It's been a while since the game fell from the top of the overseas charts.
In 2017, Yuta Games debuted overseas with the gangster-themed SLG "Mafia City". The following year, the product rushed to the 8th place in the annual overseas revenue list, and in the third year, the game continued to make efforts and promoted Youta Games to rank among the top 52 global publishers, ranking 11th among Chinese companies.
Since 2021, Friendly Tower Games has stopped growing rapidly. On the one hand, the revenue of "Underworld" has begun to decline, and the game was ranked around the top 50 of the iOS best-selling list in the United States at the peak of 2020, and began to fall outside the top 200 from time to time at the end of last year. On the other hand, the competition to go overseas is also more intense, and Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's SLG game "Puzzles & Survival" is the dark horse of the year.
At present, Youta Games still holds the position of the top 30 Chinese manufacturers in terms of global revenue. However, in the face of the decline of old products, Youta Games also began to want to catch up.
The Palu gameplay that is least like Palu
On the SLG track, which already has successful experience, the speed of exposing new products of Youta Games has accelerated, and it seems that the competitive anxiety is more obvious.
After the launch of "The Sopranos" in 2017, "Chief Almighty" was quickly released the following year, and "The Grand Mafia" in 2020 was also nowhere near the heights of "The Sopranos". Since the beginning of 2022, Friends Tower Games has successively launched and tested 3 new SLG games, "Nexus War", "Savage Survival: Jurassic Isle" and "Dinosaur Isle: Survival".
其中《Dinosaur Isle: Survival（简称为Dinosaur Isle）》是友塔游戏第一款尝试横板的SLG，玩法形式明显区分于过去的5款SLG。 《Dinosaur Isle: Survival》原名为《Jurassic Island: Survival》，去年9月进行了一次海外测试，近期更名开启了新一轮测试。
Dinosaur Isle features SLG gameplay in the back and heavy SOC gameplay in the early stages of the game. The game's SOC gameplay is based on the dinosaur theme, where the player controls a character stranded on an isolated island, and the protagonist needs to explore the island and survive and tame the dinosaurs on the island.
The game retains the basic features of SOC gameplay. Players need to pick up stones, branches, and other materials on the map to build tools, which can be used to collect stones, trees, and buildings. The character has a satiety setting, and needs to obtain food by collecting wild fruits, hunting dinosaurs, etc., and the character will slowly recover his HP on the premise of having enough satiety.
The dinosaurs in the game are similar to Palu in Phantom Beast Palu. Characters can carry up to 3 dinosaurs with them as they explore, and dinosaurs can help players speed up collection, assist in combat, and automatically produce in homestead buildings. After making the corresponding items, the character can also ride on the dinosaur to fight, so that the character can avoid damage in battle.
Dinosaurs have the same satiety setting as the characters. However, the character can eat meat or plants, and the dinosaur needs to be fed a specific food based on the carnivorous or herbivore. Dinosaurs can also only level up through battles, which can increase their health, attack power, and other stats.
Obviously, the dinosaur theme is not suitable for direct application of Pokémon-like gameplay, so "Dinosaur Isle" has also made some corresponding innovations.
Some carnivorous dinosaurs on the map will actively attack the player, and even prey on other dinosaurs. During the battle with the dinosaurs, players need to make a slingshot item in advance to make the pterosaur fall from the sky, or to prevent the dinosaur from escaping when its HP runs out.
When the dinosaur's HP decreases to a certain level, it will enter a state of coma for a period of time. Players can choose to feed according to the type of dinosaur, so as to promote the taming progress of the dinosaur, and the tamed dinosaur can be used for their own use. If it is not tamed within a certain amount of time, the dinosaur will fight the player again or run away. If the player does not choose to tame, they can also choose to mend the knife to complete the hunt and obtain item materials such as meat.
It took at least 2 hours of gameplay for Dinosaur Isle to show off its regular SLG gameplay. The game also provides a mode switching function, allowing players to go back and experience SOC content at any time.
