🌸 The Pikmin Bloom Anomaly: How a 5-Year-Old game just hit 5x downloads without UA

It's top revenue country in February.
I know, I know, I know, I know. But like for one month,
how is this not top country?
It's 58% Japan.
Sure.
Top now is scaling in Taiwan.
Maybe an event or something is happening there.
I really thought that after Pokémon Go there wouldn't be any other hits, but I was wrong. drops knowledge made of golden ice [music] Fenix with ads making those coins rise jack up designs worlds chasing the sky with the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too mate feel [music] bringing the insight we're rocking those vibes till the early daylight [music] master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies colors like a wizard in disguise jack [music] to the highest and a half gamers talking smack slow hockey sick got your back [music] ads are beautiful they like the Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh.

Ah. [music] Ah. [music] Ah. Ah.
Is it Is it Pokémon Go or is it I I don't know. Piggy Pikmin Go.
Piggy Bloom. Bloom.
Pigman Bloom. Yes. That's what we're doing today. You mean Dragon Quest 2?
Exactly. With an I with an IP or whatever. Of course. Yeah. It's actually quite a a lot of I need to work on my Japanese or Chinese
trying to read Japanese.
Yeah,
it's the predictions of location based games finally becoming true or is it just another one
wait who predicted what?
Do you No, no. Do you remember after Pokémon Go, everyone who had an aunt in gaming was basically doing a location based game?
Yeah, let's go.

None of them worked except Pokémon Go.
I worked on Men in Black location base. It was terrible. Oh my god. Because
Mann in Black.
Yes. Oh wow.
Oh jeez. Oh, it was so bad. Oh my god, it was so so bad.
Guess what?
Should never have been a thing.
Gord, it didn't work. You know what? Because nobody cares about Men in Black. First of all,
remember that the biggest biggest like uh you know waste of money was the Harry Potterite that was pinnacle of this whole market.
Yeah. Yeah. And then then people realize like maybe it's not because of local location idea to begin with.
Yeah. [laughter]
Yeah. Maybe it's because of Pikmin. Not Pikmin. Pokemon. Anyway, fun start. My name is Matthew Lancherich. I'm Felix Proberg. And we are your hosts. And I'm already typing Pikmin blow glow. And it's Pikmin blue.
Pikmin [laughter] blow.
Oh, Pikmin blow. I mean, I'm not sure what the Pikmin do does, but uh
let me let me maybe do a little bit of a

history lesson here to understand black location based game was terrible. [laughter]
What was it called? Also, I worked on that one. What was it with the zombies with the next games? What were they doing? They were doing
What was it? It's called Nobody Cares. No, no.
Anyway,
yeah, I know what you mean. I know what you mean.
Let's talk actually about what this is and and why are we talking about this? So, there's this IP called Pikmin and this is actually coming from Nintendo.
Felix's favorite.
Felix favorite for sure where I I'm guessing when Felix was choosing this game, he didn't had any idea. This is coming directly from Miamoto Shigaru, the guy behind Mario and like the legendary game designer from Nintendo. And it's this old uh I would call it like indirect mini RTS or it is a very very very unique game.
What's that?
Real time strategy game Warcraft Starcraft and the other things that you didn't play during your childhood. So what does it mean is mean that you have

these Pikm control captain forgot his name but he's
I love your Pikm.
It's a little bit of a mix of uh Pikmin.
How do you call it? No, Pikmings. But uh [laughter] as I said, the strategy is about there being automated, following you and doing the things that you order them.
Yeah, lemmings. Um lemmings a little bit. I wanted to say most probably Dungeon Keeper because a little bit of god game,
good game.
Fair enough. Okay,
that's because also there you have lots of those minions that you kind of, you know, they just
But there was also the one that we we discussed on like one episode before which was what like black and white. Back in W is also a good game. Same same designer. That's Peter Molyneu, our favorite guy which just web three fun.
It's a separate podcast. Anyway, so you see here these Pikmin's kind of moving the box here for you.
You say Pikmin one more time. I'm [laughter] going to
But this is not this is not Pikmin

