What’s one of the most popular business trends in China in 2024? The answer might surprise you: it’s minigames.
The minigame industry in China has become remarkably lively, drawing in participants from all walks of life. Take Longlong (pseudonym) for instance. Still a student, she found herself suddenly overwhelmed with work. “I’ve got so many games to design that I can’t keep up,” she told 36Kr in June. Her workload was piling up, with projects ranging from contracted work to revenue-sharing gigs, alongside her own development efforts. “I even got an offer just because I mentioned wanting to do it,” she added.
At just 21, this now incredibly busy young woman is studying to be a nurse. By her original plan, she should have been on her way to a medical career.
When she first entered the industry, Longlong planned to create her own minigame. With no coding background, she taught herself and managed to produce something quite respectable. On social media, many peers even came to her for advice. However, due to issues with the coding compiler she initially used, the game never came to fruition. But that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm. Today, Longlong works as an artist for several minigame developing teams, and within a few months, the game she had set aside was picked up by someone else.
This year, the minigame boom has drawn in many unexpected participants. A Chengdu-based independent minigame studio recently welcomed a new employee—a professional lawyer. Originally a friend of the studio’s owner, the lawyer had been fielding occasional legal inquiries from the owner since last year. Gradually, he realized that there was serious money in making minigames. After nearly six months of research and learning, he’s now not only the studio’s legal advisor but is also about to join in developing a new minigame.
Others, like a former blockchain industry professional, described his entry into the minigame space like this: his previous ventures had stalled, and during a period of indecision, he stumbled upon a minigame on Douyin. Over the next four or five days, he became so engrossed that he couldn’t focus on anything else, playing from morning till night. One day, he snapped out of it, studied the minigame model, and then dove into it with his team. Like blockchain, he sees this as a business that plays on human nature and creates addiction.
Recent data from the WeChat Mini Game Developer Conference highlights the scale of this trend: the platform now hosts over 400,000 developers, with more than half being small- to medium-sized teams, many from non-gaming industries. A significant number of these developers focus on in-app advertising (IAA) minigames, contributing to a significant portion of active users on the platform.
With a flood of investment, many who can’t wait to build a team have chosen to go solo.
On a weekday morning in June, Liu Xuhui (pseudonym) brought his laptop to the city library, ready to code until evening. Since leaving his job at an internet company in October last year, he has kept up a nine-to-eight coding lifestyle. One person and a laptop are enough to develop a minigame. In just over six months, Liu Xuhui, working as an independent developer, has created six minigames, four of which have gone live, with peak daily visitor numbers exceeding ten thousand.
One of his projects is a minigame combining dice rolling, psychological tests, and a wooden fish (a Buddhist instrument). He gave the project a rather mundane name and the entire project took him only two days to complete, thanks to generative artificial intelligence that helped significantly shorten the development time.
There’s a growing consensus that minigames are one of this year’s major trends. They are lightweight, low-cost, and can bring quick returns. One prime example is 37 Interactive Entertainment. According to industry insiders, its minigame Xundao Daqian has monthly revenue of RMB 400–500 million (USD 55.9–69.9 million), rivaling that of Genshin Impact.
Policies have further fueled this boom. On July 1, the Guangdong Entertainment and Game Industry Association (GEGIA) issued a notice on launching testing and filing procedures for online game apps within the province. This policy means that IAA minigames can go live for testing by obtaining a filing, thus avoiding the hurdle of needing a publishing license. During this period, potential IAA minigames can also be verified whether they have the capacity to monetize through in-game purchases.
Currently, minigame users number around 1 billion, with 500 million monthly active users, and this number continues to grow, albeit at a slower pace.
Some figures highlight just how material this industry has become. At the end of 2023, the China Game Industry Annual Conference revealed that the gaming market’s actual sales revenue surpassed the RMB 300 billion (USD 41.8 billion) mark for the first time, with minigames contributing an astonishing RMB 20 billion (USD 2.8 billion)—equivalent to the GDP of many Chinese provinces last year.
According to data from Ocean Engine, the minigame market is expected to expand to RMB 60 billion (USD 8.4 billion) or more in 2024, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the entire Chinese gaming market.
What has surprised market observers more is the growth rate of minigames. Last year, minigame revenue grew by 300%. A company that had been focusing on overseas minigames since 2018 saw Chinese minigames gaining traction so rapidly that it established a subsidiary dedicated to the domestic market. One of its employees told 36Kr that the company’s revenue is on track to grow 400% year-on-year in 2024.
And stories of overnight wealth in the industry are still quietly continuing.