Dinosaur Isle is so heavily designed with SOC gameplay that it can't be directly considered as a sub-gameplay. The game opens up the production buildings and resources of SLG mode and SOC mode, and the number of resources in both gameplay modes is exactly the same.
Players need to consume food, stone and other resources to produce dinosaur soldiers in SLG mode. In addition to upgrading buildings, you can also tame more advanced dinosaurs to participate in the work. And each building has a specific type of dinosaur that can participate in the work, for example, the food workshop can only accommodate herbivorous dinosaurs. Therefore, even after unlocking the SLG gameplay, players still need to continue to find and tame more dinosaurs in SOC mode.
Dinosaur Isle's gameplay design for SLG is relatively conventional, including the setting of 4 types of troops, radar to find resource points, and guild members to help each other.
"Dinosaur Isle" is very much like the product of "Palu the Phantom Beast" after it became popular. However, the Palu likes tested on the market before are basically taking the route of light gameplay, such as "Palmon: Survival" represented by Lilith, "Illusion: Evo" by IGG, "Mythmon", "Pawmon War", "Dreamio Rush", and "Critter Arena" by FunPlus.
In the past, there were also many new SLG products that put SLG gameplay in the back, such as "Age of Sea" tested by Zhixingtong, and the early gameplay was also generally of the light type. Referring to the successful products of the past, lightweight SLG is undoubtedly an emerging type in the overseas market.
The design of Dinosaur Isle is reversed. Although the game's SOC gameplay doesn't have a severe death penalty, the gameplay selection is still more severe than SLG's. For example, there is no automatic pathfinding function in the gameplay, and players need to manually operate to find mission points, target dinosaurs, etc. In contrast, players can push the main story up to the task jump function in SLG gameplay, and the operation in SOC gameplay is more cumbersome.
The lightweight design can help SLG find potential players, while Dinosaur Isle's heavy design is like looking for migrated users in a vertical track, which is undoubtedly a subversive idea.
The reason for such a big innovation in Dinosaur Isle may be that the previous SLG releases have not performed as well as they should.
The new SLG of the first two years of Youta Games also tried new gameplay elements, such as "Nexus War", which adopts the theme of alien science fiction and integrates the elements of exploration fog in the gameplay; Savage Survival: Jurassic Isle is based on the theme of prehistoric civilizations, and the gameplay incorporates RTS-like simulation elements. Judging from the content of the game, it is not as invested as Dinosaur Isle.
Friend Tower Games is not indifferent to the explosion of light SLGs. For example, "Nexus War" tried the new pack "Nexus War: Survival Mech" a year after its launch, which combined the sub-gameplay of mecha shooting on the basis of the original. Mafia Sniper Revenge and Top Mafia: Shootout were tested in May and January of this year, respectively, combining sniper and level shooter sub-gameplay, which counts as an iteration of Grand Mafia and Mafia City.
The Mafia Sniper Revenge The top mafia: shootout.
The attempt of sub-gameplay has not yet fully covered the original game version, and the game is still in a situation where the new product fails to relay and the old product continues to decline. It is precisely because of this bottleneck period that Dinosaur Isle seems more like a risky move in the game of Friendly Tower. Ingenious designs may find market opportunities, or they may keep companies in the grip of business anxiety.
Three overseas business segments
Now Youta Games is launching its overseas business with SLG category as the main line, and the business line is clearer than in the past.
Youta Game was one of the first entrepreneurial projects of Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo. According to the official introduction of Youta Games, the company was founded in 2012. According to reports, in the early years, some members of Huang Zheng's other entrepreneurial project, Leqi.com, used to operate games, and later these members established Shanghai Dream in 2013, and the core members of the company incubated Pinduoduo. In 2016, Dream Games and Pinduoduo were cut, and it was not until 2018 that Shanghai Youta was established as the main body of the company in order to further distinguish itself from the e-commerce business.
