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

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 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 River Game or some guys from the
It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice with Mins. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. Mate Felix Shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes to the early day. Matea master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Feeling stacks dollars like a wizard in disguise. Japanese craft realms with us to the highest. 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. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Hello. Hello. This is two and a half gamers special episode as usually when we do these solo ones from time to time but some of the things are not really worth like going through whole podcast. So again we do this solo wise so hope this will be useful because it's my turn this time I'm going to talk product stuff 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 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 understanding pretty much the whole market. Let's really get to it. So, what are we talking about? Uh, the only product trend you need to know in 2025, and that is the UA product funnel. Uh yeah, surprise surprise or I would say

no surprise as those listening to our podcast know that this is something we've been talking uh pretty much for last three years. 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 genre and why it works so well. So for those who don't know this and like what what they're talking about Yakob. So if you remember something like a like the before age like age of like six years ago basically Hero Wars 2019 there was the old funnel where you have all these fake ads which would lower the CPI. They can look hyper casualish. 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 so forth. 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 as it was probably Evony or even before that 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 duct taped as playable and so but like that's the old funnel in these days now in 2025 we have Chinese 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 nothing fake anymore because we go from fake ad to the fake game. So nothing's fake. 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 casualist very approachable easy to get into you know gates mechanics or very similar random mechanics 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 mark so much now and Then comes the real game which is the again the part where actually makes money and then where it starts and and you know you don't even know when you're playing Forex that's basically TLDDR of 2025. 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 but again quite early you are transitioned from base building into the forex map gameplay of you sending units against other units so on so forth. This whole gates mechanic gets pretty much sunseted 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 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 on the game. But then of course this is not making money. What's making money is the real Forex game. And this trick or the setup has been pulled multiple times by river game because we had top heroes again doing exactly the same thing. Instead of gates we have action RPG gameplay based on rumble heroes and then the same as base building and forex max game maps gameplay. Then they did dark war survival which just taken directly like the notes or hints from white out survival. So or frozen city. There's the idle game start there. 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. And then of course, we have some auto battler and the Forex and the base building. 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 waifuss into the mix. And of

course, they built even AI only fans into it. If you want to watch again 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. But uh yeah, who would have thought? Laz is currently doing the best out of the new ones. But still, you see how giant is the growth of this kind of tactic and this whole setup that River Game portfolio is currently experiencing. 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 stores Android stores there we don't see it so it's probably even more uh and yeah not surprisingly last Z uh is is the second biggest game now but you see still like there's growth on each of these games they still going up uh 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 bigger century games a little bit smaller compared to them to

Century Games, Frozen City, which was their idler. This is the real idler. This wasn't the Forex, but that idler was pretty much tech on their Forex game, which created White Out 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 one of the best onboardings mechanisms for these things to again take everyone smoothly in and then pretty much Oh, hello. Here's the Forex part. Uh again this is taken from frost tank. So this is also one of the I think kind of key differences between river game and century games where century as as I see it kind of iterates and takes ideas much more from PC team whereas river game takes idea much more marketing creatives as for what's the new you know on boarding stuff that they're using from the gates mechanic and like the stuff like that what's trending on the market but again I could be wrong this is just surface level

observation that we see there which leads us to kingshot the biggest game of this year which is already doing like 3 million a day where this exact same trick is being executed where again we have the idle core similar to white out survival we have the forex core but in before that creative that you seen anywhere uh yeah it's taken from a little indie darling called thronefall that was developed by two or three people in Germany I think in October last year and yeah that that's it basically like this this this is the comparison on the left side we have thrown fall on right side we have kingshot and you see that it's nearly one to one but again it's just used for the onboarding like you have these invasion events during the early game which creates this kind of little bit of tower defensey gameplay again nothing really to it it gets sunseted off and at some point these invasion completely stop and you just you know you play the 4x part alliances upgrades units forex map march battle base building and so on so forth so exact same trick this was

actually one of my biggest holes of this year because it's so controversial. But again, here's the example of the pipeline. So, we have the fake ad creative on the left, even with a little bit of a AI sliced on top of it. 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. 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. Yeah. As I said, line goes up. This is September 30th. Yep. It's October 7th. Yeah. So, it's even further. One addition to the mix, which again, I just don't want to talk about successes. There are also unsuccessful kind of 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 on boarding game like

they did with Drone Fall on Kingshot, they actually went three cores here, like three fullyfledged core game plays, where the game starts with Legend of Mushroom, which is the image number on the image number one on the left, which is basically Legend of Mushroom. Then it goes into Frozen City style idol game. Even though looks like Fallout Shelter, it's not. It's just a visual of like this kind of end farm. 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 course. 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 big traction recently. So I guess Century 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. Not everything's a success always even if you're the one of the biggest companies out there. Uh 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 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 River Game or some guys from the old guard which are barely able to kind of catch up. And there's one team, 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. And yep, this just proves this whole point that this strategy is so potent and so strong that they were able to do this on their 7-year-old game basically like you see the line there as it scaled to its record revenue recently which is like 600k a day of course forex but they has the they have the gates mechanic they have again base building for example they have few of their own tricks uh where they do this like simulated forex in town again we have a separate episode on this if you want to really go deep on this how how they do it and how they execute this. Kudos to the team. Like 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. 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. So, royal match for instance. Here you have the same thing. We have the fake ad where you know you save the king gets killed thousand of different ways. 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 similar to the creative and you need to save the king and of course just flavor between of course the real game is the one that makes money and drives the revenue and the whole engagement and everything. Same goes for play rings. So with 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 on boarding like I think it's every second level even some right after each other again

