As the market environment changes, more and more hyper-casual companies are turning to mid-hybrid monetization products. Although it is rare to see explosive products on the market, there are still manufacturers who adhere to the hyper-casual track and continue to iterate on successful products.
Recently, a game called "Outlets Rush" was launched in overseas regions and quickly rushed to the top of the list in dozens of countries and regions. At the same time, it also brought Supercent into our sight again. As a Korean game company founded at the end of the hyper-casual era, it has a remarkable track record in the hyper-casual field. So, what makes Supercent unique and what insights does it have about the product and the market?
(Screenshot of the US iOS list on December 20)
I "copied" myself, this time on a shopping mall theme
Outlets Rush iOS launched in June 2023 and after months of tuning, it began to move up in the rankings in early December. As of the afternoon of December 20, the game ranked 1st in the free list in 4 countries and regions around the world, and ranked in the top 10 in 104 countries and regions.
In terms of gameplay, "Outlets Rush" is an arcade placement + simulated business gameplay product. As you can guess from the name of the game, the game is based on the well-known shopping mall "Outlets", and players will experience the fun of running a shopping mall from scratch, from the early hands-on, to successively recruiting employees, increasing goods, and expanding the scale of operations step by step, moving towards the goal of becoming bigger and stronger.
According to AppMagic, Outlets Rush has accumulated nearly 13 million downloads, and nearly 11.5 million downloads in the last 30 days.
Perhaps, just looking at this product doesn't make sense of its specialness, but looking back at past products, this is the third "skin-changing" product that Supercent has given to the top of the list after "Burger Please!" and "Pizza Ready!".
“换皮大王”还是“热点洞察大师”？其实纵览Supercent成绩亮眼的产品，可以明显看到其对于街机放置+模拟经营玩法的“偏爱”。 除了近期成绩亮眼的《Outlets Rush》外，旗下还有《Burger Please!》《Pizza Ready!》《Coffee Break – Cafe Simulation》《My Toy Shop!》《My Sweet Bakery!》《Chicken Idle》等多款玩法相似的产品，也就是所谓的“换皮”。
In a previous article, we introduced Supercent, which has a deep understanding of marketing and has an extremely streamlined distribution process. At the same time, Supercent will also hold game challenges to select the best products for distribution. (Recommended reading: "Viral" chasing hot spots and reaching 70 million downloads, it says that game marketing is more important than quality).
At the same time, Supercent's parent company 111% is also a well-known casual game company in South Korea (recommended reading: After failing more than 130 games, this manufacturer made a single game with more than 100 million flows), because most of its games are known for being simple, magical, and toxic, although the gameplay is simple, but it is very addictive, so that players are deeply involved in it, suspected of poisoning, and are jokingly called "drug factories" by players. The most well-known product, Random Dice: Defense, has accumulated more than $130 million in in-app purchase revenue since its launch in 2019.
Which products are propping up for 270 million downloads?
Founded in March 2021 and with over 55 million downloads in its first year, Supercent is a South Korean gaming company that specializes in analyzing various cultural trends, viral content, and user consumption patterns, reinterpreting fun elements into hyper-casual games that are simple to control and gripping. According to AppMagic data, Supercent's products have been downloaded nearly 270 million times. Representative products include: "Outlets Rush", "Burger Please!", "Pizza Ready!", "Unnie doll", "Hit & Run: Solo Leveling" and so on. Here's a quick introduction.
"Unnie doll", nearly 48 million downloads, one of Supercent's early products, belongs to the children's casual dress-up play. In the game, players can design their favorite characters, from the appearance to the costume, and thousands of options provide a high degree of freedom. At the same time, the game supports saving the designed character image, which can be used as a mobile phone desktop picture.
"ASMR Rainbow Jelly", with more than 23 million downloads, is a standard social media hot adaptation game case. In the game, players can make "rainbow food" and imitate the sound effect of a vlogger chewing to achieve the effect of ASMR.
"Hit & Run: Solo Leveling", 15 million downloads, adds the element of "size ratio" to the parkour gameplay, players can absorb and strengthen themselves by defeating enemies with smaller values than themselves in the process of progressing, and need to dodge enemies with higher values.
"Outlets Rush" (3.2 million), "Burger Please!" (over 70 million), "Pizza Ready!" (nearly 15 million) can actually be said together, the three products are arcade placement + simulation business products, but they are differentiated in terms of subject matter.
The current dilemma of the hyper-leisure market and its solutions
1. The crisis of the fast-changing mobile game market
For the current mobile gaming market, Supercent believes that the mobile market has been overloaded with apps and content, and the rapid supply of a large number of apps and content has distracted people's attention.
The chart below is a comparison of the top 20 best-selling lists in 2015 and 2022. In 2015, the only non-gaming app in the top 20 best-selling list was line. In 2022, 40% of the top 20 apps are non-games, and more and more app apps have higher revenue than game apps.
