jonathan huang

Happy Fishing Master has been incredibly viral and successful in China (debuted at 4th on the charts, behind heavyweights HoK, Eggy Party, and Peace Elite) The game launched in Singapore yesterday, so I downloaded and gave it a whirl and man, what an absolute master class in game design. So many learnings: Simple core loop conferring low barriers of entry to lure users in BUT surprise with depth through RPG-like progression to achieve both ease of onboarding as well as stickiness to stymie churning Reinventing classic fishing genre that is traditionally peaceful and slow with fast-paced exciting content that is highly streamable and leverages the most important UA channel: short form videos Two points above allow for TAM expansion beyond stereotypical “fishing game user”, which is intuitively a smaller older audience. Quick browse of Douyin suggests fairly balanced gender ratio + younger skew in users (streamers ARE younger anyway!) Monetisation philosophy is similar to what we’ve seen recently with AFK JOURNEY: make great content then keep dropping users’ free items in the form of achievement/ engagement rewards so users almost feel obliged to pay something, and we all know the first $1 is always the gateway to far more spending So many more little details but that’s the gist of it. Fascinating case study Watch the 1 minute video of me stumbling onto and catching a rare and large fish!