Pok City is a rather low-profile game company within the industry.
Unknowingly, Pok City has completed a three-level jump in employee size over 5 years, expanding from 400 people at the beginning of 2020, to 1000 people in 2022, and to 1500 people in recent years.
In 2020, Pok City invited Tadao Ando to design the new company building and art center, with the investment amount increasing from the initial 900 million to later 1.5 billion. The building was topped out last year and is expected to accommodate 2000 people for office work. Along with this expansion, employee benefits have also increased, with 696 new iPhones given out at last year's annual meeting, setting a new record for the company.
While corresponding to the company's operational investments, Pok City has been relatively quiet about its product revenue. After entering the top 100 enterprises in Shanghai in 2021 with a revenue of 9.6 billion, it seems to have not declared since. However, its active performance in the mini-game track in 2022 is hard to ignore.
Pok City started with card and board games, and along the way shifted its focus to becoming a versatile player in the casual game track, now experimenting with various categories such as mini-games, match-3, RPGs, and is increasingly gaining ground.
Focusing on the market to create its own hits
Due to its casual game manufacturer genes, Pok City became one of the earliest companies to adopt mini-game gameplay.
The head of distribution in Guangzhou for Pok City mentioned in a sharing event that the company started focusing on mini-games in 2022 and began to push forward in 2023.
At that time, the outside world was more accustomed to categorizing these products as "hybrid casual". The Merge-3+ tower defense gameplay of "Merge Merge Merge Heroes" also climbed the domestic and international markets during this period. The game's revenue gradually declined in the first half-year after launch but has remained stable, still occasionally hovering between 50th to 200th place on the iOS best-selling charts in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
For the mini-game business, it's all about being "first" or "long-term". Unlike the early "Merge Merge Merge Heroes" which was successful both domestically and internationally, Pok City now chooses different types of products to push in domestic and international markets.
Seizing the initiative is reflected in the overseas sector, where slight innovations in gameplay have attracted players' attention. Recently, Pok City has made significant business breakthroughs, largely inspired by the resurgence of the Korean manufacturer 111%.
The latest product is "Pull Pull Pull Heroes", which launched in December last year and began to push forward in March this year. "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" integrates some gameplay elements from "Lucky Defense!" and "Lucky Offense", both games under 111%.
The core gameplay of "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" is closer to "Lucky Defense!", but it simplifies some aspects of tower defense. Heroes in the game can automatically target enemies, reducing the need for players to arrange troops in real-time. Besides, gameplay content including mythical hero synthesis and guessing games are consistent with "Lucky Defense!".
The hero generation method in "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" is similar to "Lucky Offense", adopting a slot machine-like presentation. After players click the "draw" button, the reward bar randomly displays icons of heroes, coins, or cards, and rewards are obtained when three or more identical icons appear, with the quality of rewards increasing with the number of identical icons.
Additionally, "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" also produced a protagonist cultivation feature, single-player mode, and dual-player cooperative mode similar to "Come Be a Lord" from Dream Dragon Journey. From the gameplay content, "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" has at least reached version 3.0.
Currently, "Pull Pull Pull Heroes" has been online for nearly a month and is gradually rising on the South Korean iOS best-selling chart, currently ranked over 100. It's worth mentioning that "Lucky Defense!" and "Lucky Offense" are also among the best-performing products of 111% in the South Korean market, both within the TOP 60 of the best-selling charts. Pok City has missed the opportunity to develop the domestic market and now seems to be competing with 111% for users.
Last year, Pok City also launched "Zombie Smash". Almost at the same time, 111% tested a similar gameplay "Gun Cat POW!" overseas, while "Zombie Smash" had already launched earlier in overseas markets such as the USA, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.
"Zombie Smash" gameplay is derived from Voodoo's "Ball Blast", incorporating casual shooting ball gameplay with Roguelike elements. However, the novelty of the gameplay is relatively low, and to date, "Gun Cat POW!" has not officially launched, while the market performance of "Zombie Smash" has not been outstanding.
In the domestic market, Pok City's mini-games have achieved better long-term operational results.