In June this year, Liu Xuhui sent 36Kr a screenshot of a job posting in a minigame developer community. The poster was Dong Mi (pseudonym), the then-lead client programmer at Joyo, the company behind the hit minigame Sheep A Sheep, who had been looking for help with developing the minigame. Dong Mi emphasized in the job posting that several projects, including Sheep a Sheep, were “very profitable.” Liu Xuhui speculates that this might mean financial freedom has been achieved.
In fact, “freedom” might be an overstatement, but Dong Mi did manage to earn a decent salary within a year of joining Joyo, enough to save up for his startup. Now, with money in hand, Dong Mi has decided to return to his hometown to start his own game development team, for his children and his dreams. He feels that at nearly 40, he needs to make his mark.
And Joyo’s boss is already considering investing in Dong Mi’s new team.
Sheep A Sheep is a turning point in the minigame boom story that cannot be overlooked. According to its founder, Zhang Jiaxu, since its launch in June 2022, Sheep A Sheep achieved over RMB 100 million (USD 13.9 million) in revenue within just over six months, with an initial cost of only RMB 500,000 (USD 69,891).
Many people began paying attention to the profitability of minigames around that time. “If in the first half of last year, everyone was still in the exploration and research phase, then by the second half, many people had completely woken up to it,” an industry insider said.
A hidden reason behind this is that, in recent years, apart from AI, the internet sector has seen few emerging trends. “Minigames seem to offer a glimmer of hope, allowing a group of people to stay excited for a while,” the insider said.
Reskinned minigames
To minigame developer Wang Tao (pseudonym), another key reason for the influx of people is that the development threshold for minigames is even lower than most people imagine.
He was recently added to a Weixin (the Chinese equivalent of WeChat) group with two other developers. Within 20 minutes, the three had decided to make a match-three minigame.
How did they decide? They opened a hotlist of minigames, and the top spot was another match-three game. All they needed to do was replicate the same style and gameplay for their project, even using the same background patterns. Less than a week later, a new match-three minigame was born.
Scenes like this play out every day. In an office converted from a residential building on the eastern outskirts of Beijing, another new Weixin group was created. A minigame planner, fresh from a client meeting, yawned and dropped the requirements into the group. The flashing messages were then opened by the art and programming staff. The two exchanged no words, each lighting a cigarette, and then began days and nights of overtime. After the ashtrays had been emptied seven or eight times—about a week later—several minigames similar to the one Wang Tao made would appear on the players’ usual apps.
Douzi (pseudonym), who has been playing minigames for three to four years, originally thought she would never click on the boring minigame ads in her information feed. But she couldn’t resist their repeated appearances. The ads claimed that only a small percentage of people could clear the game, yet the gameplay shown in the videos looked simple, so Douzi decided to give it a try. Once she started playing, she realized these games were complete clones of Sheep A Sheep.
The difference is that, while Sheep A Sheep involves eliminating sheep, gloves, cabbages, and corn, these games require eliminating hot pot ingredients, mahjong tiles, Sichuan opera masks, and sneakers.
When asked how much she thought such a game would cost, Douzi replied, “Probably less than RMB 1 million (USD 139,784).”
In reality, the cost of producing such minigames doesn’t even come close to RMB 1 million—it’s likely several orders of magnitude lower.
These are known in the industry as “reskinned games,” and they dominate the minigame segment. An industry veteran who has been deeply involved in minigames for nearly a decade and has produced hits told 36Kr that 99% of the games in this track are reskinned games.
From Taobao, Pinduoduo, or minigame developer chat groups and forums, it’s easy to find the source code for popular minigames. Next, you only need to make slight adjustments in the art, such as changing fruits to animals or circles to squares, and you can launch it into the market. It’s like an assembly line operation, where efficiency and repetition are key.
Just in the genre of merge games alone, Hortor Games sold 300 reskinned game packages last year.
Hortor Games is a software outsourcing company whose revenue in the past two years has been primarily supported by minigames. Zhao Dong, CEO of Hortor Games, told 36Kr that a reskinned minigame can be produced in as little as three days with a team of five people, including planning, design, frontend, backend, and testing. If existing code templates are used, you can cut two people from the team. The final cost is only a few thousand RMB.
In contrast, an original minigame can cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of RMB and may take months or even years to develop. For example, in 2023, Hortor Games catered to a client who wanted to create a custom minigame for a jewelry brand. It took seven months to develop this simulation of jewelry production and sales, which was used for brand promotion. In the end, the client paid nearly RMB 3 million (USD 419,352) for the project.