Bloom. This is Pikmin one.
Pikmin Pikmin one because we need to first break under. Yeah. The history lesson.
Pikmin. So there's Pikmin one, Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3, Pikmin 4. [laughter] So M is happy all of these Pikmans. And the last one is actually having a tie in with the mobile one. So that's that's very good. And this is old old uh games. I think I don't know which one's the original one, but this is being played on Nintendo Switch, but it was definitely before. Anyway, so this is a as I said mini RTS where you go and you are looking for these parts of a spaceship that you actually need to build during 30 days. Each day is 13 minutes and you need to again you are a little bit under pressure. You need to see now we have our Pikmin army going with us destroying things and we defeat enemies, collect these parts and it's all in this kind of a very very nice something similar like the usual theme that we see like the honey I shrank the kids where it's like bug's life or whatever like looking at

the you know giant lawn and like wood and grass environment and stuff like that like you have here so on so forth. Yeah. So the colors of the Pikmin is important because they have different abilities and all these other things. So whatever. So that's the original game and the IP where this is coming from. So now we go to the actual game how it actually looks. So this is again one of those games similar to Pokémon Go. So it's a geoloccation game. It's mainly played by you moving around even though you can play it a little bit even by standing. But still the biggest benefit which again all these games mechanics are based on our steps which [snorts] are powering your progression and then different landmarks and different objectives around the world which is all based on Niantic infrastructure and it's basically the same.
I love your Niantic. I forgot about Niantic [laughter] Niantic.
This will be a language episode.

Language episode. Niantic and Pikmin. Jesus. How do you how do you say how do you say a nantek in uh Saudi Arabian? Anyway, oh hello, hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid and it's flexible fast and fully tailored to your growth. So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. Take control of your UA budget without giving away uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to bvxpartners.com.

But what you do here is that you go around and the mechanic that they actually have here for the tiein is that you have these pikmans that you need to feed.
No, no. I looked it up on uh the Reddit thread where basically there's a discussion if it's one Pikmin and then many Pikmans and basically the plural of Pikmin is actually Pikmin as well. It's a whole form on this that I found. It's 100. You have 100 Pikmin. It's always Pikman until it's pikeman, then it's okay. Anyway, so you have these guys walking around with you and you need to feed them. So you feed them with this nectar or whatever thing and when you feed them, they grow these petals and you collect the petals and they work as some kind of energy. But there are different of these like like a little bit like a Pokémon. So you can get like yellow, different colors, different species and so on so forth. So yeah, have those. The important part is that as you walk, you are basically planting flowers and these guys are helping you planting flowers, bringing you stuff

from the environment. Here you see you can get the Mario head Pikmin from Nintendo if you connect your Nintendo account and stuff like that. Again, it's very very cross as as any other Nintendo game like Pokemon, which Pokemon has the Pokemon Home app where you can again connect all your other Pokémon apps. So again, this is literally the very same menu as you have with Pokémon Go where you have on one tab you have the Pikmin. On the other tab, you have the seedlings which are something similar like an eggs. You need to plant them and by steps they slowly grow up and then get grown into pikmin. Yeah, this is the this is the thing. As you go, there are these spots on the map. I don't know if we can find one. Not in this video, but really similarly to Pokéstops. I think it's in the other one. Same game.
Uh, no, it's not same game. It's It's a little bit different.
A little bit different. Come on. It's
Zuckerberg. It It cannot be It cannot be decked different because it's on the same back end.
That's what I was saying. It's made by

Niantic.
Same. It's Niantic back end.
Yeah.
Can like the, you know, the Pokétops are basically the same places.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The layer layout of the map and everything. It's like exactly the same.
So, you go around and you have these flowers. I don't know if I can find one here, but it looks basically like a Pokétop on the map. You go there and you go around it a little bit and you plant flowers near it. And when you have enough flowers plant near it, it will bloom and it will again give you a special nectar or whatever something kind of a consumable that you again feed to your pikman. And these then gives you more resources vice versa. So it's basically a giant like resource conversion puzzle similarly to something like like a farming game where you are planting these seeds walking them out you sending Pikmin on expeditions again like cool down timers and stuff like that. The good thing is that when you're walking around Pikmin are planting stuff by themselves even though you not planting it yourself. So you just need

to have it and they'll like take care of it. There's lots of automation and all these like indirect things which nicely fits with the Pikmin team. So that's there and then there's of course some challenges like these mushrooms or whatever this was. Didn't really understood the thing here. And yeah,
so it's a bit like a pyramid scheme
where basically Yeah, it's a pyramid scheme. You're you're at top of the pyramid and the Pikmin work for you and then they get more Pikmin and then
then they seed and plant and then there more Pikmin to go and so on so forth. There's lots of decorations and collections and
recipes. You work you work for me.
You work. So that's there. I guess there's not really any of the fighting element or whatever, you know, the competitive element that Pokémon Go is based on because as you know in that game you have the gyms where you go there, you put your Pokemon there and then somebody stronger kicks you out and like they put their Pokemon there and so on so forth. They have already the battles and all these other mechanics. So, it's a little bit more, let's say, laid out here. And it's all about this kind of a very nice See here, here we

