The theme is often the key to breaking through in SLG games. Some seemingly unconventional themes can sometimes achieve unexpected success, such as the "mafia" themes in two SLG games, Mafia City and The Grand Mafia by YoTa Games, or the "ant" theme SLG The Ants: Underground Kingdom by StarUnion.
Last November, Tap4Fun launched Top Girl, which also features a highly eye-catching theme — girl groups. Not only that, the characters of these girl groups are also generated by AI.
After launching, Top Girl demonstrated strong market competitiveness. By the end of November, it had made its way into the top 200 on the U.S. iOS game revenue charts, and now it has climbed to around the top 100. Tap4Fun seems to have found a unique breakthrough in theme differentiation.
01.An SLG Featuring AI-Generated Beauties
The SLG gameplay in Top Girl is still based on a COK-like framework. Early on, the main gameplay is wrapped in a "beauty cultivation" concept. By completing tasks, players fulfill the "wishes" of the beauties.
Each wish fulfilled unlocks a costume change, with the clothes transitioning from outerwear to innerwear and from more to fewer pieces, focusing on providing the most direct visual stimulation.
In addition to costume changes, Top Girl also attempts to enhance the cultivation experience through chatting with the beauties and a social media-like feature.
Beyond the "beauty" element, Top Girl’s application of AI technology also effectively enhances its market competitiveness. As seen in the images, while the characters in Top Girl are relatively realistic, they also show strong signs of AI generation.
However, perhaps due to Tap4Fun’s mature control over AI or post-processing, the characters in the game do not exhibit obvious traces of AI generation.
The exploration of AI-generated content in Top Girl goes even further. The game includes a card-based gameplay element framed as "recording a song." Players choose one of three randomly presented records and send their girl group members to perform. This essentially functions as a method for verifying progress in the game’s numerical growth.
What’s special about this gameplay is that during the recording process, different records feature various AI-generated dance videos. With subtle clothing changes and some muscle deformation, it’s clear that AI generation technology was used in creating these short, fluid dance sequences.
Without AI, creating unique dance videos for each of the numerous records, even if only for a few seconds, would require substantial human labor, time, and financial resources. However, Top Girl can now do this in a much more efficient way, maximizing the advantages of its theme.
Furthermore, when the beauty characters' affection levels reach certain thresholds, they can break free from the preset storylines and engage in "free" conversations with the beauties — akin to the virtual companion apps that allow users to interact with AI characters.
Though the characters in Top Girl are still not "smart" enough in the current experience, this certainly offers a fresh experience for players. If the game continues to iterate, this feature could become another competitive advantage.
Beyond the game itself, Tap4Fun has also applied AI to its ad creatives. According to AppGrowing’s data, over the past two months, Top Girl launched over 2300 ad creatives, the majority of which utilized AI-generated content.
As expected, the core selling point of these ads revolves around AI beauties. One type of ad starts with an eye-catching dance performance, then transitions into the game’s record-creating gameplay, effectively showcasing the game’s core theme and mechanics.
Another type of ad uses "special" hints to amplify the selling point, for example, placing an obvious age hint in the center of the video, followed by specific in-game chat content and dance clips, stimulating viewers' curiosity to learn more.
Another type of ad creates an interactive feel through a choice-based dialogue, showing the process of increasing affection with the beauty. As affection grows, the dialogues and scenarios become more flirtatious. Interestingly, these ads often end with the wrong choice, causing the affection to plummet, which triggers the viewer's desire to download the game and try it out.
Ads that simulate live streaming also convey an interactive feel. In these ads, viewers unlock different dance moves by tipping the beauty streamer. When they run out of money and can’t tip anymore, they are encouraged to "earn money," leading to the display of the record-creating gameplay, making the ad conversion smoother.
It can be said that Top Girl’s current success is not only due to its seemingly unconventional theme choice but also the deep application of AI technology.
02.What Other Chips Does Tap4Fun Have?
