Behind the Numbers: China’s Big Market for Mini Games

文章预览

The tiny titles have found a niche catering to players uninterested in their larger, less nimble app-based competitors. In 2021, a tiny Beijing-based studio released Sheep a Sheep, a small yet deceptively difficult tile-matching game, to almost no fanfare. The game didn’t even have a dedicated app; instead, players could access it only through WeChat, Tencent’s do-everything messaging software. The game’s legacy might have ended there, but after months spent languishing in relative obscurity, Sheep a Sheep suddenly rocketed up the player charts in September 2022. Despite a four-person development team and reported budget of just 500,000 yuan (then about $76,000), it hit 213 million monthly active users and took in over 100 million yuan in 2022 alone. The game’s success wasn’t just a triumph for small developers; it signaled a sea change in China’s gaming industry, as more developers began taking advantage of sweetheart deals offered by mega-apps like WeChat and Douyin — t ………………………………