have the seedlings. They go all the way from 500 steps or 100 steps seeds to 10,000 steps seeds. So, these can get like very very big. And I think here there was this tip of like put a picture of the day somewhere in like a different location because then the game will reward you with like a seedling from that location that will give you like a exotic seed or whatever or something like that. Yeah, it's pretty much like let's say streamlined lighthearted version of Pokémon Go pretty much like they they don't have any of the Pokemon catching mechanic. They just have the feeding mechanic of the nectar which is like you throwing the Pokeball on the on the screen and that's it. But other than that, yeah, it's quite similar because as I [snorts] said like you can't really do different things on Niantic back end like there needs to be poker stops, there needs to be steps, there needs to be cooldown based mechanics and that's it. I guess it works well but the kicker here is that it works well where that's the important part.

Let's do the numbers then. Let's have a look,
man. Like I mean why the is he so big in Taiwan? Look at and also first of all the question is why why are we talking about five years old game
because it's scaling
good fine
yeah [laughter]
because it's scaling because of Taiwan
yeah I mean the Taiwan is the top top country and it's insane and it's even like top in terms of the revenues
it's not top it's not top man
look at the revenues
okay they got a revenue
look at the revenues now.
Okay. A little bit. I guess maybe there's some
not a little bit. It's top revenue country in February.
I know. I know. I know. I know. But like for one month,
how is this not top country?
It's 58% Japan.
Sure.
Top now. Scaling in Taiwan and like
maybe an event or something is happening there. I really thought that after

Pokémon Go there wouldn't be any other hits, but I was wrong.
If you be careful,
if you consider this a hit.
Okay. So, Pokémon Go is like a whole different league, I guess.
Making 85 million in nearly
five years.
Four, five years. Yeah, it's like it's pretty nice. And I guess the game's profitable, but uh definitely not on the scale of Pokémon Go, which makes like what like 700 per year or something currently still. So, that's there. Yeah, it's this kind of a nice game, I guess. The question is, did Scopi had this before Pokemon Go? I would guess so.
What?
They bought Niantic, right? This is Neiantic. They bantic bought it with Pokémon Go.
So, it's just flag the account.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's because it's part of the deal with like all the location games. Yeah. So, Okay. Okay.
What is the genre doing?
Yeah. The genre is doing as always the usual. So, Pokemon Go being Pokemon Go then.
Well, wait. Let's just pause here. Let's just pause here. The heat you just

described made 85 million in 5 years. Pokémon Go is making 75 in 30 days. Uh, you know
what's the hit?
Where's the hit? Where's the hit? I mean, it's great game, of course, definitely making money, but come on. You know,
there's literally this even worse category than Forex. With Forex, we have four games. This is one.
It's similarly to Blockbust. Honestly,
I wanted to check how it's on Niantic Portfolio. Actually, there's really nothing here. So,
I played NBA All World. There's just the graveyard of other attempts like NBA All World, Marvel World of Heroes,
Harry Potter, Wizards Unite, Transformers, having they pretty much tried with every single IP that they could get their hands on. That's it.
Later is not even live anymore. Okay,
I guess so.
That's like that's the

that's the original original before Pokemon.
Yeah. Um, so we have that. Second spot is our favorite Dragon Quest to VU which is Dragon Quest Vog as always.
Oh my god. But this is this is only in Japan. Yeah. It's because of course our favorite because it's the game with the highest value in the world.
He is referencing this game since I know this guy. Seriously, every guy.
Yeah, but he said he said our
Yeah. Well, okay, fair enough.
See 8 million a month still.
Yeah. Feels like it's growing like crazy.
Want to see downloads? Want to see downloads, man. TK downloads a month. A month.
Yeah, it's Japan.
It's Japan. It's all Japan.
It's all in Japan.
If I if I would have like a category filter where we are for this category, I'm guessing that like 80% of the overall revenue of the whole category is coming from Japan or something like that.
They love this, huh? They love walking.

