TecRah

Title image Dinosaur Isle Survival

Author Eel

It’s been a while since Tomodachi games fell off the top of the sea-going charts.

In 2017 Youta Games debuted overseas with Mafia City, a gangster-themed SLG. The following year the product shot up to No. 8 on the annual overseas revenue charts, and in its third year the game continued to gain momentum and propelled Youta Games into the top 52 global publishers, coming in at No. 11 among Chinese companies.

But from 2021 onwards, Youta Games stopped its rapid growth. On the one hand, Yakuza’s revenues have continued to decline, with the game ranking in the top 50 of the U.S. iOS bestseller list at its peak in 2020, and then dropping out of the top 200 from time to time at the end of last year. On the other hand, the overseas competition has also become more intense, Sanqi Hutou Entertainment’s SLG game Puzzles Survival was the black horse of the year.

Now Youta Games still holds the position of TOP 30 in global revenue of Chinese manufacturers. However, in the face of the decline of the old products, Youta Games also began to want to catch up.

The most un-Palu-like Palu gameplay

In the already successful SLG track, Youta Games has accelerated the speed of new product exposure, and it seems that the competitive anxiety has become more obvious.

You tower game in 2017 after the launch of the mob wind cloud, the following year launched Chief Almighty big chief then quickly met with the cold, 2020’s The Grand Mafia big gangster is also far from reaching the heights of the mob wind cloud that year. Since 2022, Youta Games has launched and tested three new SLGs, Nexus War Savage Survival Jurassic Isle and Dinosaur Isle Survival.

Among them, Dinosaur Isle Survival, shortened to Dinosaur Isle, is Youta’s first SLG that tries to play on horizontal boards, and its gameplay form is clearly differentiated from the past five SLGs. Dinosaur Isle Survival, originally named Jurassic Island Survival, was launched in September last year, and was recently renamed to start a new SLG game. test last September and has recently changed its name to open a new round of testing.

Dinosaur Isle is characterized by putting SLG gameplay on the back burner and creating heavy SOC gameplay in the early stages of the game. The game’s SOC gameplay is based on the theme of dinosaurs, where the player’s character is stranded on an isolated island, and the protagonist needs to explore the island and survive to tame the dinosaurs on the island.

The game retains the basic features of SOC gameplay. Players need to pick up stones, branches, and other materials on the map to build tools, which can be used to gather quarries, trees, and construct buildings. The character has a satiety level, and needs to collect wild fruits and hunt dinosaurs to get food, and the character will slowly recover blood level if he has enough satiety.

The dinosaurs in the game are similar to the Paru of the Beasts. Characters can carry up to 3 dinosaurs with them while exploring. Dinosaurs can help the player to speed up gathering speed, assist in battle, and automatically produce items in the home building. Characters can also ride on the dinosaurs after crafting the corresponding items, allowing them to avoid damage in battle.

Dinosaurs have the same satiety level as characters. However, while characters can eat meat or plants, dinosaurs need to be fed a specific amount of food depending on whether they are carnivorous or herbivorous. Dinosaurs can also only be leveled up through battle, which increases their life, attack power, and other values.

Obviously, the dinosaur theme doesn’t lend itself well to Pokémon-like gameplay, so Dinosaur Isle is a bit of an innovation.

Some of the carnivorous dinosaurs on the map will actively attack the player and even prey on other dinosaurs. During the battle with the dinosaurs, the player needs to create a slingshot in advance to make the pterodactyls fall from the air or to prevent the dinosaurs from escaping when they run out of blood.

When a dinosaur’s blood level drops to a certain level, it will enter a period of unconsciousness. Players can choose to feed the dinosaurs according to their type, which will push the progress of taming the dinosaurs, and then the tamed dinosaurs will be used for their own purposes. If the dinosaur is not tamed within a certain period of time, it will fight or run away from the player again. If the player does not choose to tame the dinosaur, they can also choose to complete the hunt and obtain meat and other prop materials.

