment required for video games makes direct competition a major threat to commercial success, forcing smaller studios to adopt agile strategies to avoid being overshadowed by juggernaut titles.
2 Hours of answering Steam Questions (Please don't watch this you have games to work on)
Achieving commercial success on Steam requires a strategic shift from passive development to active, data-driven market engagement.
- Steam's algorithm promotes games by testing them with small audiences; if early performance metrics are strong, the platform automatically expands the game's reach, but if initial engagement is low, the algorithm stops showing the game to new users.
- A Steam demo launch is a 'one-shot' opportunity to leverage the 'Trending Free' section and the single email blast allowed to all wishlisters, so developers must coordinate these efforts to maximize concurrent player counts.
- Developers should avoid live-streaming their own development process on platforms like YouTube or Twitch, as it distracts from core production and rarely yields meaningful marketing results compared to focused development time.