Who would have thought that in 2023, party games would still be dominating the gaming scene both domestically and internationally?

In 2020, the party game "pioneer," "Fall Guys," became a massive hit, turning the party game genre into a hot trend. Games like "Among Us," "Super Sus," mobile versions of "Fall Guys," "Stumble Guys," "GooseDuck Kill," "Egg Party," "Funny Fighters," and others followed suit. To this day, the popularity of these party games remains unstoppable. Among these, "Egg Party" currently stands out as the most popular product. Recently, "Egg Party" announced that it achieved the milestone of over 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in August, with over 1 billion playground maps created, showcasing its incredible success.

Party games are known for their strong social interaction, short gameplay sessions, and high fun factor, which allows them to transcend time, space, and geography. According to data.ai's Game IQ data, there are currently around 37,000 party game applications in the global market, and new developers are continuously eyeing this category. It can be said that party games have become one of the most fiercely competitive genres this year.

Madbox is one of the competitors in the party game genre, and their competitive party game "Pocket Champs: 3D Racing Games" (referred to as "Pocket Champs" below) has entered the top 10 racing game charts in 25 countries, including South Korea, the UK, and Denmark. As of now, the game has accumulated nearly 40 million downloads globally, with total in-game purchase revenue of nearly $15 million in the past year.

Part 1: The Fundamental Logic of Pokémon-like Training and the Party Game Shell

"Pocket Champs" is quite a unique party game. What sets it apart is that during the in-game matches, players don't need to manually control anything; they can only observe the entire match from a third-person perspective. However, in the character development aspect, players take on the role of a "Pokémon trainer," training and enhancing various abilities of the characters to nurture them into well-rounded athletes.

Of course, this product falls under the category of hyper-casual games, indicating its lightweight gameplay to some extent.

Specifically, players can have a "Pokémon-like" character in the game, let's call it a "Little Ghost" (because of its resemblance to a ghost). In the game, the Little Ghost's objective is to participate in sports competitions and win trophies. To ensure the Little Ghost has the necessary abilities to win, players need to become "Pokémon trainers" and train the core abilities of running, swimming, climbing, and flying.

The training is done through a resource upgrade system. Every time the Little Ghost finishes in the top three in a competition, they earn trophies and training packs or training pack fragments. The training packs come in three tiers: Common (R), Rare (SR), and Epic (SSR). Opening different rarities of training packs requires waiting for the corresponding amount of time, which is 5 seconds, 3 hours, and 8 hours, respectively. The backpack will randomly yield various quantities of ability enhancement stones, coins, and equipment fragments. To obtain additional rewards, players can spend diamonds (premium currency) or watch incentive videos. These resources are primarily used to enhance the Little Ghost's abilities.

Furthermore, trophies serve a broader purpose. Accumulating a certain number of trophies not only unlocks new game modes, maps, equipment, but also new activities, chests, emojis, character outfits, diamonds, and even rank upgrades to gain additional reward bonuses.

Before the official competition, players have the opportunity to choose one piece of equipment for their little ghost. The choice of equipment depends on the specific map of the competition. For example, if there are many climbing scenes, players can choose climbing gear to enhance their speed during climbing. In regular competitive levels, a 6-player match can start quickly, with matches beginning in 1-2 seconds. As for other special modes, they can match over ten players at the same time, using an elimination format. The ultimate winner can obtain rewards such as equipment, money, and chests. However, players ranked below 4th place will face penalties in terms of trophy deductions. Based on the matchmaking speed, ranging from 6 players to nearly 20 players, it's evident that the number of active players in "Pocket Champs" is sufficient to support the gaming experience. According to available data, "Pocket Champs" achieved an MAU of 115.1K in August of this year.

Up to this point, you've seen all the core gameplay of "Pocket Champs." It's evident that most of "Pocket Champs" gameplay focuses on "development": character development - training individual abilities; equipment development - obtaining trophies and training packages to unlock higher quality and different-looking equipment. As for its competitive aspect, more interactivity might be found in the ability to adjust the perspective (third-person and second-person) within the game and exchange expressions with other participating players to convey emotions.

In the author's experience, the fully "automated" competitive mode may feel somewhat one-dimensional. While equipment is displayed in the upper left corner, the timing for using equipment skills cannot be manually controlled by players. If this part could be designed for manual activation, it might bring a stronger sense of interaction. Additionally, "Pocket Champs" has an average match duration of less than 1 minute, making it challenging to incorporate more interactive content. For instance, if a chat or typing feature were added, matches might end before players have a chance to finish typing.