exact same concept as you see here 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 because here we have Lilith portfolio for instance where in 2020 they were doing like 100 20 30 million revenue with 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. And if you look at their games recently, they are pretty much trying to catch up and hoping on this exact same setup where what they took is pretty much uh Pal World. So they have this game called Palmon Survival which uh is taken from Pal World Steam uh indie hit of 2024. Yeah, Scaleup hit. Again, it was first released or let's say scaled somewhere like uh 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 and it's the exact same setup. You have the Pokemon style Palmon World style miniame where you know these guys fight

against each other. It's even first person. Then you have this base which again is reminiscent of Pal World's kind of farm factory whatever building stuff. It looks like Dream Dale actually. And then of course it leads to Forex and that's it. Like these guys are catching up. That that that was it. even though they were the innovators before in 2020 and same goes for F plus because F plus again on its top uh during 2020 2021 has declined heavily and you can see it that let's say one of their recent releases which is DC dark a 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 war survival from river game where again idle core rex map base building auto battler and that's it. Zombies of course that's it

and this game is already over the DC dark legion game is like 50k a day and scaling up also like 100k downloads a day because again same exact setup. 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. We already see it with like tasty travels for instance that century games is doing the most recent trend where we see this regarding like but Jacob this just works in you know Rex puzzle and like not applicable to other gen of course it is and I think this is the important part of this whole discussion that I'm having here is it will proliferate to other genres because let's take for instance social casino that's a very relevant genre so social casino games throughout the years you see they had this very unique evolution ion of trying to kind of hide the slot machine into something different or 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 go dream dice. Monoly 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 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 machines. Six angles for fish of fortune which is like fish style but in coin looter game that's sub genre. All the creators are about fish. The last addition to this bunch is uh Angry Birds surprisingly which they and this is a very very good iteration in my opinion. 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 but yeah they turned their you know flying birds on a slingshot mechanic

into the like that's their uh 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 on boarding 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 team park with this is the idle core like idle based theme park. Then suddenly here's your coin master 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 team park and then you know hello coin master this is where we actually make money u and it's scaling very very well already past 200k and as you seen in the chart this is already the fourth biggest game by IP revenue in the coin m genre

right after big three monopoly coin master and dice dreams. 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. Idle Game Theme Park, Slot Machines, and you know, the typical coin master meta. Here's an example, social revenge mechanics, which scaled even faster because this scaled from July to already a day basically in 3 months. And yeah, it just goes up. So yeah, that's the trend number one. And the trend number two which complements this first trend is templatization and this is even more important especially for big companies having multiple games in portfolio. So what this means is that in my opinion this is the most efficient way to create new games. Of course it has a drawback because template will keep you locked within the genre but again still it's the most efficient way if you know how to pull it off. So the most famous company that's been using this strategy of course is hobby. If you

see their metag game template just been like getting better and better from the days of Archerro Survivor Rio Kinjaran, you see it all over the place. It's pretty much their action rog light template that they're just using and there's changing cores and again the meta is pretty much the same. The mechanics, the gacha, everything's kind of the same. It's very very efficient. Of course, it needs to work on the core and not every game works on the core. From all those games that you see here, Bumble, Snaker, Survivor IO, Kinjaran and Archer, only Archer and Survivor IO actually scale. Kinjaran, Pumble, and Snaker didn't really scale that much. 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. Again, a good example on the market where it actually works very well is Microphone, which completely took over merch to 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. Here we have example of like on the left side we have Gossip Harbor. Then we have Seaside Escape, the two big hits there, and then we have Flambe Merchant Cook, which is one of their recent games, and even a new soft launch games called icy hearts. ironically because it's all based on freezing families creators, but you see it how it's done. Uh the guy with the baseball cap on the left in [ __ ] Harbor is basically the exact same guy in the icy hearts on the right. Yeah, it's just very very efficient if you are able to pull it off. Uh of course they change stuff and like the metas and like some different things are there, but it's merge too pretty much all over the place as you see here. very very similar setup and that's why again flamby which is getting from this year's May is doing already a day easily basically we don't really need to go that far into Asia or you know like somebody in the west of course some people in the west are doing this already here an example from grand games like the game magic sword which

grand games is pretty much taking on these like unconventional puzzle subg genres which like sword you know block gem or block itself basically Basically they have the blockstar 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. Same thing goes for strike games by the way after like successful social casino game they pretty much went on like a spree of style busters busters cube busters again all doing like unconventional puzzle subg genres on the same meta game. 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. They have exactly the same metag game. You see those two pictures on the bottom left side we have Genshin on right side we have Hungai style. You see that even the the setup here on the layout of like inventory pieces is the same. What they do is just like cleverly recycle the meta. But this

has kind of a drawback because they have think 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 four 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 showed you in the first part of the trend. I could talk about using templatization. River game is using templatization even for their on boarding setup their way. Century Games is using templatization for their idle core, for their forex core. Like in order to pull out these fast new games, like you just need to pull them very very specifically and precisely within those templates. 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. For instance, hobby the latest template with defender or archer 2 cap bargo. It's like an upgrade. 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, you know, you salvage it and move faster. But, as I said, there are drawbacks. So, let's see. And, uh, yeah, this is pretty much it. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, write down into the comments below. Join our Slack channel. I think we'll see more and more genres being or let's say going to use this setup and this trend probably for it even more and more. And I'm guessing that either some again it's driven mainly by UA current market situation. If nothing changes, this will be just like the only way to scale your game to very high scale profitably or like consistently. There's no way around it. Thanks again and see you around. Bye-bye. [Music]

Hey, [Music]