Action reports and market data
55 game industry reports, presentations and talks about action from writers such as Game Developers Conference, PocketGamer.biz and Jonas Tyroller, newest from 2026. Every document has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Documents
🧙 Solo Dev Journey #1: How to start with UA? From a store link to a LIVE UA Campaigns
This analysis outlines a practical, low-resource approach to launching a mobile game, specifically focusing on a solo developer’s experience with the title One Mage Army.
- In the early stages of a mobile game launch, the volume and diversity of creative assets are more critical to performance than high-polish production quality.
- AI-driven tools can be used to generate ten distinct, story-driven video ads in approximately 90 minutes by utilizing existing store page assets and brief narrative prompts.
- Campaign maturity is essential for cost stabilization, as demonstrated by AppLovin CPI dropping from an initial $60 to approximately $3.60 as the campaign progressed.
🚀 Castle Clashers!: Voodoo’s new HIT is scaling hard
Castle Clashers represents a significant evolution in the mobile artillery shooter genre, successfully blending physics-based combat with midcore-lite progression systems.
- Castle Clashers is generating over $220,000 in daily revenue, reportedly doubling the performance of comparable titles like Mob Control.
- The game achieves 100,000 daily downloads through a hybrid monetization model that prioritizes aggressive in-app purchases over traditional ad-based revenue.
- A unique gacha system drives financial performance by allowing players to bypass randomness through direct unit purchases and universal shards.
Major AAA start-up ProbablyMonsters has revealed its first games… and none of them are AAA
ProbablyMonsters is fundamentally restructuring its operations after nine years, moving away from a primary focus on AAA development to embrace a more agile, diversified business model.
- ProbablyMonsters is abandoning its original AAA-centric business model after nine years to pivot toward a more agile, diversified strategy.
- The company is shifting its development focus to a mix of short, mid, and long-term projects to mitigate the financial risks associated with long, high-budget development cycles.
- The studio's new portfolio includes a roguelike action game for Nintendo Switch and a psychological horror title for PC, marking a clear departure from large-scale AAA productions.
PC/Console Gaming Index: 2025
The 2025 PC/Console Gaming Index demonstrates that action titles dominate the market, with approximately 262 million downloads year-to-date.
- Steam remains the dominant platform for PC/console gaming, generating approximately 450 million downloads year-to-date, which is nearly four times the volume of PlayStation.
- Monetization strategies are platform-specific: 79% of Steam downloads and 83% of PlayStation downloads are premium, while 39% of Xbox downloads are free-to-play, largely driven by Game Pass.
- Indie and AA developers drive the majority of the 262 million action-genre downloads, with indie titles accounting for 60% of total downloads on Steam.
Philosophy of Video Game Combat Design | Design Club
Effective combat design functions as the primary bridge between a game’s mechanical systems and its intended player experience.
- Combat design must fundamentally choose between skill-based mastery, where damage is avoidable through precision, and progression-based systems that rely on mathematical scaling.
- Effective combat relies on managing the action economy by balancing the frequency and impact of player actions against those of opponents.
- Modern combat design is shifting away from linear kill-to-win models toward multifaceted systems that incorporate environmental interaction, elemental weaknesses, and status effects like poise.
Project R.I.S.E Alpha Test First Look: Gameplay & impressions! What's next for @supercell?
Project R.I.S.E. represents a strategic shift for Supercell as it explores the cooperative PVE roguelite genre.
- Supercell is diversifying its portfolio by developing Project R.I.S.E., a cooperative PVE roguelite built on Unreal Engine that marks a strategic departure from the company's traditional PVP-focused titles.
- The game features a complex meta-progression system centered on the 'Tower Forge,' which utilizes a currency-based economy and gacha-style mechanics for skill upgrades.
- Technical performance is a critical barrier, with alpha testers reporting severe hardware issues including rapid battery depletion and device overheating.
3D Toon Rendering in 'Hi-Fi RUSH'
Hi-Fi RUSH achieves a distinct, 2D-inspired aesthetic within Unreal Engine 4 by utilizing a custom deferred toon renderer that decouples shading from geometry.
