Executive Summary

• Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to rhythm game popularity. Pure ‘beat-matching’ games like Beatstar won’t fare very well in this highly competitive market, but, in the same way, Japanese rhythm games usually aren’t compatible with western markets.
• To date, Beatstar is the only mobile rhythm game to combine non-hypercasual monetization tactics with original, licensed tracks in the west. It’s still being scaled heavily.
• Space Ape has released two major updates over the past nine months, and the game is slowly picking up speed when it comes to varied live-ops and new song releases. The game’s season pass has made the biggest splash in terms of monthly recurring revenue.
• The game’s IAP revenue performance is currently in decline, most likely due to its lack of variation in terms of systems and core gameplay. The game would benefit from more surprise and strategy.

The Mobile Rhythm Games Market

Approximately a year ago, Space Ape released Beatstar worldwide, and (as predicted) it has grown into the world’s most lucrative mobile rhythm game. Throughout its first year, the game has significantly evolved in order to achieve this, which means it’s a great time for a status update!

Let’s begin by putting the whole genre into perspective. There is only one country in the world where Beatstar’s numbers are just so-so when compared against its competitors — Japan (to no one's surprise). Over the past 12 months, the rhythm games segment grossed about $825M in Japan alone. As the worldwide gross totaled ~$1B, this means roughly 82.5% of all rhythm game revenue was generated in the land of the rising sun.

In fact, the genre is so extremely popular in Japan that, according to Sensor Tower, all-time RPDs for Japan’s top 3 rhythm games are an unbelievable $187, $155, and $105. Taking this knowledge into account, with a mere RPD of $1.41, Beatstar still ranks eighth in the world in terms of absolute revenue over the last year as it serves audiences all around the globe.

When looking at IAP earnings over the last year, Beatstar (as you can see below) is the only non-Japanese game in the top 10 rhythm games.

Additionally, a disclaimer: When it comes to western market-oriented games, the world did see specific ‘beat-matching’ games similar to Beatstar before its release. Here’s a short breakdown of some of its most influential predecessors.

In 2014, the first successful mobile rhythm game, Piano Tiles - Don’t Tap The White Tile by Cheetah Mobile, became a sudden hit, as described in this hilariously outdated VentureBeat article. The game pioneered the well-known vertical scrolling trail on mobile, taking inspiration from console hits like Guitar Hero and Rockband. The game was minimalistic and monetized through banners and interstitial ads.

Be sure not to tap the white tile! | Source: YouTube

In January 2016, Cheetah’s next game, Piano Tiles 2, raked in an incredible 51M downloads in its first month while also modernizing its monetization by adding IAPs into the mix. It became pretty famous as well, even resulting in some people (successfully) trying to automate its gameplay. The game is still being updated regularly to this day. A year after, as the decline of Piano Tiles 2 officially set in, Singaporean developer Amanotes released and started scaling its game, Magic Tiles 3. It managed to reach 10M monthly downloads and has continued doing so up until this day. Both of these games have by now reached half a billion downloads each in their lifetimes, taking the crown when it comes to the absolute number of downloads for any mobile rhythm game.

All of that said, what is so interesting about Space Ape’s Beatstar? It’s not performing extraordinarily well in terms of downloads, having already dipped below its two biggest competitors (good ol’ Magic Tiles 3 and newcomer Piano Fire: EDM Music), raking in only about 30% of their monthly downloads. Beatstar’s special attributes are its masterful execution, its modern monetization strategy, and its outstanding licensing efforts.

Until Beatstar’s launch, Magic Tiles 3 and Piano Tiles 2 (for a very short time) have been the only beat-matching games on mobile (outside of Japan) to monetize players using IAPs (in addition to frequent ad placements being the main revenue driver). However, last year at this time, Beatstar literally changed the game by prioritizing immersive, AA-quality gameplay, clearly vying for long-term retention first and foremost. While its competition is riddled with interstitial ads and features mostly karaoke-quality covers of viral songs, Beatstar’s (by now 300) songs are purely original, as licensed with the authentic artists, and it has opt-in ads only.