After at least 2 hours of gameplay, Dinosaur Isle reveals regular SLG gameplay. The game also offers mode switching, allowing players to go back and experience SOC content at any time.

Dinosaur Isle is quite heavy on SOC gameplay, to the point where it can no longer be considered a side game. The game bridges the production buildings and resources of both SLG and SOC modes, with the exact same amount of resources available in both modes of play.

Players need to consume food, stone and other resources to produce dinosaur soldiers in SLG mode. The way to improve the efficiency of resource production is not only upgrading the buildings, but also taming more advanced dinosaurs to participate in the work. And each building has a specific type of dinosaur that can participate in the work, for example, the food workshop can only allow herbivorous dinosaurs to move in. So even after unlocking the SLG gameplay, players still need to continue to find and tame more dinosaurs in SOC mode.

Dinosaur Isle’s SLG gameplay design is relatively conventional, including the setting of four types of soldiers Radar to find resource points Guild members to help each other and other gameplay content are involved.

Dinosaur Isle is very much like a product of the Phantom Beast Paru, which was only released after the explosion of the Phantom Beast Paru. However, the Palu-like products tested in the market before are basically taking the route of light gameplay, such as Lilith’s Palmon Survival, IGG’s Illusion Evo, Mythmon Pawmon War, Dreamio Rush, FunPlus’ Critter Arena, which do not have a fixed template for gameplay design, and invariably use the same gameplay content. The gameplay design of these products has no fixed template, and all of them adopt cartoon style and light gameplay without exception.

In the past, there are also many new SLG products that put SLG gameplay at the back, such as Age of the Sea tested by Wisdom Star, and the preliminary gameplay is also generally of the lightweight type. Referring to the successful products in the past, lightweight SLG is undoubtedly an emerging genre in the overseas market.

Dinosaur Isle’s design is inverted. Although the game’s SOC gameplay does not have serious death penalties, the gameplay selection is still heavier than SLGs. For example, there is no autopath function in the gameplay, and players need to manually search for quest points, target dinosaurs, and so on. In contrast, players can advance the main line as of the mission jump function in SLG gameplay, the operation in SOC gameplay is more tedious.

While the lightweight design can help SLGs find potential player groups, Dinosaur Isle’s heavy design is like looking for migrating users in a vertical track, and the idea is undoubtedly more subversive.

The reason for Dinosaur Isle’s drastic innovation may be that the performance of the previous SLG products was not satisfactory.

Youta Games’ new SLGs in the past two years also tried new gameplay elements, such as Nexus War, which adopted the theme of alien planet sci-fi, and blended the exploration and fog elements in its gameplay Savage Survival Jurassic Isle adopted the theme of prehistoric civilization, and blended the simulation and management elements in its gameplay with the RTS-like simulation and management elements in its gameplay. In terms of gameplay, it seems to be less involved than Dinosaur Isle.

YouTuber isn’t indifferent to the explosion of light SLGs, either. Nexus War, for example, tried a new package a year after its launch, Nexus War Survival Mech, which incorporated a mech-shooting side gameplay on top of the original. In May of last year and January of this year, Nexus War tested Mafia Sniper Revenge and Top Mafia Shootout, which incorporate sniping and level shooting sub-gameplay, respectively, and are considered iterations of Grand Mafia and Mafia City.

Left Mafia Sniper Revenge Right Top Mafia Shootout

The side game attempts have yet to fully cover the original game versions, and Youta Games is still in a situation where new products have failed to pick up where old ones have left off. Because of this bottleneck, Dinosaur Isle seems like a risky move for Youta Games. The unique design may find a market opportunity, or it may cause the company to continue to suffer from business anxiety.

The three overseas business segments

Youta Games is now focusing on the SLG category in its overseas business, and its business lines are clearer than before.