- Tango Gameworks achieved a consistent 2D toon aesthetic for both characters and environments in 'Hi-Fi RUSH' by customizing Unreal Engine 4 to decouple toon rendering from standard geometry rendering.
- To maintain a rock-solid 60fps required for rhythm-based gameplay, the team integrated deferred lighting and toon post-processing into a single, performance-optimized deferred toon rendering pass.
- The developers utilized a 'comic shader' that applies half-tone dots and hatching lines to surfaces, using world-space UVs to ensure these textures appear printed on polygonal surfaces rather than floating in screen space.
Classic Game Postmortem: 'Karateka'
The development of the 1984 title Karateka represents a pivotal moment in early home computer gaming, marking a transition from rudimentary arcade-style action to cinematic, narrative-driven experiences.
- Jordan Mechner developed the 1984 hit Karateka by combining the large sprite design of the game Swashbuckler with the smooth, fast animation style of Choplifter.
- To achieve fluid character movement on the Apple II, Mechner used a VersaWriter graphics tablet to rotoscope live-action film frames, tracing them manually into the computer.
- Mechner implemented a cinematic 'leitmotif' musical approach, where his father composed distinct themes for the hero and villain to help tell the story through limited audio channels.
Supercell's Squad Busters - The Definitive Deconstruction
Squad Busters represents a pivotal attempt by Supercell to secure its next billion-dollar franchise, serving as a strategic response to the company’s need for revenue growth.
- Supercell developed Squad Busters as a strategic growth initiative to secure a new billion-dollar franchise, supported by a massive pre-registration campaign exceeding 40 million users.
- The game utilizes a lean, agile development model with a core team of approximately 30 people, focusing on rapid iteration and live operations.
- The core gameplay loop centers on a hectic, accessible sandbox experience featuring roguelike elements and randomized character sets that force real-time adaptation.
Developing 'Hi-Fi RUSH' Backwards and Finding Our Positive Gameplay Loop
The development of Hi-Fi RUSH represents a strategic departure from traditional horror-centric game design, focusing instead on a rhythm-action framework that synchronizes player inputs with a musical score.
- To maintain player immersion, the development team designed the game's rhythm-action mechanics by working backwards from the desired musical impact, ensuring that gameplay features were built to lead into specific beats rather than trying to force music to fit existing gameplay.
- The team implemented a 'positive feedback loop' where players are rewarded for playing in rhythm through subtle damage bonuses and audio-visual cues, while avoiding negative reinforcement or penalties for off-beat play to keep the experience accessible.
- Level design was structured around song composition, using 'mood graphs' and song structures—such as using choruses for combat and verses for platforming—to define pacing and event timing before physical level layout began.
Why Hard Games Feel Great - Extra Credits Gaming
Effective game design requires a deep understanding of velocity (V) and the change in velocity (delta V) to maintain consistent player progression.
- Game balance relies on managing both velocity (V), the current rate of player progress, and delta V, the rate of change in that progress.
- The 'jerk principle' refers to the second derivative of velocity, representing sudden, noticeable shifts in gameplay pacing that players perceive as jarring or unfair.
- Poorly planned progression curves often force designers to use 'kludge math' or disjointed equations to force balance, which frequently introduces bugs, exploits, and inconsistent player experiences.
Zenless Zone Zero: First look! Everything we know from Closed Beta (#88)
HoYoverse continues to solidify its dominance in the global gaming market by applying a highly refined, high-production-value gacha model to its latest title, Zenless Zone Zero.
- HoYoverse employs a standardized, highly profitable template for its gacha-based titles, allowing the company to develop new games in roughly half the time required by Western studios.
- Zenless Zone Zero utilizes a gacha monetization model identical to Honkai: Star Rail, featuring a 1% base pull rate for top-tier characters and a pity system that guarantees an S-rank character after 50 pulls.
- The game features a complex progression system with six equipment slots and randomized stats, requiring players to repeatedly farm artifacts to achieve optimal character builds.