Both Magic Tiles 3 and Piano Tiles 2 were launched by hypercasual publishers, and therefore the in-game ad/IAP monetization strategies were in sync with their UA scaling strategies. Beatstar, on the other hand, hasn't gone the hypercasual UA route (showcased by having opt-in ads only) but instead doubled down on IAPs; it is now able to acquire a higher-quality audience compared to its hypercasual counterparts.

Last July, confirming the game’s success, Supercell announced that it was investing $37M more into Space Ape in order to grow Beatstar. This proves that, even with its relatively low RPD, the game’s business case seems very solid, mostly because of a lack of competition and high virality (due to the pick-up-and-play nature of its core gameplay and its music library of popular tracks), resulting in a low CPI. Next to the acquisition of more (expensive) players, the added funding will most likely be used to scale up the team, add more songs to the game’s library, and more rapidly expand the live-ops feature set. This is very much needed, as feature variation is currently still the biggest (but certainly not unsolvable) limitation of the game’s performance.

Right after its launch, thorough & in-depth deconstructions of the game’s relatively lean set of launch features were published, but at the time it didn’t have any strong monetization features or any live-ops yet. This is why now is a great time to check in and see what’s been added since and how it’s influenced Beatstar’s course of action. In this essay we will go through the game’s new features to project its future trajectory and try to answer the million-dollar-question: Can Beatstar scale and keep its momentum?

Read on for:

• A view on the game’s licensing and UA efforts
• A quick breakdown of the game’s core features and unique selling propositions
• A full deconstruction of improvements made to the game during its first year
• An analysis of Beatstar’s live-ops (as it stands)
• An inquiry into the game’s monetization strategy
• Prognosis and advice with regards to Beatstar’s future

A License to Play

Before we dive into the core gameplay of Beatstar, it’s important to highlight the game’s biggest additional challenge compared to any other mobile F2P game — its music licensing. The game features more than 300 original tracks that are modified into shorter versions, similar to how radio edits are done (mostly) for electronic music. While it’s not easy to confirm this, it is very likely that (some of) the game’s songs require a per-play license cost to be paid to the license holders of the music, e.g. BMI, ASCAP, and Sony. This is the reason why the game currently doesn’t feature a practice mode or unlimited play for a longer period of time.

Licensing music for a F2P game hasn’t been done much before, as all past console titles required a premium purchase. This makes running a live game like this extra complicated, as confirmed by the job opening for Music Licensing Manager that Space Ape has been promoting. But, as it goes with any license-based product, it also comes with great advantages like being able to use the copyrighted material for promotional purposes.

You say U, I say A

From the performance marketing side, the game really doubles down on pure gameplay, sometimes with a slight thematic addition in the background, like a peaceful forest background or some wiggling feet on a beach chair.

Who would say no to some Nelly on the beach!? | Source: YouTube

This shows that at its core, the most catchy aspect of Space Ape’s game is really its gameplay. It’s a great compliment to its developers — and most likely a relief to the creative developers — that they don’t have to resort to false-advertising strategies like some other players in the industry. Instead, they have been filming someone play the most popular songs from the biggest stars in the game’s repertoire like Niki Minaj, Eminem, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Iron Maiden, Run-D.M.C., Backstreet Boys, Post Malone, Blink-182, Ed Sheeran, and many more.

To reach the right audience, Space Ape has mostly been acquiring players by showing these ads on Facebook and Instagram in most countries worldwide. In the game’s most performing countries (the U.S., Canada, and Australia) additional TikTok campaigns are part of the marketing mix, with ByteDance’s platform being on par or sometimes performing even better than either one of Meta’s platforms.