It can be seen that games must compete not only with their peers, but also with the entire content market, including all other apps. However, for games that require more production time than social media, it is relatively difficult to respond immediately to market changes. In contrast, social apps are encroaching on the app market and are quickly becoming a major competitor to mobile games, thanks to the rapid flow of content.
2. TikTok, the new competitor in the gaming space
Of particular note is TikTok, which ranked first in terms of sales in 2022. In the image above, you can see that the watch time for short content is increasing rapidly, while the watch time for long content is not decreasing. This shows that the appeal of short content, which is different from long content, is being discovered, and the market share is increasing rapidly.
What is it about TikTok that attracts the masses? TikTok allows you to keep enjoying new content with simple actions. Each time you scroll up, an unpredictable video appears, providing an addictive experience similar to the slot machine reel system. This mode of operation meets the needs of the masses to consume content easily and effortlessly.
3. TikTok and hyper-casual games have similar DNA
Simple controls and rewards for repetitive actions are common features of hyper-casual games and TikTok. As a result, TikTok and Hyper-Casual have seen similar growth.
Users who have become Xi to the fast-paced delivery and consumption of content have shorter attention spans. This changing trend has also had a positive impact on the growth of the hyper-casual genre, with lighter, shorter content gaining the upper hand across the industry.
However, the super-casual market is now ripe. Competitors are saturated, users are demanding more and more quality, and there are fewer and fewer game ideas. That's why the constant and unlimited delivery of new exciting short-form video content has become a competitor to hyper-casual games.
4. The list is solidified, and new games appear but do not circulate in the market
There are only three games in the top 20 downloaded games worldwide in 2023: Subway Surfers, Candy Crush Saga, and King Ludo. Even though these games have been released for almost 10 years. Why does this fixation occur?
Due to the intensification of market competition and changes in the market environment, the barriers to attracting new users and monetization have increased significantly. First, the biggest change began when Apple discontinued IDFA (Identifier for Advertising) support and introduced ATT/SKAN in April 2021. The CPI continues to rise as users are no longer able to be identified on IOS.
Global economic conditions are also influencing the mobile gaming market. As global interest rates rise, companies that are underperforming are reducing their advertising investments. As a result, even the eCPM has been reduced and the profits have been reduced. IAP sales, which went through a special period during COVID-19, also showed slow growth after the pandemic, which made it difficult to scale and monetize core games.
For these complex reasons, the number of new games entering the leaderboard is decreasing.
5. It is difficult to find a market environment for new products
The chart below shows how many new games are in the top 30 downloads when they hit the market
Only three of the new games released in 2023 are in the top 30 for downloads: Burger Please!, Magic Piano, and Homerush, and have been steadily declining since 2019. Even in this chaotic market situation, Supercent found a breakthrough and confidently made its new game, Burger please!, to the top of the charts.
Finding a breakthrough in a difficult market environment
1) Understand market trends
When the market changes quickly, you need to react quickly. Only developers who develop new games that are in line with fast-changing trends and verify their marketability will survive.
(Variations on the popular genre of hyper-casual games)
We live in an era of media saturation. With the increase in short-form content, people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and games need to produce more engaging content.
So, take inspiration from everything in the market.
We need to find the content that consumers find attractive in the app market and media platforms, and integrate it into the game. People like the familiar. But at the same time, it has to be fun. That's why you need to create a game with 70% popularity and 30% differentiation.
2) Leverage Superpercent's unique CPI formulation
Unlike other genres, trends in the hyper-casual market change quickly. Superpercent invests heavily in trend analysis and material discovery from the ideation stage to create highly best-selling games. As a result, we have an 80% chance of finding CPI below $1.
In addition, the creative ability of the Superpercent marketing team can reduce the game's CPI by more than 50% on average. Snake Clash! is a representative example of an initial test CPI that was reduced from $0.7 to $0.3 after the second iteration. Based on this expertise, Superpercent will continue to find games with low CPI even in difficult market conditions.
("Snake Clash of Snakes!" successful iteration case)
3) Deeper gameplay
As it becomes more and more difficult for new games to make it to the leaderboards, a low CPI is just the first step to a successful game development.
We needed to provide a more in-depth gaming experience with popular footage while keeping CPI low. In order to provide a deep gaming experience, the metaverse system must be enhanced to present the core goals of the game and provide various growth paths to achieve those goals.
In addition, level design and economic balance are important to control the growth of the various metalayers. To take advantage of hyper-casual, we need to build a core loop of popular themes and a strategy to improve LTV by creating an environment that allows users to be more immersed.
(Now we need to increase LTV by providing a deeper gaming experience)
Finally, Supercent's way of continuously launching successful product iterations needs to be Xi, and the success of continuous themes based on a set of gameplay is a successful methodology in itself. The main thing is that Supercent can be sustained.