Mini-games are rapidly becoming the new darling of modern times for passing the time, creating wave after wave of online trends.
Following the popularity of “Hop and Jump”, “Catch a Sheep” and “Merge Watermelon”, “Catch the Goose” quickly became a popular pastime for many workers. Additionally, the recent mini-games eco-conference held by Douyin (TikTok) and WeChat further demonstrated the rise of the mini-game industry.
Mini-games have clearly transcended their humble beginnings, transforming into lucrative avenues for developers and platforms alike.
Observation shows that in “Catch the Goose”, the form of in-game advertising is no longer limited to traditional embedded promotions, and now well-known brands such as “Genki Forest” have become partners, appearing together within the game interface.
On the other hand, “King of Salted Fish” has enhanced the interactivity of advertisements and captivated players’ attention more effectively through innovative ad formats, such as continually jumping close buttons and pop-up ad banners.
Mini-games were once regarded as low-end entertainment, but they have proven now to fill the idle time for everyone, especially for those players who are engrossed in endless procedural levels.
On the other hand, game strategy is also crucial. Through a delicate balance of game progression, players often find it easy to pass levels but challenging to become winners in one go, which leads to sharing or micro-transactions becoming the key to further immersion.
In summary, it is undeniable that mini-games have become a new cultural phenomenon; they are not only time-killers but also a new battlefield for commercial monetization.
When players win in the game, they can only wait patiently for the next day, when a new scene unlocks to start again. Each time they pass a level successfully, players obtain a unique “Goose” card, and by collecting these different “Geese,” players’ competitive desires are reignited. It’s through such mechanisms that “Catch a Sheep” maintains user retention and continues to lead in the WeChat mini-games leaderboard to this day.
“Catching The Big Goose” has distinct social characteristics. It firstly uses a sharing mechanism for user revival, which is also the first key step in achieving social fission for the game. Considering the game’s difficulty, many players have shared guides and secrets to success on social media platforms like TikTok and Xiaohongshu. Players who have successfully “caught the big goose” create waves of secondary dissemination by sharing their achievements on social networks.
“The pressure of being limited to ten minutes, the metaphor of the progress bar, and the design of ‘only three chances per day’ seem to suggest moderation, but in reality, they stir the competitive desire even more. And when success seems within reach, perhaps with just one more item, those who catch more geese are often more easily manipulated.”
Facing 400,000 mini-game developers in the market, everyone is looking forward to creating the next hit game like “Catching The Big Goose”. Developer Li Wu still vividly remembers the shocking afternoon when their company’s mini-game suddenly surged into the top 100 best-selling list on WeChat. “The virality of a single ad material brought in 60,000 new users that day. The whole day, the team was busy with maintenance work. The daily top-up limit for the payment interface was reached, resulting in uncredited user top-ups in the evening, and all backend metrics were in an alarm state, necessitating immediate reset and reissuing of orders to the players.”
Games like “Jump Jump” and “Sheep Happens”, which can become viral in an instant, are increasingly gaining presence, attracting more and more people to join the mini-game development ranks. According to the 2023 China Game Industry Report, the domestic mini-program game market revenue is expected to reach 20 billion yuan in 2023, with an astounding year-on-year growth of 300%. On April 24th, the WeChat mini-game team revealed that the number of developers has surpassed 400,000 this quarter, an increase of 100,000 since the beginning of 2023. As early as last year’s China Game Industry Conference, the founder of “Sheep Happens” revealed that their game’s revenue had exceeded 100 million yuan, and the team size had expanded from the original 10 people to 20, despite the game’s initial cost being only 500,000 yuan.
If one can develop a popular mini-game, the subsequent maintenance is relatively simple, but the benefits are enduring. As such, the hot market favors not only veteran industry developers but also those ordinary developers dreaming of overnight wealth.
