New genre leader in cozy games by Jakub Remiar

So, why do we collect this? I still haven't figured out really if there's like game play affecting mechanics for it because the clothes collection is extremely big.
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Welcome to another solo episode by Two and a Half Gamers. That's me speaking as usual on the product side. And in this week's episode of uh what exotic game did Yako prepare? We're going to speak about Hardtopia, which is the new game on the block. And uh we're actually going to broaden our horizons. Yes, there will be anime. Yes, there will be gachas. Yes, there will be a lot of revenue. So, stay tuned. And uh as I said, we're going to look into a genre that we don't really talk about. It's not really that much in the spotlight, but uh yeah, this game's pretty big, so let's put it in the spotlight. So, we're talking about the cozy games, live simulation games, avatar games, however you want to call them. There's multiple names and this category is I guess quite exotic and not that mainstream but yeah this game's definitely mainstream. Yep. Let's get to it and we'll start with the

data this time. So what do we have here? Hearttopia released on January and it is currently still doing something like K revenue and I was like oh this is just like the initial spike but the download seems like extremely steady. 10 days after this on 10 days data but like hey it's more than a week which is like more than half a million downloads a day still the country filter yeah let's look at the country filter uh yeah download wise of course it's coming mainly from Asia there's quite strong US with 13% and then there's like lower tier one but yeah let's not kid ourselves it's mainly Asia and Japan is very very strong if we go with revenue Japan wins with 22 2%. Then there's US with around 18%. And then we have the usual culprits from Asia such as Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and France. Yeah, France makes there quite high. But yeah, let's see.

So that's there. And uh yeah, this game is still going very strong. And on top of it, this game is on Steam. So it's a crossplatform game. So the revenue is actually even higher. Correction there. It's going to be on Steam. Not this on Steam, but uh it's on PC. So, if you go here into their website, you can download the PC client. So, Steam's going to be Yeah, it's crossplatform, but it's not on like Steam client yet, but it's going to be released soon as it's as it's um it's done by XD International, which is the I'm guessing Chinese publisher. Yep. I don't know if Chinese or Korean, but I'm guessing Chinese. If you look at their portfolio, there's blue plot protocol there, there's LA adventure there, there's uh Azour lane there, there's Terraria there on mobile. So quite an interesting setup that they have there. And yeah, they're doing like a quite sizable amount of

revenue. But again, back to Harttopia. Hearttopia itself is in this like if we go here and just kind of take it by the category incense tower is under this avatar life which is this kind of a coy games 5 seconds. I'll get into it as I go through the game itself and like the actual feature set but again let's finish the numbers. So how this category looks from download side download sidetopia is already first in last 30 days even though it's been out for 10 days only. And then you have a lot of these like simulation games. There's a game called Lifetopia. There's Sims here like the original EA Sims uh that's doing like 1 million downloads a month. Sunday City by Kafir which we covered on the channel which is a casino game that's having GTA YC as an onboarding setup and like a lot of these other games. So if you go to revenue, there's this other game called lively island cute pets again [snorts] like kind of

simulation stuff. Second spot Sims third spot kafir hearttopia already on the fifth spot but this is last 30 days revenue and if we check the actual performance which by the way the downloadtopia is literally crushing it. If we check the revenue of all of these kind of top apps, we see that pretty much it's like something like I don't know 300k a day and now it's pretty much because constantly doing over 200. So it's pretty much immediately being catapulted to the top. And if they continue to do something like 250K. So it means that if I look at at this chart in a month, this game is going to be second because Hardtopia would be already doing 7 and a half million a day, which is like double the amount of the first game here. So yeah, that's why we're talking about it because it's the biggest cozy game on the mobile games market yet. Yeah, I guess let's maybe look like last last chart here. This is the overall kind of a cozy genre up live

