A new pattern is emerging for Chinese mobile games to go overseas.

Looking back from January 2024 to April 2024, according to the Sensor Tower monthly revenue list of Chinese mobile games going overseas, we find that the top of the list is no longer the world of traditional medium and heavy mobile games, and the two major casual SLG products occupy the first and second positions on the list.

In January, Whiteout Survival topped the charts for the first time, and in March, Last War: Survival (hereinafter referred to as "Last War") replaced Frost Revelations as the top spot. In addition, "The Legend of the Mushroom Brave", the new representative of the mini game "Legend of the Mushroom Brave", has been firmly in third place in the past three months (2-4).

Mini games going overseas is undoubtedly one of the new outlets for going overseas today, but it has been widely discussed by the industry, and this article will focus on another direction - casual SLG and mini game sub-gameplay + games going overseas.

The monthly income exceeded 500 million yuan, and the casual SLG became the king of gold absorption

In 2024, the revenue of leisure SLG will refresh the industry perception.

According to AppMagic data, as a new dark horse, "Last War" will start testing in 2022, and will start to work hard in December 2023, rising from a monthly income of US$10 million (equivalent to about 72 million yuan) to US$74 million (equivalent to about 540 million yuan) in April this year.

Source: AppMagic

As a dark horse product last year, "Frost Apocalypse" exceeded US$10 million (nearly US$12 million) (equivalent to nearly 87 million yuan) in monthly revenue in April 2023, and then climbed to a peak of nearly US$53 million (equivalent to about 380 million yuan) in March this year (basically flat in April).

Today, the monthly revenue of these two products is far ahead of other SLGs. Taking April this year as an example, the monthly revenue of other SLG products was less than 30 million US dollars (equivalent to about 220 million yuan), which was one-half of the monthly revenue of these two products, or even less than one-half.

Compared with the two products, the new dark horse "Last War" grew faster: from the force to the monthly income of more than 50 million US dollars, "Frost Apocalypse" took nearly a year, while "Last War" reached it in 3 months.

Many practitioners have said that because of the involution over the years, the R&D cost and publicity cost of traditional SLG are very high, and the payback period is basically 12 months or more, which has caused great pressure on many companies.

For example, "Last War" has a cumulative revenue of more than 240 million US dollars (equivalent to about 1.7 billion yuan) in 5 months from December last year to April this year, and "Frost Apocalypse" has accumulated more than 490 million US dollars (equivalent to about 3.4 billion yuan) in one year from April 2023 to April this year, and these two products are still in the growth curve.

With millions of downloads per month, casual SLG is breaking the curse of "SLG is difficult to get customers".

Let's start with the SLG dilemma.

As we all know, traditional SLGs are highly dependent on purchase volume and use this to screen out paying users, especially big R users, so SLGs are also one of the types with high customer acquisition costs.

Before the IDFA and other privacy policies, manufacturers could well obtain target users, but after the official implementation of privacy policies, the logic of buying volume has changed, and it is more difficult for target users to acquire customers, and manufacturers need to invest more energy and funds to acquire users, resulting in further increase in customer acquisition costs and further lengthening the payback cycle.

It is no exaggeration to say that the cost of a single customer acquisition in traditional SLG is as high as several hundred yuan, and the payback cycle is long, so practitioners in the SLG field will advise "don't do SLG easily".

The emergence of the popular casual SLG has made the industry see the feasibility and potential of rolling outward. Casual SLG has overcome one of the major pain points of traditional SLG and achieved the scale of user volume - the number of monthly downloads has reached millions of levels.

For example, the number of downloads of "Frost Apocalypse" exceeded one million downloads in March last year (actually nearly 2 million), and then it has been rising steadily, achieving more than 4 million downloads in January and April this year, and more than 46 million downloads since its launch.

The number of downloads of Last War has grown rapidly month after month, with downloads exceeding one million for the first time in December last year, peaking at over 8 million in January this year, nearly 6 million downloads in April, and nearly 40 million downloads since its launch.

For comparison, let's take a look at the number of downloads of other strategy products in April. In April, traditional SLG mobile games ranked first and second in the overseas revenue list, respectively, "Age of Origins" and "Puzzles & Survival".