Regarding monetization, "Pocket Champs" employs a hybrid monetization model of IAA (In-App Advertising) and IAP (In-App Purchases). Watching rewarded ads can provide players with additional resources and reduce the time required to unlock resources, but there's a daily limit of 5 times for shortening resource acquisition time. The in-game store also offers special mode tickets and small resource chests that can be obtained for free by watching daily ads. However, if players wish to quickly acquire powerful equipment, abundant resources, and remove ads, they would need to make in-app purchases. It's worth noting that the game's minimum purchase amount is set at $0.99, catering to both light spenders and non-spenders. Through daily ads, non-paying players can still accumulate satisfactory resources such as diamonds and tickets over time.

According to third-party data, "Pocket Champs" has generated nearly $15 million in in-app purchase revenue in the past year. Since its launch in early 2021, the game has accumulated close to $27 million in total in-app purchase revenue. Notably, the United States contributes nearly 35% of the in-app purchase revenue. Based on the author's investigation, players mainly make in-app purchases to collect higher rarity and cooler-looking equipment. High-rarity equipment can provide acceleration effects in two or more types of terrains, significantly influencing the outcome of matches. For instance, the author's climbing ax can never compete with other players' jetpacks.

In summary, as a game where players can only watch matches, the importance of equipment, appearance, and other factors in terms of aesthetics and the excitement of winning or losing cannot be overstated. This is the fundamental reason why overseas players are willing to make in-app purchases.

In terms of advertising, "Pocket Champs" has focused its material placement around equipment and competition themes. According to data.ai, "Pocket Champs" has a wide variety of advertising materials. Apart from directly demonstrating the competition process, it also utilizes the popular "double-choice" mode in secondary gameplay for user acquisition, showcasing the abilities of different equipment, as well as featuring real-life commentary, and failure demonstrations, among others. In the past 30 days alone, "Pocket Champs" has had over 10,000 ad placements on both platforms. Over its entire lifecycle (from January 2021 to September 2023), it has had more than 110,000 ad placements on both platforms.

On TikTok, the advertising for "Pocket Champs" is more daring and flamboyant. It primarily features real players engaging in creative activities, blending animations with real-life scenarios. "Pocket Champs" has collaborated closely with a TikTok influencer named @_mrsmartypants, who has 113.5K followers on TikTok. This influencer has created numerous creative and humorous videos for "Pocket Champs," frequently occupying public attention during the campaign period. Some of these videos have received over 40 million likes, significantly boosting the game's download numbers.

Part 2: Madbox, the Perfect Match of Two Studios

Talking about the game, let's take a look at the company behind it. The game developer is Madbox, and you might be surprised to learn that this company was formed by the merger of two studios. On their official website, Madbox even has a dedicated section to introduce how they met and merged.

Madbox was created through the merger of two game development studios: Chou Entertainment and MadJoh. MadJoh was established in 2015 and has developed notable titles like "Just Dare," "Versus," and "Tribs.io." Although I haven't personally experienced these games, based on their descriptions, these three products have intriguing concepts and gameplay. For example, "Just Dare" aims to gamify people's lives through unique challenges in a social networking context. "Versus" is a multiplayer party game with 20+ mini-games. "Tribs.io" is based on a childhood game called "Chicken, Snake, and Fox" and attracted one million players in its first month, but it eventually had to be shut down due to insufficient updates and technical limitations.

The other studio, Chou, was also founded in 2015. This five-person team has developed a PVP strategy game called "Sand Wars" and a VR Western showdown game called "West Gang" (2017, during the early days of VR), but neither of these games made a significant impact.

Both studios were facing financial challenges and needed a breakthrough. In 2018, they met in a coffee shop and talked for hours. After a few hours, a strong sense of camaraderie was born. Starting in May 2018, they decided to merge and create Madbox. Since then, they have released several hyper-casual games, including "Dash Valley" and "Stickman Hook." "Stickman Hook" reached the global number one spot for downloads on both the App Store and Google Play and has been downloaded over 200 million times to date.

After hearing their "love story," it's not surprising that they were able to create "Pocket Champs" with their background in hyper-casual and party games.

Additionally, it's worth mentioning that Madbox's website homepage is also made up of interactive elements similar to party game levels. On each individual island, you can find their vision and messages to readers.

Part 3: Conclusion

Of course, when it comes to "Pocket Champs," we must acknowledge that this product has some shortcomings. However, the fact that a product that has been online for over two years can still achieve such impressive results may also be due to the challenges that Madbox has faced along the way. This kind of team also makes us look forward to what exciting games they will bring to players around the world in the future.

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