genre on mobile. It's not that big. Definitely the category was steadily kind of growing and kind of doubled itself throughout last uh what 8 years 9 years. Yeah. Something like 12 13 million uh revenue a month now. Consistently doing over 20 23 22. So that's their download wise. Yeah. downloads has grown quite significantly from something like 10 million a month to again like 30 million a month or something like that. Yeah, it's quite popular but again not that big but as I said getting there. Let's look at the actual game and how it looks. So we have our character in 3D world. Everything's extremely relaxed. There's no combat. There's no pretty much, you know, nothing to it. Let me even turn on the music because it would not be the full experience without it. Uh and we have our character that starts immediately and then we pretty lift the live here

and we can do a lot of things. So um how or what are the reference games here? Stuff like Animal Crossing for sure that that's like one of the big references. Stuff like Love Nikki or Infinite Nikki that's very again close to this especially with the gacha system. when we talk about that in detail and similar games where again you are just living the slow nice life and the game just rewards you. So immediately start here in your house that you first select your character then you select your house and then you start to decorate it and pretty much do stuff with it. Later on as you progress in the story there is a story. So you are kind of following this kind of a easy story you unlock more and more features and all of these menus. So we have our kind of main watch. There's this kind of DG members guild pass which is basically unlocking the features of the game. So for instance here it unlocked fishing for me. Then on level three unlock gardening some like photo features dying furniture. Then it will

unlock plot unlock. I can have more plots and like harvest crops. Then it will unlock some again new hobbies, more plots, member events and so on. Some more hobbies. Da da da da da. Yep. Very kind of easy progression. Then we have stuff like the crafting bench here where we can craft a lot of things and we learn a lot of recipes. Yeah, those are coming also in collection. So we have this kind of a joinery collection of furniture. Then as I said fishing you can buy you can catch the fish and you can actually put them in the aquarium here in your aquarium and so the fish pretty much just goes there. Let me put on the light. Yeah, that's there. You can sleep of course. It would be a simulation without sleeping. It just restores uh with a bit of your energy I guess. So that's there. Yeah, enough of sleeping for now. And then there's of course very extensive build mode where

you can, you know, decorate and move stuff around your house and do pretty much the like the furniture thing where we have again lots of combo sets, all these other things here. We have the dying of furniture. We have building materials. So we can like do stuff like windows and stuff like that. Actual furniture here, which again some of it is coming from Gacha. These these menus are extremely robust because it's like decoration is like one of the main parts of the game. Um let me just finish that and go to the other menu. So yeah, we can craft furniture, craft items, craft all of these things. As I said, we have these plots where we can like seed and plant stuff. We can harvest stuff directly from that house has grown pretty fast that was not there before. For instance, if I go here and I equip an axe, I can just harvest some wood from here. And then even mandarins. That's nice. And then the tree needs to rest. That's like quite interesting

because you never chop it down. It's just like infinite source of wood. Let me just look at this. I think is this is someone else's house if I understand. And just put a random player beside me. I'm guessing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There should be like another players house because after I like finished the tutorial suddenly it kind of repopulated the server with other players houses which is like extremely interesting because again you can go there talk with them interact with them if you see them or as I see here like I'm just kind of strolling through their house because again if we go on the map yeah you see these plots of land that are being pretty much I guess populated by players. The houses can get quite big in a way that uh as you see there the plots that you that you get. Maybe let me go to the actual house builder. This is this is my house here. And uh yeah, you see how it's kind of the segments are kind of visible like what more stuff I can buy. What was it? The town guide somewhere here. There's the there's the

plot unlock. Yeah, I I'll get to it as as I go. Anyway, why is it making money? The the big question. So there are gachas as usual. For instance, this is the main gacha. We can actually all him. So we can like summon summon here. Let's release these exhibition souvenirs. Very nice presentation. If you're asking like okay, so you have cosmetics based gachas like in love nikki. Very similar to love nikki. Yes, you have. We have stuff like ice diamond water bottle. Thank you. Frost weather sweater mask. Another mask. And this, I'm guessing, is something very rare, which is ice glow barrett. Oh, we have a pet. That's nice. And some more stuff on top of it. And there we go. I guess the cap was the rare rare one. And we collect clothing. And the Yeah. So, it I guess recycled items. So, why do we collect this? I still haven't figured out really if there's like game play affecting mechanics for it because the clothes