As a software outsourcing company, Hortor Games is like a lump of clay molded to fit the shapes dictated by different market trends. In 2017, Weixin’s Tiao Yi Tiao, which roughly translates to “jump,” became a hit, driving the development of the minigame industry, and Hortor Games started taking on minigame projects. In September 2022, Sheep A Sheep went viral, and in 2023, the number of clients for Hortor Games’ minigame business increased by 30%.
Clients’ demands are simple. After the minigame King of Salted Fish topped the charts for several months, everyone flocked to them, wanting a similar product. When the revenue from management minigames saw a rise, clients’ inquiries changed accordingly.
The market has invisibly inflated the prosperity of reskinned minigames. Both buyers and sellers are obsessed with making easy money without needing to think. A minigame outsourcing team once recounted that two different clients submitted similar requests, both wanting to make a management simulation minigame. The account manager mistakenly swapped the deliverables, but neither client noticed even after the games went live.
However, to make big money from reskinned minigames, you need to rely on mass production. Zhao also pointed out that the development cost of a reskinned minigame only accounts for about 10% of the total cost. Most of the money goes into traffic acquisition and operations. Without that, the games would just be two more drops in a vast pool.
Multiple minigame developers told 36Kr that a single ad view by a player only nets the developer a few cents or even less. In such a low-margin scenario, IAA reskinned minigames must be mass produced and heavily promoted to achieve economies of scale.
A Weixin minigame channel operator told 36Kr that reskinned games rely on volume to rack up profits. If a reskinned game can only make RMB 1,000 (USD 139.8) a month, what about ten or a hundred games? “Anyway, it doesn’t cost much.”
Douzi once got hooked on Sheep A Sheep. The thought that plagued her was, “Why can others clear the game but not me?” During that time, she played while walking and while eating. As a result, she began to be repeatedly targeted with ads for reskinned elimination games. She vaguely sensed that the way reskinned minigames are promoted can also be copied—the types of games, suitable target audiences, and platforms have already been proven.
Under traffic acquisition and mass production, reskinned games can achieve a net profit margin of 100%, while most original minigames have a profit margin of only 30%.
Zhao said that “using source code to reskin is the best monetization and profit model, regardless of the type or scale of the company.”
“So, even though many in the gaming industry sneer at reskinned minigames, considering them all garbage, countless ‘pieces of garbage’ are still being churned out,” a gaming industry observer said.
Reskinned minigames have already proven their market, and it’s an open secret which audiences love them and which platforms they are best suited for.
Moreover, compared to short dramas that also rely on traffic acquisition, reskinned minigames don’t need to bet on a blockbuster hit, nor do they care about return on investment (ROI) data, because the costs are low enough to make losses unlikely. Abandoning traffic acquisition and operations isn’t a difficult decision, because “with such low costs, you can keep trying different types in large quantities,” summarized the Weixin minigame channel operator.
Big players take stage
Independent developers may downplay the minigame frenzy—after all, the industry is already overcrowded. But the actions of big internet companies provide a clearer picture.
Some minigame players have noticed that Douyin has been showing significantly more minigame ads this year. “I used to scroll through 20 or 30 videos without seeing one. Now, I might see two or three minigame ads in a span of just ten videos.”
The latest news is that big companies are jumping on the bandwagon. Recently, Hortor Games has seen a surge in major clients, including iFlytek, which wants to create a virtual nightclub game for brand marketing on Bilibili.
Bilibili users might remember a live streaming game called Xiugou Yedian, which roughly means “dog repair nightclub.” Just by entering the live stream, players could masquerade as a dancing dog, and during the game, they could send commands via comments to make their avatars move or show expressions. Despite its quirky nature, the game set a record of 600,000 concurrent users at one point.
Interestingly, before launching on Bilibili, this game had tried Douyin, but Douyin’s resistance led it to switch to Bilibili, where it became a hit. After Bilibili experienced the success of live streaming games, Douyin began pushing hard into this area in 2023, with top live streaming games on the platform at times achieving monthly revenues of RMB 300–400 million (USD 41.8–55.9 million).
Additionally, Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Xiaohongshu have all gradually increased their procurement of minigames since last year, spurring competition.
In early April this year, Douyin announced favorable terms for minigame developers: in-app purchase (IAP) minigame developers could receive up to 95% of Android consumption revenue, whereas previously they could only receive 60% of in-app purchase revenue. Furthermore, the newly introduced terms did not set high thresholds, with no requirements for first release or exclusivity. This move by Douyin’s minigames was seen by many in the industry as a challenge to Weixin minigames—Weixin had launched a minigame growth incentive program in March, where the ad revenue share for developers was 40%.
