"Over the year, we managed to boost IAP monetization by 650%," Anton Rybakov from JoyBits on the results of 2024
We continue to wrap up 2024 together with experts from the gaming industry. Anton Rybakov shared with the editors how the year went for JoyBits.
How was the year for the company? What achievements stand out?
It was quite an eventful year across all directions!
First and foremost, we should start with the revolution in the alchemy genre (mechanic A+B=C).
Back in 2010, JoyBits popularized the merge mechanic with the release of Doodle God, and in 2024, there was a real boom of new games in our "home" genre. The main reason, of course, is the rapid integration of AI into all key game development processes.
Alongside the revolution within the niche, the original gameplay of the Doodle God series was also actively evolving. Significant breakthroughs in metrics and content helped extend a rather unique contract with Apple Arcade for several more years. There aren't many products from real indie studios in the Arcade catalog, and even AAA publishers don't always get contract extensions.
Our friends from Epic Mobile Store also highly appreciated 15 years of continuous upgrading of Doodle God. Several games in the series will be featured in the global launch of this new gaming platform in the shortlist of indie hits of all time.
Something quite unique yet promising was a deal with Hamster Kombat and our first experience with cross-promoting traffic from Telegram games into mobile.
However, the successes this year were not only for our flagship brand.
The hyper-casual quest Fish Story finished 2024 approaching the 30 million install mark.
Not bad, considering the old-school hyper-casual monetization that doesn't use IAP, as well as the UA, which hasn't dwindled for ABI Game Studio for three years. It seems that only Vietnamese UA teams can pull this off today.
I'll also say a few words about the alternative Android distribution direction.
Over the past five years, Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass, and Netflix Games have shown the mass player the charm of subscription services for mobile games. But few know that this market is over 20 years old, with hundreds of channels, portals, and services. JoyBits has been on this market practically since its inception. Moreover, it has long been firmly at the top of the largest content aggregators for such platforms (e.g., Gameloft highlights us).
For quite a while, JoyBits' portfolio (with 1000+ SKUs) included many strong game titles, and this year we significantly enhanced our longstanding partnership with the undisputed leader in installs — AZUR GAMES. Additionally, we signed a distribution agreement for a hundred Unico Studio games, creators of the BrainTest series with a billion cumulative downloads.
How was the year for the genre in which you work?
In 2024, the alchemy genre experienced a "quantum leap," a real revolution!
As is known, the genre emerged almost 30 years ago, but the mechanic was primarily known only to game designers for a long time.
It wasn't until 2010, riding the wave of a successful web prototype, that JoyBits made A+B=C a truly massive global phenomenon. Back then, Doodle God occupied the second spot for weeks in paid app sales on iOS across all countries, second only to Angry Birds, and soon reached hundreds of millions of plays on thousands of Flash portals.
A unique idea is important, but much of what played a role back then was the quality of the content. A lot of effort was put into every element icon, every edit. Such a very authorial, crafted approach to developing the first craft-merge. The first release came with a pack of 115 elements, all hand-drawn.
The success of Doodle God spawned hundreds of clones (such as Little Alchemy), as well as two large independent genres — merge3 (TripleTown) and merge2 (2048).
Meanwhile, Little Alchemy and almost all clones significantly sacrificed quality for quantity. Even the most content-rich games over the next 10+ years couldn't manage more than 1000 unique elements. Such content was just too costly, even when saving on quality. Plus, the complexity of evolutionary chains grew exponentially, leading gameplay to quickly devolve into a frustrating grind with frequent player failures.
A big step towards simplifying the genre occurred in 2021 with the release of Doodle God Universe on Apple Arcade. The content was executed at a new quality level; therefore, the game continued to feature mere hundreds of elements, but the reactions numbered in the thousands. This largely eliminated the issue of trial and error that plagued previous alchemy games.
In December 2023, JoyBits was the first to implement a mode allowing complete avoidance of failures and trial and error. Every attempt to combine elements became successful, making mistakes impossible. By then, the main version of Doodle God featured nearly 1500 unique elements and about 50,000 reactions.
At the end of 2023, we began first experiments with AI. They led to us receiving a content boost in record time.
In 2024, neural networks allowed us to generate alchemical content of any complexity in any volume, in any setting, and for any info occasion almost in real-time.
Notably, AI affected the entire game dev industry this year, but the A+B=C genre seems particularly suited for full automation through AI.
As a result, we now have around 7 million (!) reactions and ~200 thousand elements in our global database, which essentially equals endless content. For players, this has completely changed the pace of the game and long-term engagement, creating a new wave of hype around the entire genre.
JoyBits arguably has the most developments in meta and LiveOps in the alchemy niche. Over the year alone, IAP monetization was boosted by 650%. Similar dynamics are observed across other key metrics.
What are the company's plans for next year?
The goal for 2025 is to bring the entire genre closer to the successes of HexaSoft / ScrewPuzzle, who have already proven that a powerful hybrid can be realized with fairly simple means.
We have high hopes for an upcoming push with Hamster Combat. Doodle God hit the Playground showcase just a week before the New Year, during a period when the first season of "Hamster" had long ended, and the second was only announced. For Playground, this is a period of minimal activity, when crystals and codes are only interesting to players for the future. In essence, this is a soft launch. However, it turned out that even in the off-season, player activity is at the level of good organic growth, and the conversion from Telegram to iOS/GP installs is comparable to UA networks (Mintegral).
Overall, we are eagerly anticipating the second season and new records for "Hamster" in terms of active audience. The 300 million people who were with the project at its peak and allowed it to enter the Guinness Book of World Records are surely not the limit!
Releases on Epic Mobile Store also have great potential. We expect up to a million installs with every free giveaway. We are likely to publish third-party projects using this model.
Our priority, however, is to complete the transformation of the main line of A+B=C games into a proper hybrid-casual product, featuring a full set of LiveOps features and multiple meta layers! A strong hybrid today can be monetized not only on platforms like the App Store and Google Play but also on hundreds of other stores. Not to mention dozens of PC platforms, HTML5 portals, as well as consoles and messengers!