Currently, the best-performing mini-games of Pok City in the domestic market are the box-opening gameplay of "Jumping Kid" and "Spirit Painter". According to the monthly best-selling list of WeChat mini-games compiled by Gravity Engine, both games consistently rank in the TOP 30. On the Douyin mini-game best-selling list, both games are even more frequently in the TOP 10, with a relatively more significant advantage.
Additionally, even though "Jumping Kid" and "Spirit Painter" perform well on mini-game platforms, the games have not yet chosen to launch an APP version domestically to expand their advantage, which is also rare among the top mini-game charts.
"Jumping Kid" was one of the earliest medium-sized mini-games to enter the market and has maintained its position even after the mini-game market exploded. As of August 2023, "Jumping Kid" has ranked in the TOP 10 of the WeChat mini-game best-selling list, and the game's ranking has seen a resurgence over the past year and a half, with no significant changes.
"Jumping Kid" has added tower defense auto chess gameplay, increasing the player development content and strategic combat content, all of which lay the foundation for long-term operations.
Last year, "Jumping Kid" started incorporating sub-gameplay content as a traffic-pulling method, which is speculated to have helped the revenue resurgence. The types of sub-gameplay chosen are also quite diverse, such as the recently popular gear evolution, the relatively light climbing paving, and the triangular frontline. From the official WeChat video account, it appears that similar "Royal Match" match-3 levels and other gameplay were also produced before.
"Spirit Painter" is a new product launched last year, also with early sub-gameplay content, and the game replaces the traditional box-opening with a large map treasure hunting design, which is more visually appealing. Currently, "Spirit Painter" and "Jumping Kid" both rank in the TOP 10 of the Douyin mini-game popularity list (ranked by game activity and content heat), with "Spirit Painter" having twice the heat value of "Jumping Kid".
Besides the popular box-opening gameplay, Pok City still has a fixation on the match-3+RPG combat gameplay.
Last year, Pok City launched a new product on WeChat mini-games, "Happy Gamer". The gameplay is similar to the line-matching RPG combat of "Knights Combo" that Pok City tested overseas. "Knights Combo" was only online overseas for 3-4 months in 2023, and its performance did not improve before being discontinued, and now it continues to try domestically.
"Happy Gamer" has changed the art packaging, from the bean-eyed little people similar to "Boom Boom Mercenary Corps" to a plant anthropomorphic theme similar to "Defend the Sunflower". The game content has also become more intense, such as adding hero equipment development, talent development, pet development, and also adding a PVP arena as social content. At the beginning of this year, "Happy Gamer" briefly entered the TOP 100 of the WeChat mini-game best-selling list, but the performance is still relatively ordinary for now.
In the past few years, Pok City also launched mini-games like "Adventure of Xunke" and "Qinglian Pearl", which are no longer searchable, perhaps because the gameplay is slightly outdated and has exited. However, after filtering out the hits, Pok City has successfully kept up with the mini-game trend and gradually expanded its advantages domestically and internationally.
Since the policy tightening on card and board games, other major card game manufacturers, including Pok City, have also started to transform. In the past two years, TourYou also joined the mini-game competition with "SubGod: Awakening of Light", which currently ranks between 10th and 50th on the WeChat mini-game best-selling list and between 50th and 200th on the domestic iOS best-selling list. The early performance of the mini-game was also not bad, and the new SLG "Three Kingdoms: Ice Age" has recently maintained a TOP 5 position on the WeChat mini-game best-selling list.
Compared to this, Pok City seems to only focus on the casual category for now, and is gradually making breakthroughs, which also provides solutions for the company's transformation going forward.
Over 30 casual games a year
Since its transformation to go overseas in 2018, Pok City has gradually expanded the scale of product testing, aiming to become a versatile player in the casual game track.
Last year, the company tested 32 games (including 5 that were discontinued), maintaining the same number as in 2023. Besides the early successful overseas categories such as card games and match-3, Pok City now sees any opportunity related to the casual category as worth trying.