collection is extremely big. So you have like furniture collection, you have other collections with stuff such as like recipes, instruments, all these items literally cars. You can have cars in this game or pictures. And the clothes collection is one of the main ones. you have all of these other kind of a sets and stuff, but I haven't seen found like a functional usage for this. It seems like you're just collecting them and you're being as you see rewarded by the collection itself, which is quite interesting. And um because in for instance, the gacha seems like being taken literally from Love Nikki because when we go here and uh maybe let's found that new cap hat or whatever we just summoned. Yeah, should be somewhere here. Hopefully it has parameters. That's what I wanted to say because stuff that's also Yeah, here it is. So, ice glow barrett. If you go into details, it doesn't have parameters. It's just like different skins for it. When I was in the last shop last time,

it did have parameters. I guess not this one. But it has like for instance like a whatever I'm having a mint currently jacket or whatever I I'm having here. But again, as I said, I didn't saw anything as for the Yeah, here we are. So you see this kind of morin white and usually in love nikki you would have the PVP battles or like dress up battles and stuff like that. So you would use these parameters because he would give you assignments based on these you can do this and so on so forth. Maybe it's there somewhere there but I was literally scaring the internet looking like guides online haven't found anything yet. I'm guessing maybe it will be there but maybe not. thing is that yeah, it's making so much money because you can like collect more than 1,000 clothes and like dressing up is like one like main part of the game and looking cool and not only you yourself but also the furniture itself. So if you look at that we have the female character uh clothing gacha. We have the male character growing gacha and then we have the furniture gacha. So, if we do this,

yes, we get gacha base furniture. We kept putting to in the house. It's in sets and all these other things, which is great. And hopefully we'll skip this because don't want to do another tent pool. And we got ice palace gable roof, which is nice. I guess you put that on top of your house. Yeah. So you see how I'd get like more points into this kind of special furniture sheet which again just gives me rewards as I'm going there. And then I'm collecting the specific collections here as as was sold there. Yeah, that's the recycle part. So again, if we go here back to the collections now we're in furniture again. You see how it kind of gives me stuff like in a battle pass like even a recipe for a new chair collector's armchair. So here for instance we have the polar hymn ice building material palace. Then we have the ones you actually select the ones that you want to have in the gacha. So yeah it's a very heavy collection item

driven but again this is not driven by some gameplay mechanics you know no fire water electric Pokemon and similar things like you would have in Genshin or whatever. Not even the one that you have in Nikki. though if this is just working based on cosmetics itself like it's amazing and yeah I should definitely study it more because we're getting to these let's say non-gameplaydriven gacha systems let's coin it right here which means either waifuss or these dress up games because you collect those things because you want them they don't really have that much gameplay impact like the waifu games ones if we take stuff like goddess sneak or similar games like they actually have gameplay impact there. But still, you collect even the ones that have bad gameplay impact. It just just looks good. Here it seems it's like put on another level where there's literally zero impact. It's just cosmetics. You just kind of get it and you have the cosmetics. But then we have the hobby cataloges where you have again like a

gardening one, fish observation, one bird watching one, so on so forth. The guys that are here waiting, this is for instance the gardener that gives you quest and again he has access to the gardening store where I can buy potato and tomato seeds. Now, then there's the I'm guessing this is some kind of pilot. I haven't seen this yet. Or random person. Don't know. Then there's this guy who is what? Yeah, just some kind of merchant that just helps you out. Lots of NPCs in this game. And as I said, you go into the city, there's lots of shops. You can buy stuff and do these other things. And yeah, the gachas that I'm just like again these ones 21 days. So these are banner like limited ones. There's actually, you see, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight gachas running currently. Basically, they're a little bit different by their type because something is furniture, something is clothing, something is Yeah, this is just kind of not the previous furniture. So, that's there time limited festival and daily rewards. So, it's very heavy