Monster Hunter now is still making money. I thought it's
But it's all their IPs, man. Pokemon is Japanese. Pikman is Japanese. Monster Height is Japanese. Dragon Quest walk is Japanese. Then this is definitely Japanese. Jurassic World Alive. Okay, maybe this is surviving somewhere there. But you see the like the decline and again is Japanese again. So So it's like all hi Japanese IP.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um
there is Ingress. Come on. There is Ingress. It's still live.
Where? There. Oh yeah. Yeah.
It's different. Yeah. Okay.
Some some new new version or whatever. Yeah. This category is kind of as it is always. So, it's just Pokémon Go and nothing else to
No, no, no. It's not Pokémon Go. It's Scopi and someone else.
Yeah, it's Scop and someone else now. [laughter]
Definitely.
Oh, this is great.
Pokemon Go's still in pretty pretty good shape. Like people underestimate this game. They underestimate it a lot because they always compare it to the like unreachable peak of 2016 when when it was new. Yeah. When it launched

everyone Yeah.
Yeah. But but like of course the that like you can do 200 mil a month pretty much constantly but it's
because like the whole world is playing it then. Yes.
Yeah. Exactly. But you see like how stable the revenue is throughout doing between 30 to 50 mil a month.
What's the lifetime revenue now? I can't see cuz it's a bit too small.
6.2 bill which is which is much higher definitely if you count in all the other stuff.
Imagine if they would have had a web shop. Oh, I pre and you know what is Oh my god, this is actually such a great comment
point.
Yeah,
you know why? Because they work at Fastpring. Hey, so guys, you know what's coming. This episode is brought to you by Fast Spring, the No Drama D2C vendor. It's been scaling with mobile publishers for over 20 years and they're growing fast.

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Yeah. So as I said, the category is as it is and I guess it will be like it is for next five to six years. I don't see anything changing.
You see Pokémon Go going anywhere? I'm guessing it will just go down because the thing is that uh this year it's
never going to go to zero though, you know.
It won't go to zero. The thing is that there will be just more competition for the Pokemon audience itself. That's that's that's the main
thing. But like what what does like what did the Pokemon TCG?

Ooh, that's good. Put them next to each other. Pokemon Go.
Pokemon TCG one is still going very strong. Yeah, but put them next to each other. Let's see.
What What did it actually do to Pokemon Go? Jack I don't think it did anything either. What do you
mean? Jack like this.
Like it's the same thing. I mean, it didn't really got their audience.
It didn't reduce their audience.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So,
yeah.
There might be a little overlap, but it's it's not the same game, right? So, who gives a Even if there is like more Pokemon games, doesn't really mean like they're not going to or they're just going to jump from Pokemon Go to something else. Like what? What's this thing? If I put it down. Yeah.
Come on. It's stable.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's stable. It's stable. It's stable. We'll see because I'm really looking forward like how Pokemon champions going to fair.
And you know what? Pretty much Pikm, they don't give a about Pokemon. So, let's go back. Okay. Yeah, let's go back to Pikmin. Let's go back and let's

not talk about uh Pokemon champions because Pikm would be or Pikmin would be pretty annoyed. What do you mean? like let's go let's go to to UA.
So I told my boss I [music] made a playable app with Playable Maker
and he said to me what language did you code it in? And I said I don't know with Playable Maker [music] all you do is drag, drop, click and it does it all for you. So again he said what language did you make in? I went I don't know English. At the end of the day [music] as long as a playable maker does it all for you. Why do you care? It's just like magic. Why
how do they get users? W They don't. No, I think we Okay, let's start here.
I want to see Taiwan. I want to see Taiwanese creatives here.
I'm guessing there are very few creatives.
No, not really. It's actually quite a lot.
You know, the thing is with Japanese games, you don't really see all the creatives because you don't see all the offline advertising that's happening in

Japan.
Sushi and stuff.
Exactly. So, it's pretty much like last 30 days, like 1,800 creatives. But I mean,
it's still pretty good. That's
But I mean, come on, man. Like, it's it's usually I'm going to share.
Everyone can enjoy Pikmin Bloom. That's true.
Hello.
It's a home home IP. Everything that Nintendo touches is basically sacred in Japan.
Yeah. This won't be like super crazy that we are used to. See,
Nintendo brand like they have extremely strong guidelines.
Yeah.
You know that you know that Nintendo won every single lawsuit in Tokyo. I mean now now I know
Japanese justice system is uh questionable to say the least. [laughter]
So I mean I don't think this is this as interesting. Uh it's Facebook Google right? So if we go even here
or Pokemon company I think it was a Pokemon company.
Pokemon company.
Yeah Pokemon Company.