As Pok City's old business, card games have helped the company transform to go overseas. However, subsequently, Pok City did not go all-in on card games for overseas markets and seemed to encounter a bottleneck.
The first to go overseas and see results was "Higgs Domino Island". The game integrated popular local Domino and other card gameplay in Indonesia, and after launching in 2018, it began to push forward in 2020, reaching a revenue peak in 2022. SensorTower's report in July 2022 showed that Pok City's monthly revenue reached 3.75 times that of the same period in 2020, with the top three markets being Indonesia, the USA, and China, accounting for 38.6%, 26.2%, and 23% respectively.
As of 2023, "Higgs Domino Island" has long ranked in the top three of the Indonesian Google Play best-selling list. According to Data.ai, "Higgs Domino Island" is also the third largest DAU game product in the Indonesian market, only behind "MLBB" and "Free Fire".
Until last year, Pok City was still trying to launch local card products in other Asian markets, such as Thailand's "Dummy Land", the Philippines' "Tongits Star", Arabia's "Domino Cafe", Russia's "Online Fool", and last year's test of Turkey's "101 Okey King". However, these games have not launched iOS versions, and their download performance is still far from "Higgs Domino Island".
Additionally, "Higgs Domino Island" was also unlisted for over a year in 2023, and according to SensorTower's data monitoring, the overall revenue level dropped by half as a result. Only this year did "Higgs Domino Island" relaunch, and from the iOS best-selling list rankings, its revenue has not yet returned to pre-unlisting levels.
Match-3 elimination games make up the majority of the tested products. From regular match-3, Merge-2 to stacking elimination, classification elimination, etc., Pok City has explored various gameplay types.
The best-performing downloads were 2020's "Tile Master" and 2021's "Tile Master 3D", both achieving over 100 million downloads on Google Play. "Tile Master" was also one of the earliest products to land on Youtube's mini-games for overseas markets, but both games have inevitably declined.
Match-3 and Merge-2 are more likely to achieve high revenue, and Pok City has also tried them after starting the transformation. Perhaps because of Lemon Microfun's "Gossip Harbor" continuing to be hot and breaking into the top 3 overseas, Pok City has also shown stronger interest in Merge-2.
Between 2021 and 2023, the company successively made "Chef Merge", "Merge Restyle", "Merge Odyssey", among which "Merge Restyle" officially launched after nearly a year of testing, and its performance is still not very prominent. After a whole year, Pok City also tested a new product "Merge Hamlet" at the beginning of this year, with the art style moving from the previous cartoonization, flatness to closer to "Merge Mansion", "Gossip Harbor".
Pok City has also considered following other casual categories, but the market opportunities seem more elusive. For example, in 2022, it tested "Coin Race" against "Coin Master", and last year tested "Fishing Elite" benchmarking "Happy Fishing Master". The gameplay type of the former has never been replicated by overseas manufacturers, and the latter's popularity quickly declined last year, with "Happy Fishing Master"'s overseas performance also being relatively ordinary.
Based on the existing hits in the market, the revenue-generating ability of casual games is not necessarily inferior to heavy games. Pok City chooses to focus on exploring opportunities in the casual category, also waiting for the next hit to emerge.
Conclusion
In the early years, Pok City started with card and fishing games, once also becoming one of the top six game card game suppliers in China. However, with the policy tightening in recent years and entering a stock competition, Pok City's performance in fishing games has not been as outstanding.
Since 2021, Pok City has successively launched "Fishing World", "Fishing Game King", "Fishing Master Thousand Cannon Edition", and even the best-performing fantasy-themed RPG "New Fairy Demon Nine Realms" is considered a fishing game in disguise, maintaining a ranking between 100th and 150th on the iOS best-selling list. However, compared to TourYou's "Fishing Battle" and Youku Shengshi's "Fishing Master" entering the top 30 of the best-selling list, the advantage is still not very obvious.
Pok City, in an attempt to break away from the dependence on card and fishing games, spent several years successfully going overseas and a few more years making hits in mini-games. After tapping into the potential of the casual category, it will take some time to expand the sector further.
