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Nicole Jao · · 6 min readChina-Singapore game publisher went from making $1m to $181m within a year
Last year, a gaming startup from China broke into the highly competitive mobile gaming market. The company’s name, Habby, embodies the idea of gaming as a hobby that makes people happy.
That success is attributed to mobile game Archero, which became a hit both in its home market and overseas after its release in June 2019.
Archero combines the simple look and feel of hyper-casual games and sophisticated mid-core gameplay to create what’s called a “hybrid casual” game.
Image credit: Archero
For Habby, genre-mashing is a way to innovate and differentiate itself from a rapidly evolving mobile gaming market while staying profitable. Its nearly 200x revenue growth last year is proof it has done something right.
Swift as an arrow
Habby was formed in 2018 by the core game development team of Cheetah Mobile, a Beijing-based game publisher.
Stefan Wang, Habby’s founder and CEO, was Cheetah Mobile’s product manager and produced several of its sought-after game titles, including Piano Tiles 2 and Dancing Line.
In March, Habby raised a US$6.5 million series A round from prominent Chinese venture fund ZhenFund. The startup is now headquartered in Singapore but has its core team stationed in Beijing.
What brought Habby into the spotlight was the breakout success of Archero, a single-player game with a rather simple goal – kill wave upon wave of enemies by shooting arrows at them.
Screenshot of Archero
The game was an instant blockbuster in and beyond China. Archero reached 10 million installs within a month and hauled in US$35 million in in-app revenue over a three-month period, according to a third-party estimate based on sample data.
Although the bulk of Archero’s players are in the US, the game also became popular in China, India, and Southeast Asia – markets where casual games are gaining momentum.
The new casual
Some see the hybrid casual trend as a reaction to the rise of game developers like Voodoo, which focuses on producing massive numbers of lightweight games.
A monetization phenomenon
Astounding growth
What’s next?
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Habby’s revenue grew nearly 200x last year, thanks to the breakout success of its deceptively simple “hybrid casual” game.
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