📈 Top 4 Mobile Gaming Genres Overview 📉

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Hello, hello. This is 2.5 gamers. Again, one of the special solo episodes.

So, today we're going to look at some genre trends that I was talking about in Istanbul. And uh yeah, there's lots to talk about because stuff is changing quite drastically. So, let's get right into it. Here we go. So, um first things first, um the main genre, let's say, the sizes and the hierarchy that was always the same, which means RPG was always the biggest, strategy was under it, then puzzle, then casino, is changing. As you see here, uh during the Corona years, uh 4x pretty much took over uh together with puzzle. Well, casino, oh, sorry, RPG. That was RPG. But then afterwards, uh RPG declined. And now 4x can completely

uh strategy is 4x for completely blew off. But then it seems to go into heavy decline now while puzzle still goes up. And RPG slowly dying. Casino is consolidating. So let's see what's there one by one. So I said Forex itself this is just Forex. Uh hit its height at December last year. With something like 750 million a month just from the Western stores. Again, we don't see Chinese WeChat revenue so on and so forth. Keep it in mind. And uh yeah. It seems that uh still Century is kicking everybody's ass here. Because um what do we have here? We have King's shot and Whiteout Survival on the top and then we have all the other people. So let's go one by one uh on what's happening right there. The Century portfolio is exploding. Guys

are doing 200 mil a month just on the as I said on the Western stores. King's shot is going great. Whiteout Survival is doing great. Tasty Travels is doing great. So keep in mind this company is also having casual game not just mid-core games and is killing it. Uh as I said Whiteout Survival is kind of consolidating. It's not at its height doing something like 75 mil instead of 125 mil but keep in mind that in the meantime they have King's shot which is doing perfectly well something like 70 mil a month. Uh still lots of downloads. And then they have their new Forex games that are also pretty much killing it which is Lord's Ash and Top Force. Both scaling on the exact same creatives uh can exact same UA setup and exact same kind of a re-skin of King's shot. Which one is Top Force which is kind of these toy soldiers and Lord's Ash is King's shot in the Age of Empires basically. So yeah, these guys who scale

games even though they are the same games they already have. So that's great and we'll see what what happens over there. River game, their big rival and the king of 4x of 2025 kind of fell from its glory. You see that it was doing even more revenue with all these games on all different accounts, 271 million. But yeah, this is uh not something that was uh
[gasps]
done there. Uh I mean like not something that lasted because again it's really went to something like 90 mil which is like 1/3 of it. I think there some rumors are that they maybe seen some like tax evasion scandal or whatnot, but like yeah, it's not looking that well for them because the UA literally stopped like you see here. It's like it's there. Uh but they have their new game Top Lords which is making now even more in this year. It's like 400k already, so let's see how this one goes on because this is basically Last Sea

kind of a reskin or let's say Last Sea version with King Shore elements. Let me just say that like it's even the king guy and everything, so they just again going for that creative thing. So they're the second in the chart. Then you have Score Warrior Total Battle. These guys just kill it. Eight-year-old game or nine-year-old game and they are just basically doing record revenue, record downloads, record everything. The only Western team that can keep up with the Chinese 4x uh hands down. Hands off to these guys.
[gasps]
37 Interactive is doing quite well and these guys literally did the U-turn as you see here because stuff that was declining mainly their main thing which was Puzzles & Survival is now offset by their new hit called Last Asylum. They also have Zero Redemption, so yeah, they're doing very well as I said. Last Asylum hitting record revenue. This is the big innovation with My Perfect Hotel put into the onboarding.