Youta Games was first one of the startups of Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo. According to the official introduction of Youta Games, the company was founded in 2012. According to reports, in the early years of Huang Zheng’s other entrepreneurial project Leqi.com, some of the members had operated the game, and then this part of the members established Shanghai Dream Seeker in 2013, and the core members of the company incubated Pinduoduo. 2016 Dream Seeker game and Pinduoduo cut, until 2018 in order to further differentiate from the e-commerce business to set up the Shanghai Youta as the main body of the company.

If you now check the overseas official websites of Youta Games’ games, they are categorized under 3 differently named official platforms, including Phantix Games Carolgames and Matchrella Game, corresponding to 3 different game categories.

On Phantix Games are all of Youta Games’ SLG games, including 5 products such as Mafia City The Grand Mafia Mafia City H5, although Savage Survival Jurassic Isle, which was launched at the end of last year, is not included.

Carolgames’ counterpart is the RPG card category, which includes My Sister Can’t Be This Cute 2 Girls X Battle 2 Heroes Chaos Legend Ever Legion Ace Alliance. These are mainly medium offerings where Tomodachi Games tries different gameplay, and most of them don’t have a very high reputation.

For example, my schoolgirls can not be so cute 2 in 2018 on-line international service version the following year on-line Japanese version, to 2020 to reach the peak of income. 2022 in line with the trend of side gameplay also iterated to join the drawing line to save the dog’s head of the content, but also did not play the operation of the effect of warming up.

Placement card game Heroes Chaos Saga in 2021 on the overseas market, so far has not entered the U.S. iOS bestseller list Top 200. this game has not been abandoned, early this year ushered in a round of income rose slightly, from time to time to break into the Philippines iOS bestseller list of 50 200.

As a continuation, in June last year, Youta Games also tested Ace Alliance Realm of Heroes, upgraded from vertical to horizontal graphics, the game has not yet been officially launched. From the game material, it is assumed that the game is an iteration of the War Spell Team Tactics RPG, which was dropped in March 2023 after testing.

Ace Alliance

YouTuber also tested Dragonfall Puzzles, a three-player card game, in 2022, and also incorporated 4X building elements, before the game was eventually discontinued before its official launch. Earlier in 2019, Youta Games also tested Alpha PD Crimefront, a police detective simulation with some resource management elements.

Matchrella Game’s counterpart is in the casual category, with only Hollywood Crush currently available. Hollywood Crush adopts three elimination dress-up gameplay and was launched in overseas markets in July last year, and its bestseller ranking has hardly fluctuated in the past six months.AppMagic’s report analyzed the new products of the three elimination track in the T1 market of Europe and the United States in 2024, and of the 60 new products, only five of them have passed the threshold of $50,000 in monthly income, and Hollywood Crush is one of them. Hollywood Crush is one of them.

Before Hollywood Crush, Youta Games launched a three-consumption home decoration game Bella Villa in 2020, which ranked more than 600 on the U.S. iOS bestseller list, and the game was shelved and discontinued after two years of operation.

During that time, Youta also tested Mansion Delights of the same genre, but it was not officially launched, and another Pirate Adventure was still attracting traffic for Hollywood Crush when it stopped testing. It was only after several attempts that Youta found a better option in the fashion genre in the three-consumption category.

Hollywood Crush

In 2020, Youta also tested Relic Rumble, a game similar to Legend of Bow and Arrow, and had the idea of expanding the Roguelike game for a long time. However, Relic Rumble was not officially launched, and it seems that Youta Games did not continue to invest in this area.

Overall, YouTaGame’s overseas business has become more refined, and has now formed three segments of heavy SLG, medium card, and light three elimination games. In recent years, you tower game has spent a lot of time to try a variety of gameplay, in the various tracks are also continuing to iterate investment, but the results can be seen at present is still limited.

Conclusion

In recent years, Youta Games seems poised to take a big step forward. We’ve previously reported that Youta Games is recruiting developers for a multi-purpose European and American real-world urban-themed open-world project, which is expected to be Youta Games’ first foray into PC-based games. With Youta still willing to break away from its past successes and experiment with new genres, it may have a chance to return to the top of the list of overseas companies in the future.

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