Age of Origins was downloaded 1.35 million times in April, with the highest download month being 2 million in January this year, and has accumulated more than 86 million downloads since its launch in 2018.

Puzzles & Survival had nearly 1.6 million downloads in April, with the highest download month being 3 million in 2021 and nearly 53 million downloads since its launch in 2020.

From the comparison, it can be seen that casual SLG has broken the curse of "difficult user acquisition" of traditional SLG, coupled with the strong ability to attract money mentioned above, and achieved a revenue that is not inferior to or even higher than that of most traditional SLGs.

So how did Frost Apocalypse, Last War, or the earlier Pocket Shock break through the traditional SLG user circle?

At the product level, the game design and operation level cater to the characteristics of casual gameplay. The above three games all adopt vertical screen operation, cartoon themes, and global aesthetic painting style, abandoning the previous SLG horizontal board and realistic or hardcore art style, and at the same time, through the initial "simplification" gameplay, weakening the hardcore operation of traditional SLG, making it easier for players to get started.

For example, "Pocket Shock" has added a synthesis element to make upgrading a very "cool" thing; "Frost Apocalypse" has integrated the plot from the beginning, making the ice and snow atmosphere full, creating a unique game experience; The newcomer orientation stage of "Last War" fully integrates the mini-gameplay, allowing players to release their "coolness" to a greater extent.

At the same time, they paired it with a COK-like framework that has been proven countless times in the market, so that the freshness and playability of the game have been enhanced.

Based on the "casual design" of the product, they can buy crazy through "sub-play or casual play" to achieve user scale.

Compared with the previous propaganda that directly aimed at the core user group, casual SLG is more like screening potential users from a wide range of user groups, and simultaneously cultivating and converting them into seed users, after all, today's users have a very rich game experience, and the tolerance and acceptance of gameplay are much higher than in the past.

"Mini Game Sub-Gameplay + Mature Gameplay Framework" will be the direction that the industry will continue to explore

The successive emergence of casual SLG explosions has undoubtedly injected new vitality into the industry in today's highly involuted game environment, especially the new hit "Last War" has provided a direction for exploration in the SLG field and even in the medium and heavy categories.

As we all know, in recent years, category integration has been a high-frequency word in the mobile game industry, and many popular products have been born, among which match-3++ is one of the typical ones. The same is true in the SLG field, where a lot of explorations have been made, such as "Pocket Shock" is synthesis + SLG, "Frost Apocalypse" is simulation management + SLG, and now "Last War" has made the mini-game sub-gameplay + SLG more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.

"Mini-game sub-play" plays a different role in different periods.

At the beginning, I used mini games in marketing to buy volume. Playrix's "Dream Garden" and "Dream Home" are examples. Although many manufacturers who adopted this publicity strategy at that time were complained by players about "selling dog meat on the head of a sheep", the effect of buying volume was really significant, and to this day, this is still a marketing "magic weapon".

However, because of the "serious inconsistency" between game advertisements and game content, after being frantically complained about and named by overseas regulators, many manufacturers, including Playrix, "embedded" mini-game gameplay into the game, becoming the "condiment" of the game, and later gradually integrated with the main gameplay of the game and played a more important role.

One of the most well-known examples is Glacier Network's X-heroes in 2022. The game has been tepid for more than a year since it was launched, but after adding the sub-gameplay content of the mini-game and using it as buying material, it has become a popular product in 2022.

Now, "Last War" has also achieved jaw-dropping results by integrating the sub-gameplay content of the mini-game, and it has also made the industry once again see the potential of "mini-game sub-gameplay + mature gameplay framework".

We are in the era of information overload, and how to quickly attract the attention of users in a short period of time is a topic for everyone who wants to master the traffic password. The sub-gameplay of the mini game is characterized by creativity, novelty and coolness, which is naturally eye-catching, which is why it has been able to continue to grow and develop in the fields of marketing, category and integration with other categories.

Therefore, we predict that not only in the field of SLG, but also in various tracks of involution, "mini game sub-gameplay + mature gameplay framework" will be the direction that the mobile game industry continues to explore.

Note: The data in this article comes from the third-party data platform AppMagic, and the "revenue" is the in-app purchase income after deducting the channel share and related taxes, and does not include the third-party Android income, and the data is for reference only.

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