And then there's the Zero game which again is just crushing it recently and it's the second in line that they're scaling up. So, yeah, there are still people that can scale Forex, but there are also people who don't scale Forex. Like Lilith, because all the Forex game in Lilith are going down and the thing that's pretty much doing the U-turn here and saving their portfolio is Clash of Creatures, which is doing giant revenue. And Clash of Creatures, as we completely review on the podcast, so you can check the episode, is a social casino RPG. Uh because you have the pachinko machine instead of the Monopoly board. And then you have this kind of a base building idle idle idle is more idle idle RPG. And it's even under tower defense, but come on, it's not really tower defense, it's more idle RPG. But you have the pachinko uh slot machine in the middle, which again loses to something.
[gasps]
Uh sorry, more like Monopoly Go 4:00 a.m. vibe. Then we have FunPlus. FunPlus again being the old character

together with Lilith uh being the kings of, as you see here, 20 20 like the Corona Forex guys. Uh yeah, this is not going very well for them. Uh their thing, which is Tal Survive, which was the copy of Dark War, uh was doing quite well until like March this year. Now it's not doing that well anymore. It's kind of scaling down. And their other game, AnimA, uh which is the big kind of hope for them, the creature collector paladin slash Pokemon slash Genshin style RPG, isn't really doing that well. Uh the revenue is declining even though there's this new season spike. I also check the VG Insights and it's like pretty much the same picture there. Just on a little bit higher scale. So, yeah, they're making still total revenue on PC console, but uh not that much, it seems, so I would guess something like 60% and it's all going down, so I'm just quite

pessimistic. Because this game doesn't have a gacha game and we have the full review on the channel. So, if you want to check it out, check it out and you learn why. Uh so takeaways, the genre is currently losing market share. Century keeps winning and still everyone, River Games in heavy decline. 37 interactive guys are picking up speed and old guard with Lilith and FunPlus cannot keep up in Forex anymore. Puzzle. So puzzle is just growing forever. And now, as you see in the main chart, is the biggest category. Yes, it's puzzle now. Because we have match three or match swap, which is kind of in, let's say, consolidation or stable, but not growing anymore from 2024. Which is, uh again, the usual guys here. Candy Crush, Royal Match, Gardenscapes, Dragon Soul is basically King, Dream, and Playrix. One important thing to kind of keep in this this chart

that's not here, it's Township, because Township is now the third biggest match three game because they have [ __ ] 20,000 match three levels. And uh yeah, and they're mainly monetizing on that, not the town building, whatever resource puzzle thing. It's no. [snorts] It's the people that have like nothing built and they just have level 5,000. So yeah, Township is one of the new tricks with the UA UA setup again because it's using the farm onboarding as as the UA trick. Uh as I said, Township is pretty much the ever-growing game that's been growing forever, like last 17 years. So that's there. Um and uh yeah, they're still killing it. So hands hands off to these guys. Again, we have a full two-hour review of how Township changed with I know from Game of Farmer, if you want to check on the channel.
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Merge is the growing segment of the puzzles category. And yeah, go see the harbor. It is still killing it and you see crazy crazy revenue numbers. Merge Mansion being left behind here somewhere on like lower spots. Because we also have Century Games in the category. And Century Games is not only number two as you see here with Tasty Travels doing 13 million a month. Century Games also have three new merge game because why not? Hotel Legacy, Justice S, and Family Farm. And all of them are scaling up all already over 100k a day. So, let's see what happens because they are pretty much following the same Micro Fun playbook of like let's flood the category with other like, you know, reinforce our position with other reskins. But they're using their signature UA, especially Tasty Travels with the whole draw punch creative. So, let's see how that one goes in. Sort fifth fivefold the revenue between

the years because it's again they may be Pixel Flow and Pixel Flow copies and clones. There's Magic Sort, there's Colony Flow, which by the way Colony Flow now on daily revenue basis makes more than Pixel Flow. So, yeah, we have time is killing it. Jelly Busters, the surprise hit from Moon Active, Yarn by Combo Games by Games, and Cube Land by Rotate Lab. So, let's see how this goes. This will be very interesting category to check, especially now that guys from Pixel Flow, or I mean Moon Games, really need to do something because the game is in decline. And I guess the Colony Fall game will overtake it next month. Let's see how that goes. Uh so, takeaways, match three is not growing anymore, merge two is still growing, Century Attack micro funds market share in merge. Deterministic puzzles in sort block and screws of genres are still growing like crazy, and keep in mind that the revenue that you