Quick Core Breakdown

For the reader who’s unfamiliar with the inner workings of this game, the beat-matching subgenre is a specific part of rhythm games in which the player tries to match the sounds of a song with predetermined “notes” on a select amount of tracks, sometimes called the highway. Other successful games in this genre include Guitar Hero, Donkey Konga, Beat Saber, and Rockband.

Beatstar’s core mechanic is very understandable and has been casualized in comparison to aforementioned games by only having three tracks the player needs to switch between on its highway compared to four or five in some of its console counterparts. In these tracks, the bulk of the notes are a single tap. More variation is created by two other kinds of notes that require different gestures: the hold and the swipe (four directions), plus a pretty rare combination of the two combined into one gesture in respective sequence.

One thing that’s crucial in understanding how performance in Beatstar works is the three categories of hits a player is allowed to make. When the player hits the note perfectly on time, in the middle of the “PERFECT” bar, the note is counted as Perfect+. When the player is just slightly off (to a degree that can consistently be avoided only by pure rhythmic feel, not visual timing), the note is counted as Perfect. When the player is off more than that, the game actually resets the player’s streak, resulting in a lower score tally while the note is counted as Great or simply Too Early/Late. If a player fails to tap a note entirely before it falls off the bottom of the screen, the round is over, unless some gems are paid to keep going.

The importance of this scoring system lies in its phrasing; the game only punishes less-than-perfect hits. Actually hitting a wrongly timed note does so by ending the streak, which affects the end score drastically but isn’t communicated in a negative way, as the result is still called “Great” regardless.

The game’s meta is very accessible as well. Inspired by Supercell’s Clash Royale, the player fills up three slots attributed for song cases (see image below) by earning Beatcoins, which are gathered by (re)playing any track. While completion of the song matters a great deal for obtaining Beatcoins, a player’s performance is not taken into account for this. A regular song case requires three hours to unlock, while a large case requires five hours. The former awards 2-4 cards, the latter awards 6-8. A song is unlocked when the player earns enough cards coming from the song cases to fill up a box.

At first, the amount of cards it takes to fill a box and unlock a random song in its corresponding category is a mere three cards, while in the late game, a box is only filled after thirty cards have been collected. The player works towards filling boxes for every card category simultaneously, at times being able to select the category for which cards are earned. The regular flow (song cases unlocked by timers) simply awards cards of a random category. What this facilitates is an exciting, steady influx of new songs of every category during the earlier sessions, after which song acquisition slowly starts growing into a more long-term endeavor.

When completing songs, the player earns stars (completion) and medals (stretch goals). Stars are a finite indicator showing how many songs the player has already mastered. They directly feed into the ability to unlock more songs in boxes by progression in the Journey. Medals, however, are simply used to show three tiers of extra accomplishment, with Diamond (the highest one) requiring less than 25 non-Perfect+ notes to achieve. This is quite the challenge, especially in songs with higher difficulty.

Currently, two other scenarios for playing songs exist, like the Daily Shuffle and tournaments, but in any of these scenarios, the exact same core gameplay applies. Here is the game’s loop diagram as it looked directly after the game’s launch. A diagram including the scenarios that have been added over the last year can be found later on.

An Intense Endeavor

One thing to consider with regards to games like these are the specific circumstances they require players to be in during play. While the game is very playable with headphones and two thumbs, some purists will want to play with their index fingers while laying the device down onto a surface and use the device’s loudspeaker for minimum sound delay. This means that players like these can’t play the game everywhere and at any time (e.g. in bed) as it requires extreme focus, a good body posture, and, ideally, speaker sound. Even though these limitations are all self-imposed by the player, it does make games in this genre more niche and likely more susceptible to churn due to the intensity of its gameplay. This video illustrates in a funny way some of the many things that can go wrong when playing in such high focus.