this that it's I mean kind of everything from everything but it's just mainly Facebook and for Japan makes sense it's very few like up loving stuff and the rest it's just I don't think
this is going to scale too much although
the question is why it's scaling so much for because of the Taiwan
well let's see this I just landed in Taiwan Pikmin player holy grail Oh, thank you very much.
I spotted one of these special flowers and got gold seedlings. Blah blah blah. Holy hell, I got already six gold seedlings in literally shaking this. So, I'm so excited. So, there's ton of stuff happening apparently in Taiwan on the ground that if you
maybe that's where the Pikmin are from or they like to be
or they just said, "Oh, you know what? Let's just do like something like this again like some interesting event in in Taiwan or wherever." And then which was all like what like last year Taiwan

Design Expo and they do all of this stuff if you remember like even Pokémon Go did all these offline events and it was super popular.
So this is happening there. So you know like all
Okay, now I have the answer.
Yeah, there you go. Tell me.
So Niantic actually run a regional experiment in Taiwan from November 12, 20th till February 15th. Mushroom location changed weekly. Big flower locations also change weekly. Hello play. This mushrooms caring player attention issues in Taiwan.
This is unusual because normally mushrooms and big flowers the basically Pokétops change in fixed location. So players in Taiwan suddenly saw spots moving around different spawn patterns inconsistent gameplay versus other countries.
There you have it.
There are also Taiwan specific events. Taipei game show 2026 event. special missions walk thousand step

that's what I said that's see so pretty much
interesting
why not to do it in Taiwan if it's your fourth uh revenue country
in the biggest yeah fourth biggest in terms of revenue and then suddenly
5xed 5xedvenue Pretty good. Pretty good features.
That's insane. It was big in South Korea. Now it's pretty much dead. But still, I mean, if you do this in Korea, I can I can understand.
Taipei Game Show is what? Like Gamescom,
I think. So,
I would guess so.
Yeah, it's that's something. So, but let's go back to like this. I mean, it's pretty much whatever.
Yeah, it looks like that like Gamescom.
Interesting. So,
yeah, this is super interesting. So it's not driven by like a regular UA but yeah but product. Yeah.

Which is UA eventually. But know like if you if you expect crazy stuff from creatives. Yeah. This is not
if it would work so well I would expect it to happen the same thing in Pokemon Go.
Oh yeah. Because this is I think this is just Yeah, exactly. You can trans
you can do it on this kind of laidback small game.
Exactly. Yeah. Oh, wait. I can 5x the revenue in in Taiwan. Why I can do it in like US for Pokemon?
Yeah. 50x scale. Yeah, exactly. This is I mean, this is amazing. I mean, honestly, like kudos to Scoply for like doing all of these different stuff on on these games. I mean, it's growing like since they got it. So,
yeah,
it's it's perfect. I mean, yeah, heads off. Nice. But yeah, I have nothing to say about
Yeah, I think we can end it here. Like you pretty much
I think we said enough, but it was interesting to see.
We can do this. Oh, hello. An uplo.

Yeah, those are the decor pigments, the special ones.
There you go. That's it.
It's actually quite funny to look at.
Yeah, it's pretty pretty good. Yeah, that's it. It's pretty nice that at least one of these attempts went good against all the IPs that been thrown IPs. What they're talking
like incompatible basically, you know.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Somebody in somebody's head it should already click that like look this is Japanese IP works in Japan. There's also Dragon Quest walk which is also Japanese IP on geocational game. Who would have thought it also works in Japan?
So let's do a like national Japan IP again or who would have thought that it will work. in Taiwan. Yeah. Like it's it's always good to, you know,

check all the segments of the market. Even the geoloccation black sheep that's still sitting there with Pokémon Go doing Pokémon Go things.
Doing Pokémon Go things. Yeah.
They shouldn't even call it geoloccation. It's called Pokemon Go.
Pokemon Go.
The game play is your location. You need to move move your ass.
Yes.
Right. Thank you guys for for listening, tuning in, saying if you want to join the Slack channel, please do so. Comment on the the video and see you next time. Yeah. See you in Japan. Bye-bye. See you in Japan. Yeah. Or Taiwan.