Mobile Games Inspired by Social Media Trends Part 2: from DIY to Road Marking with Insights by FreePlay

Continue your journey together with AppMagic to find out about even more games inspired by social media trends, their market dynamics and popularity reasons.

— by Diana Levintova

Mobile Games Inspired by Social Media Trends Part 2: from DIY to Road Marking with Insights by FreePlay

Executive Summary

Full Article

Welcome to our second piece of research into social media trends that end up resurfacing in mobile games. Just like in the previous article, we’ll start off with a broader trend of Do It Yourself (DIY). We’ll try to understand the reasons behind its success and then move on to its subgenres and see which other games seem to have taken inspiration from them.

Do It Yourself (DIY)

To provide some perspective on how large this trend is, let’s quote a few numbers. For example, the DIY home improvement retail market was valued at $848.20B in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.73% from 2022 to 2030.

But what is the psychology behind this trend? Firstly, DIY gives you a sense of community: it doesn’t matter whether you are doing it together with someone or they are simply watching your process—they are always as excited about the end result as you are. Secondly, it’s a healthy way to escape everyday stress and explore your creativity. Apart from that, DIY often provokes the desire to share your doings on social media platforms, even in those who usually prefer to remain a spectator.

Phone Case DIY

All set with the psychology of DIY? Let’s move on to the examples then. The first subtrend we’ve identified is Phone Case DIY, whose hashtag has so far collected 4.8B views on TikTok. There’s a bunch of games inspired by it, and we’ve put together most of those that generate any downloads in one dashboard.

As you can see, there’s an undisputed leader that has earned 65 times more installs than their closest competitor. It’s yet another hypercasual arcade title by Crazy Labs: Phone Case DIY. The game started harvesting downloads in November 2020, peaked in January 2021, rolled back to about 6M monthly downloads and has been fluctuating around this number since, hitting a lifetime total of 203M installs. As for competitors, three of them have made more than 3M installs over lifetime, which is still 65 times less than the Crazy Labs’s hit.

Tie-Dye

The next subtrend to highlight is Tie-Dye. Remember those colorful T-shirts with unusual splotches and gradients of color? Well, just to let you know, the “Tie-Dye” hashtag has 148.1M views on TikTok.

The number of games who have attempted to reach similar success is comparatively large. However, we see yet again that there’s one leader in the crowd—Tie Dye, a hypercasual arcade by Crazy Labs with a total of 147M installs, which is more than 300 times (!) more than the closest competitor.

As for the game’s dynamics on the market, it peaked two months after its release in early July 2020 and quickly went down to 5.58M monthly installs. Since then, its downloads have been decreasing gradually. In January 2023, the game generated 1.9M downloads.

Dessert DIY

The final subtrend we’d like to cover is Dessert DIY, which has 15.1B views on TikTok. We, too, love watching hacks on preparing cakes we’d never consider making ourselves! Or we might just do it—online, playing one of the games from our own list, hehe.

Compared to the previously discussed trends, there aren’t that many games to source inspiration from this particular social media trend so far. However, we can surely identify the winner generating 150 times more installs than its closest competitor. Introducing Dessert DIY, another hypercasual arcade by the very same (and highly productive!) Crazy Labs.

The game has been generating downloads from April 2022 and peaked at 21.5M monthly installs in June 2022, facing a downtrend from then onwards. Let’s give it some time and check if the title continues to gain at least a couple million monthly downloads in the upcoming months.

Oh, and in case you are considering trying your skills in a house DIY game, we will just leave a list of the most popular videos of this subtrend here. Spoiler alert: the top 3 are Flower Wall, Pallet Furniture and DIY Vases.

String Pull

Another trend for art-lovers in our selection is String Pull. If you are, as yours truly, hearing about it for the first time, let us elaborate. The idea of the trend is to take a rope, dip it into paint, place it on a piece of paper and then pull around: this gives you unique unusual prints that can later be drawn into something larger or just stay as they are. “String pull painting” has 84.7M views on TikTok, and it also has a “simulator” following in the mobile games industry.

The most popular game you can find is String Pull, a hypercasual arcade by (you guessed it!) Crazy Labs. It started generating downloads in September 2021, peaked in December 2021 and continued its descent until it reached 250K monthly installs, where it’s been hovering since. As of today, the game has generated a total of 15.9M installs. Looking at its competitors—well, there are barely any. We can only wonder about the reasons. Could it be that the trend was popular only in the narrowest of circles?

Pop It

While we briefly mentioned this trend in one of our regular articles on hypercasual games, we’re planning to dig deeper into it. Let’s start with a historical reference. Apparently, the game was created ages ago by a company that is known for its board games: Theora Design. At some point, Ora (one of the founders) had a dream about a field of breasts, and when she mentioned it to her son, who is also the CEO of the company, he decided to develop a prototype.

The toy debuted in 2013, but it only became a hit after the owner of the monkey named Gaitlyn Rae (who currently has 8.2M followers on TikTok) uploaded to the platform a video about this monkey playing with a Pop It.