Regarding monetization models, mini-games mainly fall into three categories: IAP (in-app purchases, including game item sales, level fees, etc.), IAA (advertising monetization), and IAP + IAA (hybrid monetization). Games that include in-app purchases require an official license to go live, which makes ad-monetized games the main battleground for developers. It is understood that mini-games have relatively short development cycles, with individual developers often able to complete development within a month. Chen Xi told the media that they usually develop a demo version in one to two weeks and submit it for review, which takes about one to two months. Once approved, they further perfect the gameplay, and since starting independent development at the end of 2023, they have successfully launched five mini-games on the WeChat platform.
While exploring trends and possibilities in game design, game designer Chen Xi found that current trends often originate from popular works in the overseas game market, and a bit of luck and a strategy of “riding the trending wave” are indispensable. His mini-game “Sewage Incoming” successfully attracted over ten thousand users, most of whom found the game by searching WeChat for hot keywords such as “nuclear waste water”.
The advancement of modern technology, especially artificial intelligence, has greatly reduced the difficulty of creating mini-games. AI drawing tools like Stable Diffusion can satisfy the visual design needs of mini-games, while AI tools like ChatGPT can solve some development problems. Even so, before reaping large-scale profits, most game developers and publishers still need to wait patiently. Chen Xi revealed that despite running ads in his mini-games, his daily income is only a few tens of yuan, which reflects the general situation of individual mini-game developers.
The high attention of internet giants to the mini-game market can be traced back to the release of WeChat mini-game “Jump Jump” on December 28, 2017, whose daily active users broke through the hundred million mark in just three days, bringing immense advertising value. Facing such a strong money-drawing effect and business potential, other internet firms also began to enter the mini-game market. Douyin launched its first mini-game “Music Jumping Ball” in February 2019, but at that time, lacking a well-developed social system for support, the mini-game was unable to fully utilize the power of social fission to grow.
However, this year’s market performance has changed. On April 23, a Douyin IAA Mini-Game Conference that gathered many mini-game companies was held in Changsha, and the very next day, WeChat held the counterpoint WeChat Open Class-IAA Mini-Game session in Wuhan. This competition is also reflected in recent policy adjustments: Douyin launched the epoch-making “91 Open” mini-game in-app purchase revenue sharing policy, and WeChat also updated its mini-game growth incentive plan in March, offering up to 90% profit share to developers.
In this situation of a clam and heron struggle, it’s the game developers that are the benefiting “fishermen”, who can try to gain maximum profits from the fiercely competitive market.
To launch a mini-game on the Douyin platform, one must first complete the application for software copyright. Once this process is passed, the whole approval speed is much faster than WeChat. Normally, the WeChat channel requires over 20 working days to complete the approval, while Douyin only takes about a week. Chen Xi shared with us that he is currently submitting applications for the mini-games he manages on both WeChat and Douyin platforms simultaneously.
Although according to public data and gaming experience, WeChat mini-games have a larger and more mature market, the competition between Tencent and ByteDance, whether in short videos or mini-games, is fundamentally about a commercial contest. More specifically, mini-games are a key tool for accelerating ad consumption for Internet platforms.
Li Wu analyzed and stated, “Douyin and WeChat are able to achieve substantial profits, which can be attributed to their respective advertising systems. The core metrics these advertising systems focus on include traffic, exposure, click-through rate, conversion rate, and payment situations. For companies advertising games, the main metric of interest is the conversion rate. If the cost of video advertising on the Douyin platform is 100 yuan per view, and if this advertisement directly leads to a user making a purchase of 150 yuan, the advertiser may decide to allocate their entire budget to advertising placements.” At the same time, Li Wu revealed that ByteDance’s advantage lies in the fact that Douyin’s advertising system is more precise in conversion efficiency than Tencent’s, thus favoring advertising on Douyin.
Douyin is also actively laying out its strategy for mini-games and opening up external link functions for these games, with the sole aim of increasing advertising revenue. Meanwhile, WeChat is optimizing its commercial conversion and technical enhancement. Heavy games with in-app purchase features can now be directly run on the mini-program platform, and these improvements have significantly increased monetization efficiency and led to notable growth.
Despite this, the continuous influx of new players and developers has made mini-games an upward “new sprout” in the internet domain. But fundamentally speaking, it remains a business dominated by traffic.
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