see here, I mean this 60 million a month is more than double most probably because of the ad revenue, so it's 120 million a month. And if you then compare it to merge, which is 230, it's not that far off how how big this category really is. So, let's see. RPG, a really a sad story. I won't even go into details. Even though it's making giant revenue, mainly coming from Asia, of course, it's in heavy decline, as you see, because it lost half of its size in last 5 years, basically. Also, because of the whole IDFA targeting thing, because this is again very, you know, CPI heavy category. Looking at the chart, of course, there's Genshin, there's Honkai, so there's whole Mihoyo thing, there are the Lineages, there's Monster Strike, there's Fate and Order, there's Wu Doing Waves, there's Goddess of Victory. Yeah, all these guys are okay, but they're down from their heights a lot, and they're again just kind of old fame, basically. Won't go even that

much into the category, so let's go straight into casino, cuz casino is on the Yeah, be quite interesting now that Monopoly Go is consolidating. So, what do we have here? Monopoly Go, of course, still on top, Coin Master, which is unopposed because it's just a straight line of 3 million revenue day. Even though Monopoly Go come and go, and like I mean like exploded and then stabilized, Coin Master is just like you can see that they they they don't care about this. And there's Dice Dreams, and then there we have the new guys on the block trying to go there with top tycoons, carnival tycoons, and piggy goals, and so forth. But, yeah, those are really really small games compared to the big guys on the top. So, let's see what what happens here. Um yeah. Coin Master Adventure uh is kind of trying to get to the top. I don't know what's going to happen with it because you see that it's uh kind of

stuck there on something like 300k day. So, let's see if Moon Active can kind of pull it off, or like scale it even higher, but seems now very stable. But, still like it's better to have it than not have it. And Monopoly Go as you see here is in decline, but that's normal for a game that's been like 3 years old now, especially that we don't see the revenue of the web store. Well, sorry. The web store's here. 4:00 a.m. Taking a stroll. Um and uh web stores are definitely big chunk of Monopoly Go's revenue. They have the whole tycoon club stuff. So, I'm guessing this chart is mostly just stable here, and this whole blip maybe can be filled in. Of course, it's in decline, but it's not like even this year. So, this money this thing is just printing money still. Um yeah. And two more data points on the casino because casino, I think, needs to be disrupted again in order to move somewhere like the pachinko game from Lilith, but let's see if that because that's casino RPG.

[snorts]
But, two more points I want to like kind of finalize the presentation with is that last year, first time, apps made more than games because again this is whole this Corona bump. Again, is consolidating, mainly driven by AI, uh short drama, the movie segment here, and social media. And then, looking at short drama, yes, short drama is really killing it, and it's the thing to look at. And I'm waiting when it will be gamified or elements from it will come to games because, you see, it's completely killing it, even against the OTT streaming, which means over-the-top television, like Netflixes, Disney Pluses, Hulus, and so forth, like the mainstreaming platforms, they're losing the battle. This is monthly downloads for this, and you see that they already crossed them at the end of last year. So, now the line by Q4 this year will be somewhere here, and this goes down. So,

yes, this this this, you know, we've been talking about this all the time. Netflix should have already short drama app with all their IPs and everything, and do something, man, but they didn't because they have better plans with GTA 3 and Halo, triple A shooter, and yeah, let's not let's not get started. But, yeah, this is quite important to keep in mind when looking at this genre because, yeah, we're kind of losing attention to these guys, especially to short drama. It's a very very important dynamic that's affecting our market. Anyway, um that was it. Hope you learned something in this very uh blitz style overview of the four main genres. Um as I said, because of the whole changes of like the usual order was completely changed now because now puzzle is the biggest, strategy is second, RPG is third, and casino is fourth, not RPG, strategy, puzzle, and casino. So, we'll see, and we'll be looking at it uh very closely and seeing what's

happening there, especially if the decline in forex continues. I think it will stop at some point, and it will be consolidated, or I mean, like some new innovation. We already spoiler alert, the new very very new forex game going to review quite soon, uh Water World, Wild Water World. And then, um yeah, puzzle, there's going to be more puzzles and more different subgenres such as blocks, such as physics, such as different things that I think will grow with even more. So, I'm guessing that puzzle will be dominant even though if Forex kind of gets back in shape. So, let's see. Anyway, as I said, hope you learned something. Let me know in the comments. Join the Slack channel. See you next time. Ciao.