A Year of Game Changers for Beatstar

The one thing that must have come as a big surprise to players who have been playing during soft-launch was the sudden hard gating on the song case slots which was implemented close to the game’s release. Where the game was overly generous at first by letting players play songs even though their slots were full, the developers took a sharp turn by limiting gameplay when players have played enough to fill all three case slots. One of the first things that was done after the release was softening the blow again by adding means to bypass this. Gameplay is still limited to this day when song case slots are full, but this can now be circumvented by watching one ad per extra gameplay or by spending hard currency.

The harsh (and undoubtedly difficult) decision to restrict prolonged gameplay this way has most likely been a correct one when looking at it from a monetization standpoint. Throughout this article we will see that it has facilitated a steady, maximum pace of progression, creating strong possibilities to offer players to speed up the set pace by ad placements or exclusive purchases.

What else has been added since the game’s release and the last deconstructions? We can tell you it’s quite a meaningful amount of features. A chronological timeline:

September to November 2021

The post-launch months and golden cohorts of Beatstar were literally uneventful (more on that later), but this time was certainly not wasted, as these months were spent on closing the social loop. Space Ape focused development on improving the prestige of a player’s profile, adding profile customizations, adding friends easily, and enforcing emergent, friendly competitions between them. Additionally, a local and friends leaderboard was added.

In September, adding friends was made possible by copying and sharing their player tags. And without a catch-all social media platform to link to these days, Space Ape (as the first subsidiary to ever do so) made adding friends a bit easier by implementing Supercell ID. The way they incentivized players to link their accounts is particularly fun and smart, at least for players who were already familiar with Supercell games. Players are able to choose one song from the four biggest Supercell IPs as a reward for connecting their ID.

Since the November update, any time a player starts playing a song, a leaderboard with friends is shown beforehand. This has allowed players to set additional goals for each song (beating their friends) and sending in-game “brags” when they succeed in doing so, something that is crucial for a skill-based game with only a finite number of goals per track. On top of that, it also justifies Space Ape closing the social loop, as without the leaderboard being shown the team’s earlier social efforts would've fallen flat.

December 2021

Two weeks before the holidays, by far the biggest and most influential update to Beatstar was released. This monster patch featured one of the most urgent features our friends at Deconstructor of Fun were most looking for right after the game’s release.

Complying to the by now pretty well-known F2P Season Pass playbook, Space Ape released its Seasonal Pass (named the Tour Pass) giving players the ability to complete a long-term progression track within a specific amount of time. The feature makes players earn additional Tour Points with each gameplay that feed into the pass.

A season pass needs rewards, and the changes that were made to the player’s social identity within the game a month earlier were capitalized on. This was done with the introduction of banners and seasonal emotes to be collected and added to brags.

Music games have a very broad assortment of artistic content to work with, which lends itself very well to a new thematic subject matter every month. Beatstar’s Tour Pass gratefully doubles down on this matter by adding music that adheres to a specific topic depending on the time of the year. The first and extra long pass in December featured holiday songs, after which love songs followed suit in February. Then some lightly spring-themed songs were adding for March, and so on.

The free track of the Tour Pass contains two songs while the premium track awards another seven. Next to this, generous amounts of song cards for the game’s main progression are awarded when reaching new levels of the pass. Something that currently only gets enabled when the player has reached the end of content and no more songs can be unlocked by opening cases is the ability to play on even when case slots are full. Maybe it would be a good idea to unlock this feature for all players who have the premium track of the pass. But perhaps this idea is not viable anymore, with the recent price drop from $15 to $10, as capping the amount of plays makes sure that players don’t play more songs than they have paid for, most likely to avoid towering licensing costs.

Adding the Tour Pass to Beatstar changed its entire business case by lifting its IAP ARPDAU by 37% MoM (from $0.11 to $0.14). We’ll specifically discuss the Tour Pass monetization in more detail later.

But that was not all for this update. The December update also saw the addition of a daily recurring event. The Daily Shuffle feeds directly into the Tour Pass by allowing players to play specific songs that award double Tour Points each day. Players can choose their favorite song from a set of three that is picked by the game from all of the player’s owned songs.