Just three months later, Douyin upped the ante again—during the July to September summer season, developers could receive an additional 10% ad incentive rebate from the platform.
The battle has already begun. Interestingly, the minigame cake that Weixin and Douyin are now fiercely competing over is precisely the one they both helped bake.
The existence of minigames is inseparable from mini-programs. Former phenomenon-level minigames like Tiao Yi Tiao and Synthetic Watermelon also became popular on Weixin mini-programs. A Douyin employee mentioned that internal reviews a few years later revealed some regrets and hindsight: “Because before 2020, Douyin hadn’t fully exploited the short video boom, and developing minigames required developers and had a higher barrier to entry, so it wasn’t a key focus at the time.”
It wasn’t until 2022, when the pioneering IAA minigame Sheep A Sheep emerged out of nowhere. Douyin minigame’s head, Xu Xingyang, mentioned at an event in July that the success of Sheep A Sheep “still relied on Douyin’s extensive hit content, which helped popularize the gameplay to a wider audience, creating this huge content momentum.”
This might just be Douyin’s self-praise regarding its traffic, but 2022 was indeed a pivotal turning point for the minigame industry. That year, Douyin integrated with Weixin mini-programs, allowing the two largest traffic pools in China to collaborate. This led to the rapid rise of several industries dependent on mini-programs, including short dramas, whose market size nearly reached that of the film industry last year, and minigames, which boasted a market size comparable to the RMB 40 billion (USD 5.6 billion) short drama market.
A veteran casual game developer told 36Kr that many people redirected Douyin traffic to Weixin after that, reaping the rewards.
No one wants to miss the moneymaking wave of minigames. For the platform, the most direct reason, of course, is the visible revenue growth. Developers release minigames, and the platform takes a cut—users click and watch ads, generating significant income for the platform. Not to mention the high costs of user acquisition by publishers.
The battle for users’ time is another layer of anxiety. According to QuestMobile, as of June 2024, China’s mobile internet monthly active users reached 1.235 billion, up 1.8% year-on-year—compared to the occasional 2% growth rate in the second half of 2023, the 1.8% increase is the highest in recent months.
Focusing on channels, Weixin’s monthly active user growth has slowed and even declined over the past few years. Reflecting this, the combined growth rate of monthly active Weixin and WeChat accounts were 5.2%, 3.5%, 3.5%, and 2% year-on-year from 2020–2023, respectively.
Fortunately, minigames have sprouted new life for Weixin. At the 2023 staff meeting, Tencent president Martin Lau revealed that, over the past year, Weixin minigames have exceeded 400 million monthly active users (MAUs), with annual revenue growth of 50%, accounting for 8% of the total gaming market. Moreover, Lau said during a performance briefing that the overlap between Weixin’s minigames and Tencent’s app game users is less than 50%, indicating that minigames remain a huge growth market.
In 2024, the minigame pie has grown bigger, and now it’s time to divide the pie. Today, Douyin also wants to tap into the minigame trend.
Many still remember the scene at last year’s China Game Industry Annual Conference (CGIAC), where the Douyin minigame session was packed with people. Everyone was trying to raise their phones to capture the presentation slides. People squeezed out of the venue and into the aisles. Just before that, the conference announced that minigame revenue in 2023 grew by 300%, exceeding RMB 20 billion.
The entry of the platform seems to provide more channels and support for minigame developers, but with the repeated interference of big players, the fate of one batch of developers after another has already been sealed.
Out of cash
While recent proceedings bode well for the minigame scene, it’s a segment that has already begun to resemble a game of traffic acquisition. Compared to newcomers and those still on the sidelines, some sharp developers sense a slight unease.
Zhiqiu (pseudonym) and a friend responsible for backend development once made minigames as a side job. At their peak, following the trends of the time, Zhiqiu and his partner made over RMB 100,000 (USD 13,978) in two years, which was a pretty good side income. But compared to their past pride, “it’s too competitive, we can’t keep up” are phrases Zhiqiu frequently mentioned when discussing minigame entrepreneurship. His tone was anxious: “Now most minigames are about real skills. It’s no longer easy to make money with just any random minigame.”
What are real skills? One developer bluntly said it’s about who has more money to buy more traffic. Whether it’s reskinning or original games, traffic costs are becoming increasingly expensive.