If you look up the overseas official websites of the games of Youta Games, they are classified into three official website platforms with different names, including Phantix Games, Carolgames, and Matchrella Game, which correspond to three different game categories.
Phantix Games上都是友塔游戏旗下的SLG游戏，其中包括《Mafia City》《The Grand Mafia》《Mafia City H5》等5款产品，不过去年年底上线的《Savage Survival: Jurassic Isle》则没有包括在内。
Carolgames corresponds to the RPG card category, including "Girls X Battle 2", "Ever Legion", and "Ace Alliance". This is mainly a moderate product of Friend Tower Games that tries different ways to play, and most of the products don't have a high volume.
For example, "My Schoolgirl Can't Be So Cute 2" was launched in the international server version in 2018, the Japanese version was launched the following year, and reached the peak of income in 2020. In 2022, in line with the trend of sub-gameplay, the content of "drawing a line to save the dog's head" was iteratively added, but it did not have the effect of recovering the operation.
The idle card game "Heroes: Legends of Chaos" was launched in overseas markets in 2021 and has not yet entered the top 200 best-selling iOS in the United States. This game has not been given up yet, and at the beginning of this year, it ushered in a round of small revenue increases, and from time to time it was able to break into the top 50~200 of the Philippine iOS best-selling list.
As a continuation, in June last year, Ace Alliance: Realm of Heroes was also tested by Ace Alliance, upgraded from portrait to landscape graphics, and the game has not yet been officially launched. Judging from the game materials, this game is an iteration of War Spell: Team Tactics RPG, which was removed after testing in March 2023.
《Ace Alliance》
In addition, Youta Games also tested the match-3 + card game "Dragonfall & Puzzles" in 2022, and also incorporated 4X construction elements, and finally the game stopped testing before the official launch. Earlier in 2019, Friend Tower Games also tested a detective-themed simulation game "Alpha PD: Crimefront", which also has a certain element of resource management.
Matchrella Game corresponds to the casual category, and there is currently only one game, Hollywood Crush. "Hollywood Crush" adopts match-3 + dress up gameplay, which was launched in overseas markets in July last year, and the game's best-selling ranking in the past six months has hardly fluctuated. AppMagic's report analyzes the new products in the match-3+ track in the T1 market in Europe and the United States in 2024, and only 5 of the 60 new products have crossed the threshold of $50,000 in monthly revenue, and "Hollywood Crush" is one of them.
Before "Hollywood Crush", Friends Tower Games launched a match-3 + home improvement game "Bella Villa" in 2020, ranking above 600 on the iOS best-selling list in the United States, and the game was removed from the shelves after 2 years of operation.
During this period, Friends Tower Games also tested the same type of "Mansion Delights", but it was not officially launched, and another "Pirate Adventure" was still driving traffic to "Hollywood Crush" when it stopped testing. After several attempts at the theme, Youta Games found a better choice for fashion themes in the match-3 category.
《Hollywood Crush》
In 2020, Friend Tower Games also tested a game similar to "Legend of the Bow and Arrow" "Relic Rumble", and had the idea of expanding roguelike games relatively early. It's just that "Relic Rumble" has not been officially launched, and the follow-up Friend Tower Games does not seem to continue to invest in this aspect.
In general, the overseas business of Youta Games has been more refined, and it has now formed three plates: heavy SLG + medium cards + light match-3. In recent years, Youta Games has spent a lot of time trying various ways to play, and it has continued to iterate on various tracks, but the results that can be seen so far are still limited.
epilogue
In recent years, it seems that Friendly Tower Games is poised to take a big leap forward. Previously, we also reported that Youta Games is recruiting R&D personnel for an open-world project with a multi-terminal European and American real-life urban theme, which is expected to be the first time that Youta Games has stepped into the track of PC games. At present, Youta Games is still willing to break through the successful experience of the past and try new genres, and perhaps there will still be opportunities to return to the forefront in the future.