For a long while, the Daily Shuffle has been the only “event” Beatstar would have to offer, which is an issue we’ll address down below.

March 2022

At this point, some new songs were finally added to the cases at the End of Content. Especially players who started playing early and have been doing it consistently started to run out of songs to pull from song cases, resulting in not being able to clear the case slots. This is not a situation you want to be in when maintaining your game’s content pipeline, and even more so when said game keeps players from playing altogether when their case slots are full.

Around this time, one of the most annoying issues within the core game was solved as well. Occasionally, the game requires the player to end ‘hold’ notes with a swipe. These swipes would end your perfect streak if you didn’t do them perfectly on time (“Perfect+”), while this normally only happens with (“Great”) notes that were hit off-beat. It sounds like a small issue, but in a game where your score depends on keeping your streak for practically the entire song, it was a very welcome fix.

June 2022

Half a year after releasing the Daily Shuffle, Space Ape released a new time-limited event designed to cater to the most competitive segment of its audience. Multiplayer Tournaments require the player to log in to the game at intervals of 20-24 hours and compete with pools of 10-20 other players for the top score. During the event, all players worldwide play the same song and earn exclusive tournament tokens depending on their rank in their pool. Players have 20 minutes and 2 tries to record a high score, although they can practice the song during normal play beforehand as many times as they see fit.

Ten accumulated tournament tokens can be used to spin a slick-looking wheel and earn rewards. Usually a select amount of partitions of the wheel award a new track, but chances of landing on these are very slim. Players can watch ads to round up their token amount to reach the amount required for the next spin, or they can flat-out purchase more event tokens to spin the wheel a good number of times. After its release, frequent and themed iterations of Multiplayer Tournaments have recurred; for example, the “Decades event” in July.

But that was not all for the month of June. This month also saw the first occurrence of a phenomenon that would certainly become a trend — the pre-release of a new song by a famous band. Before it was even available on Spotify, The Black Eyed Peas, Shakira, and David Guetta chose to debut their song, Don’t You Worry, exclusively in Beatstar two days earlier. Where this first pre-release consisted of a free giveaway for players who logged in to the game during a specific time, a more elaborate event was seen just a few weeks ago with the release of Eminem’s new Greatest Hits album, Curtain Call 2, where an entire Multiplayer Competition was launched featuring four new Eminem songs.

The new and very successful event surrounding Eminem’s album release has been the first occurrence in which the multiplayer tournament was reused to feature and unlock new content. Three of the four songs (including Godzilla, the “hardest extreme song ever”) were given away for free to practice for the event. The last one had to be collected using the event tokens and the spinning wheel. (FYI, as my second attempt shows, Godzilla is definitely of extreme difficulty and practically impossible to complete on the first two tries, mostly because the ultra-fast rap in the end.)

July 2022

While this month didn’t see any new features, a very interesting crossover happened where Space Ape featured Mediatonic’s Fall Guys in the light of its ‘Free for All’ promotion (in which Fall Guys changed its business model from Premium to F2P). While both companies aren’t officially affiliated, collaboration events like these have become a bit more of a trend over recent years. It’s unclear if some remuneration was paid in exchange for the Fall Guys’ publicity in Beatstar or if any future events featuring Beatstar are planned to happen within Fall Guys to return the favor.

August 2022

Beatstar’s most recent update is a quality-of-life feature that should combat the analysis paralysis that happens for some players when they have to select a song for their session. The game’s new auto-cue functionality has been the default for Beatstar’s competitors, except in those games players have to watch an ad if they want the ability to choose a song they’d like to play at all. For Beatstar, it’s a simple yet relevant addition to the game for players who like the variety and don’t mind the game choosing for them.

The auto cue also allows the developers to nudge players into playing a higher variety of tracks, getting out of their comfort zones, and influencing a song's discoverability. This is something that can be useful in Space Ape’s ambitious mission to make Beatstar the ultimate platform to discover new music.