Coming back to these fidget toys themselves, they gained wide use in the 20th century as a tool for helping kids struggling with ADHD to still their minds and focus. However, it didn’t stop there, and videos of trading fidget toys on TikTok started going viral. The game was so popular that you could even order a special playing field on Amazon. To substantiate our statement, we’ve created a dashboard with a bunch of games inspired by the trend.

As before, we can clearly see a leader. Fidget Toys Trading: Pop It 3D is a hypercasual simulator by FreePlay. It peaked 3 months after its release and then slumped down, reaching 3.5M monthly downloads and staying level since February 2022.

Pop It is the first trend where we can see a number of other successful games inspired by the trend: for example, Pop it Fidget Toys 3D Games and Pop It Fidget 3D have generated 54.6M and 39M downloads respectively over their lifetimes. However, a crucial difference between these games and Fidget Toys Trading: Pop It 3D is that they only offer digital antistress toys, while in FreePlay’s game you can actually trade these digital toys to build a collection of your own.

We asked FreePlay what they believed to be key to the success of Fidget Toys Trading: Pop It 3D. They suggested that the recipe consisted of great timing, high-quality items and mechanics, continuous iterations, and in-game development. After spotting the trend on TikTok by its hashtag #fidgettrading, FreePlay had their first iteration ready in just two weeks! The real-life idea of collecting items turned out to be super fitting for a mobile game, and it worked even better for the metagame due to reward incentives.

Additionally, all the toys were developed accurately in order to mimic the physics of the real-life ones. As for the trading mode, it was created as a positive experience with no stress factors like timers or pushing for benefits; the player receives a reward even for poor trades. To extend the soothing effect, a playing mode was introduced where users can simply play around with the toys earned and explore new items for future collections. Did you write it all down? Because we definitely did.

100 Mystery Buttons

Have you heard of the 100 Mystery Buttons Challenge? If you haven’t, just go on TikTok and search for this word combo; not only will you find examples of the video, but also notice that this search counts 32.7M of look-ups. Wow? Wow.

Here’s a brief summary. In the challenge, the player is placed in a “mystery box” which is full of different buttons, and only one of them will let the player out. The result of tapping on others is either reward or punishment: for example, for a reward, you may get an umbrella-hat or glasses that will protect you from all the stuff falling from the top; as punishment, you may be sprinkled with pickles or doused with honey.

This trend didn’t go unnoticed by game developers. So far, Panteon is the studio that has reaped the most benefits from it with its 100 Mystery Buttons: 6.5M downloads since the release in August 2021 and still counting! The studio combined the general concept of the challenge with additional mini games, such as classic runners. Leaving the gameplay video here for you.

Interestingly enough, the game made it to the top charts once again after a 4-month break after its initial success (which is rather rare for hypercasual titles) thanks to optimisation towards D1 ROAS and a mix of both playable ad creatives and video ads. As for its competitors, to give you a perspective, let’s compare the downloads over lifetime of 100 Mystery Buttons and its closest competitor 100 mystery buttons (yes, cheeky namesake): while the former has a total of 6.5M downloads, the latter has hardly managed to scrape a mere 33K installs.

Coloring Match

The general idea of the Coloring Match trend is to mix colors in a way so that they match the chosen object. The trend itself comes from Reddit, where there was a post about a man painting on canvas and trying to get the perfect color for the sky. TikTok didn’t stand aside, and soon it was flooded with similar videos. The “Coloring Match” query currently sits at 2.6B views.

The most successful title in this category is a hypercasual arcade by Supersonic called Color Match. Its downloads began growing in November 2021 and reached their peak in February 2022; then they started to roll back, reaching 3.5M monthly downloads and proceeding with a steady decrease. In January 2023, the game generated 2.8M installs. Competitors didn’t do any better, reaching a maximum of 60 times fewer downloads than Color Match.

Road Marking

The last trend we’d like to cover today is Road Marking. The idea is simple: people color in the asphalt markings on parking lots or along roads. This search on TikTok has 455.5M views, and even though the trend might seem a bit unusual, we can still see several games that took some inspiration from it.

The list is led by Park Marks: a hypercasual simulator by Supersonic. The game peaked in three months after its release as it started generating some hefty downloads, and then the metric dropped rapidly, reaching 300K monthly installs and stagnating there until September 2022, when its further downfall started all over again. As of today, the total number of installs is 7.8M. The closest competitor has so far reached 1.5K installs, so no success there.

Conclusion

Let’s recap! Today, we’ve covered 6 more social media trends that found their way into mobile games. Most of our conclusions from the earlier article have been confirmed. However, there are a couple more observations that could be done based on the additional insights: 1. More niche trends (with only several hundred thousand downloads) can also become the basis for successful games if publishers target the right audience. 2. A game can make it back to the downloads top with the right advertisement strategy and creatives. 3. There can be several successful titles inspired by the same trend in case they choose to target different aspects of said trend (e.g. Pop It).

Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be discussing trends banned by TikTok; the current favorite that is Save the Doge; and a few insights into the games’ success by Azur Games.