gacha based. It's uh I think it's following the Love Nikki setup and Love Nikki has a very good LTV just because of that. But Love Nikki also has the dress up battles. I'm wondering if this still has some kind of functional mechanics because I would expect that. But for now and like I'm playing this for multiple days now. It just hadn't come yet. And yeah, what you do in the game? Yeah, you should live in it. There's like a lots of the east quests and feels like a chore to be honest a little bit because you just like move here like one of those uh quests in Worlds of Warcraft where you go from A to B and just like collect stuff. Bring this here, bring this there, click on this, move the boxes, save the cat, and usually like, you know, slow life, like nice things. Not really some kind of a kill enemies, damage based something or whatever. It's just very easy and nice and cozy. And as I said, yep, that's that's kind of this genre that's I think been very very like silent or quiet for

now. So I was really surprised that this game just came out of nowhere and now it's doing so much money immediately out of the bed and it's still preserving the revenue. Yeah, I know it's heavily Asian. That's why I'm talking about it alone because yeah, my team feelings wouldn't be here. But yeah, let's see how it goes. And I'm just kind of curious if this trend continues because yeah, this makes so much money based on literally just you buying cosmetics, which by the way is like some of the ultimate solutions. But let's kid, let's not kid ourselves. This is like extremely heavy female audience only. You can do this with other systems like Fortnite or like similar ones. Yeah. One few last charts. Native Gallery have 1,6700 creatives on on launch. That's great. Yeah, it's pretty much me trying to play mate. I was looking into the concept. They're very varied. There's lots of UGC, but there's I think 90% is based on

gameplay itself because again, they literally have the world that they can simulate. So, they do stuff like that. There's also lots of these like decoration building creatives. Again, you can do this. There is like a world builder mode. So, you can literally create like some of these amazing houses and creations that are kind of shown here. So, uh, yeah, surprisingly they don't have fake ads and they still make a lot of money. So, that's a nice refreshing kind of a thing to see. Yeah. Um, so we'll see if this hits based on the prediction here around 72 million a month for like until 7th of February and we'll keep it on the radar definitely because uh, yep, it's just like giant giant giant revenue. Doesn't matter if it's Asian or not, just the system. Seems quite interesting if it works like as it should. Anyway, this was it. Uh brief rundown of the game. If you want to play it and go check it out, it's quite easy and cozy even though I was just like reviewing it. It's also, by

the way, um rewarding explorations to world and there are these like items and powerups or like big hide chumps that you can get. See, for instance, here right there we have actually hard currency sitting there. that we need to collect. And I don't know. Yeah, there we go. See, so it's it's quite nice. And as I said, Coy, the game feels amazing. Let's see how it fares further down the line if they can keep up the player volume and especially the player revenue and if it will be that typical spiky pattern with GA because for now it doesn't seems that it's doing that. But again, you've seen their cycle. So it seems they're running like a 30-day cycle on gacha. So, let's see if like in 30 days it goes down, it slacks up and then we can read the line much more further. Anyway, that was it. Thank you for watching. Uh, if you have any questions, feel free to write them under the video or join our Slack channel. Also, if you have any suggestions, especially for these like

solo episodes that we're doing and I'm I will be doing some more of these like uh exotic games and Maple Story. I'm talking about you, which is completely crushing the idol RPG market now doing 50 million amount. I still haven't been able to run it on the emulator, but I'll get to it. So, yeah, I'm going to do more of these ones sliced with some theory that we talk about from time to time. Anyway, that was it. Thank you for watching and see you next time. Ciao.