Beatstar’s Evolution

A trend that‘s easy to observe is the growing overall difficulty of the game; new tracks definitely require more skill than earlier ones. Given there are only three difficulty levels, there still is a noticeable gap between them, but they have definitely been skewing closer towards each other. This is both understandable and expected, as the level designers must have had relatively low initial insight into the base level of gameplay skill that was needed at the inception of the project. The best way to balance level difficulty has always been to analyze a critical mass of players. Something could be said about the maturation of the player base itself as well, but this should never be a changing factor as new players will always keep being acquired.

All features highlighted above result in a much deeper and richer loop:

Monetization

As mentioned above, by far the biggest structural improvement and main monetization track for Beatstar has been its Tour Pass. Since the beginning of this year, the monthly recurring seasonal progression track has undoubtedly lifted the game into profitability, but the recent trend of its performance is worrisome.

The monthly peaks since December 2021 clearly show the revenue impact of the pass, but its trend is strongly declining. To combat this, in July the (very steep) price of $15 was decreased to $10, but $10 for 7 new tracks (2 songs are in the free track of the pass) is most likely still too high to keep any player except the die-hard fans spending periodically for extended periods of time.

A Different Incentive

The addition of all features highlighted above has made Beatstar’s IAP RPD increase from $0.10 to $0.90 since launch. This KPI has plateaued since May of this year due to the declining efficacy of the Tour Pass, but what is not visible in these measurements is the effect of the increasing amount of placements that incentivize watching a 30-second advertisement. Since launch, the ad monetization wizards at Space Ape did what they do best and have added four high-potential, incentivized ad placements. Including the advertising revenue these ads contribute, a realistic estimate likely pushes the total Revenue Per Download into the $1.50+ range. The most meaningful example of this is the cards-for-ads popup. After almost every song that doesn’t end in an immediate replay by the player, a popup appears to incentivize the player into watching an ad for two song cards.

By structurally engaging with this placement, the player can earn an additional song by watching a total of 15 ads. For players who don’t mind doing so to speed up the progress, this is a meaningful addition to the default pace of song unlocking that happens by opening song cases over time. Time invested in watching a 30-second advertisement is much more lucrative than the wait of 3 hours for 5 song cards. The latter adds up to 18 hours of waiting versus 7.5 minutes of watching ads to receive one new song, which is a pretty tempting proposition.

This Rewarded Video implementation is the most important reason why the aforementioned limitation on gameplay when case slots are full has been paying off. It increases Ad-ARPDAU for players with a high ambition for progress while being an easy skip for players who want a more immersive and uninterrupted experience.

While the Tour Pass still accounts for a major chunk of its monthly monetization, the day-to-day of Beatstar’s revenue seems to be more and more focused on ad-revenue. While it’s a good development to have a hybrid monetization strategy, if the reason for the shift is a decline in IAP revenue, it isn’t a desirable development.

The Potential of Beatstar’s LiveOps

Space Ape eventually did what was needed and added the right elements to Beatstar to grow it into a hit, but the uphill battle is far from over. A severe lack of systematic variation plagues its live-ops calendar. In other words, the game doesn’t have a rich enough feature set to provide players with surprising, new events often enough. Now that players can enjoy new content at a satisfying pace, the remaining challenge lies in giving players systems they can play around with and strategize on. While they certainly can grind their way through the events, there is no way for them to come up with fun and emergent strategies anywhere.

One of the most daring things Space Ape did was launch Beatstar worldwide as early as September, while it was only a shell of its current product. The reason for this was most likely to have more leverage when licensing songs, as a product that has UA campaigns running structurally and worldwide is much more appealing. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that during the three months after its launch, the game’s event page was eerily empty, even though the game did feature an entirely different time-limited event all throughout its soft-launch. This illustrates the conservative reality that might stand in the way of the game’s short-term evolution.