The minigame startup boom is juxtaposed with the fact that most traffic is concentrated in the hands of two major channels: Tencent and ByteDance.
On the one hand, more and more competitors are crowding, but traffic is limited, and the dividends of low-cost traffic acquisition are nearly gone. A minigame company operator told 36Kr that the cost of buying traffic on the Weixin channel, which he manages, has continued to rise, doubling this year compared to last.
On the other hand, it’s foreseeable that the profit margins for individual developers are being squeezed. Similar to Tiao Yi Tiao and Sheep A Sheep, IAA minigames—which monetize through user ad clicks—are having their profits locked in. “The amount of money you can make is already calculated by the platform.” This means that participants in the minigame industry not only need to acquire traffic but also need to be sensitive enough to precisely tap into the locked-in traffic to make a profit.
Another immediate concern is that the review time for minigames on platforms is being continuously extended. Zhiqiu found that, in the past, a minigame could be successfully launched within an hour or two after completion. But now, it takes a month to apply for software copyright, one to three months to file, and one or two days for review, stretching the process to four or five months.
Liu Xuhui has similar feelings. Stricter reviews are now a widely acknowledged trend. Some believe that, “on the one hand, it’s to build the ecosystem—the platform still wants to control the fate of minigame development in its own hands. On the other hand, the number of minigames that the platform’s technology can support is approaching saturation.”
During the Dragon Boat Festival, Hortor Games was enthusiastically hosting an offline minigame event in Handan, Hebei, and had reached a cooperation agreement with the local government to develop idiom-based minigames for local cultural and tourism promotion. This was Hortor Games’ largest order of the year, worth RMB 10 million. From the founder to the employees, everyone at Hortor Games could recite the significance of this collaboration to the company.
Meanwhile, Hortor Games is working less and less on reskinned minigames, with Zhao noting that anyone can access source code, and reskinning is becoming increasingly competitive.
Additionally, in the IAA minigame track, on one side, ads are getting longer, and on the other, players are getting less patient. Zhao said that some IAA minigames now have ads that are 300 seconds long.
Conversely, as a player, Douzi said she finds it hard to tolerate ads longer than 30 seconds. When she first started playing Sheep A Sheep, using a tool or reviving only required a short 10-second ad, “Now it’s double or even longer.”
And those independent developers who don’t have the money to buy traffic or don’t want to be constrained by domestic platform rules have already started looking overseas.
In an independent minigame developer chat group with hundreds of members, going overseas is the latest topic. When someone new to the group asked if there were still opportunities in QQ minigames, a member referred to as a “big shot” replied that “it’s tough domestically, go overseas. TapTap still has some natural traffic.” Another member shared that, on Douyin’s domestic platform, without buying traffic, daily visitor numbers were only in the dozens.
Unlike the disappointment of independent developers, the wealthy bigwigs are still having a grand time.
In mid-June, the Youliyouju Research Institute analyzed the top 100 minigames in the first quarter of 2024 based on ad placements. Each of the top 14 games raked in at least RMB 100 million per month, with the top-ranked Xundao Daqian recording nearly RMB 700 million (USD 97.8 million), rivaling the top Chinese mobile game heavyweights in terms of revenue.
At the end of May, GameLook updated the bestselling minigame list for May. Although the rankings change, looking back at the companies behind these games, they are still the same familiar names—including 37 Interactive Entertainment and Hortor Games.
These lists hardly feature small teams or independent developers anymore. Joyo, which created Sheep A Sheep with an initial team of three, represents the peak of minigames but has also now become almost a swan song.
Now, Dong Mi has returned to Shenyang, and his career is just beginning. When talking about games, Dong Mi speaks quickly, and his eyes shine—he has loved games since he was a child. More than ten years after graduating, Dong Mi still remembers his college elective course on game design, where he made a real-time strategy game that his teacher loved, giving him an A grade.
Blockbusters are rare, but the reality is that steady progress is the more common path for the future. Dong Mi’s expectations are not high: “Develop three to five minigames, and as long as I can earn a few hundred RMB a day, that’s fine.” Besides, the Chinese minigame industry is just one part of his plan—there are still overseas markets and the Steam platform to target.
And Dong Mi’s wish is also Liu Xuhui’s. This independent developer is now also adjusting his mindset. When asked about his future plans, he said, “I’ll keep going for a while, maybe I’ll look for a publisher later.”
But the clear-headed are few and far between. In the minigame developer chat group, people are still constantly asking about ways to make money, even though conversations often end after realizing how low the average effective cost per mille (eCPM) has become.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Lan Jie for 36Kr.