Take for example the “Venues” event that was active throughout most of the game’s soft-launch. The event most certainly wasn’t perfect, but it might have been better to keep it going, exchange the old star rewards for song cards, and reuse its systems, instead of having nothing happening at all for a few months.

When looking at the current variation of Beatstar as a whole, the game is certainly more eventful than ever. Namely, the artist-specific release events feel fresh and allow for exciting new opportunities, but when purely looking at the game’s systems, the live-ops calendar definitely looks monotonous. While progressing through the Tour Pass is the main driver now, it’s not a strong enough reason to keep reengaging with the game every month, as its declining ARPDAU illustrates.

To combat the feature monotony, some different play modes could be added to the game to allow for a more varying calendar with something different to do for the player every day. What Space Ape could work towards is having different modes to pick from that can be enabled. The goal of these modes could be to grind event currency, which players can use to spin the wheel whenever an event with a new song as a reward comes around. Other rewards like banners and emotes could also be added more frequently than the current one every month that comes with the Tour Pass.

Game modes would need to be enabled only in short windows of time and have specific goals like finishing an easier song on 1.5x speed or an extreme song on 0.75x speed. Some day in the week could even be “extreme day” where songs during this mode would have to be finished while only hitting Perfect+ or Perfects (although the current technical issues would have to be solved for this, as the difference between a Perfect+ and a Perfect currently is too small and mishits of these kinds can’t be avoided).

The Future

Beatstar is (still) an amazing product with very strong potential, but Space Ape will have trouble maintaining the momentum if it doesn’t successfully combat its declining IAP ARPDAU and find ways to meaningfully extend long-term retention. The main challenge today is the repetitiveness of its live-ops springing from a very limited number of systems and the relative monotony of the core game experience.

So what should be done?

First of all, trying to lower the price of the Tour Pass even further to a more market-conforming price point (e.g. $5.99) could be a very attractive and welcome modification for the player. A monthly recurring payment of the current magnitude will definitely give players a reason to think again before buying. One purchase of a Tour Pass might not cover the cost of licensing for the player, but if a much bigger part of the audience makes the purchase, it might still add up, as song plays might increase as well, but to a much lesser extent.

Secondly, adding events that aren’t catering to the most hardcore part of the audience would do a lot of good to keep the more casual, less skilled players sticking around longer. While surely fun for some, including “the hardest song ever” into a live-ops event that should be fun for everybody is not the most inclusive move.

Exciting surprises and a variable pace of progression are sorely lacking at this point. The ”Journey” which unlocks the majority of the songs is very predictable. In a way, events like the current exclusive song releases are a good way to surprise the player, but the availability of these events is out of the player’s hands. Instead of linking exclusively released songs to a simple giveaway or a PvP tournament (including a spinning wheel with only one desirable reward on it), why not push players for more strategic engagement by using the mechanics of the songs in the player’s library?

To keep the game more fresh, small iterations on its core gameplay can be considered. Coming up with a system that offers a mix of more playful challenges — e.g. “hold notes for a total of 50 meters” — could offer a fun way to strategize with regards to which songs to play to most quickly achieve this. Think of gameplay modifiers like speed (e.g. Turtle mode), Swipe mode (every normal note now requires a swipe), a note requiring a new gesture (e.g. double tap), or even crazier things like backwards mode (although this might be pushing it!).

To combat players dropping off after day 30, the game could even include an entirely new, secondary track of permanent progression (beyond the simple leveling up based on earning stars that exists today). Ideally, advancement in this track would not be skill-based but rather strategy-based, like requiring daily engagement with a limited influx of the playful challenges that were mentioned before. Providing surprises, extra gifts, and opportunities to farm new currencies (e.g. a rare one that lets players select any song they want to unlock, bypassing the gacha) on the way would surely benefit the game by adding surprise, strategy, and a long-term goal to complete.

A big thanks to Niek Tuerlings for writing this essay. If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.