Compared to its earlier glory, Tap4Fun has somewhat faded in recent years. Going back to 2011, when the mobile game market was still emerging, Tap4Fun decisively entered the scene and shifted its focus to overseas markets.
That same year, two self-developed SLG products,Island Empire and Galaxy Empire, were launched, with the latter becoming Tap4Fun’s first blockbuster, briefly topping the U.S. iOS revenue charts.
In the following four years, Tap4Fun steadily launched two new self-developed games per year (except for 2015). Titles like Empire of Kings (2012), Spartan Wars (2012), Galaxy Legends (2013), and Invasion (2014) all showed impressive monetization capabilities.
Confident in its momentum, Tap4Fun began to push for an IPO. According to its prospectus, the company’s revenue in 2013-2015 reached 308 million, 508 million, and 543 million RMB, respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 32.27%. From 2012, Tap4Fun was also listed in the App Annie (now data.ai) global top 52 mobile game developers ranking for three consecutive years.
Unfortunately, in 2017, its long-awaited IPO plan was rejected, and in the same year, key staff from Invasion left the company, delivering another heavy blow. That year became a turning point for Tap4Fun. Fortunately, the company still had its place in the industry, relying on its early R&D and market experience to stay afloat.
In 2020, CEO Stan Xu revealed in an interview that Tap4Fun still had 2-3 new games in its pipeline each year, but many of them failed to meet expectations and were canceled during testing.
As competition in the SLG genre intensified, Tap4Fun began to recognize the importance of differentiation. Stan Xu believes that differentiation is based on three factors: worldview and themes, gameplay, and peripheral systems. Age of Apes, which met all these criteria, was expected to perform well.
In terms of theme, Age of Apes boldly explored the ape theme. Gameplay wise, in addition to the popular free-movement feature, it introduced a tribal system above the gaming guild to strengthen social elements. Peripheral systems revolved around the game’s chat system, adding features like social media circle and TV broadcasts. It is said that the game had good early retention in European and American countries, and players’ payment rates were also impressive.
However, what really helped Tap4Fun was the success of Kiss of War, which was based on the iteration of Invasion. Though relatively conservative, the "beauty commander" theme in Kiss of War was highly appealing. Yes, Top Girl wasn’t Tap4Fun’s first attempt at this theme. As early as 2019, they had recognized its potential and achieved some success.
After some fine-tuning, Kiss of War began to gain momentum in 2020 and contributed 56% of the revenue, allowing Tap4Fun to re-enter the Sensor Tower China Mobile Game Publisher Revenue Top 30 in January 2021. Tap4Fun had found a successful path in theme differentiation.
Following this success, Tap4Fun launched Kingdom Guard in 2021, which combines strategy tower defense and synthesis mechanics. With the help of Kiss of War, Tap4Fun secured a solid position in the above-mentioned rankings. However, it seemed that Tap4Fun fell into a "gap" in product releases, with a lack of new blockbusters. Ironically, it was the less prominent Age of Apes that achieved growth in 2023 with mini games.
After adding "Banana Snatching," "Fortress Duels," and "Candy Bean Collection" as extra gameplay modes, Age of Apes saw its revenue rise and became Tap4Fun’s highest-grossing mobile game in July 2023. To this day, it remains one of the three main revenue drivers for Tap4Fun.
In the past three years, Tap4Fun has appeared frequently in the Sensor Tower China Mobile Game Publisher Revenue Top 30 list. Despite this, many still feel that Tap4Fun has "fallen behind." On one hand, its performance in recent years has not matched its earlier successes. On the other hand, it lacks a truly "explosive" product to refresh the industry's perception of the company.
Now, with Top Girl showing strong potential, Tap4Fun still holds several cards. In terms of theme differentiation, it has games like Water World Survival, which explores survival on the sea, where players build rafts to customize their survival space.
Additionally, there are games like Buy the Farm, focusing on farm management, Tavern Legend, which centers on tavern management, and Dawn of Planet X: Frontier, a space sci-fi themed game that Tap4Fun once excelled at.
As for the exploration of mini game, Tap4Fun has derived multiple versions based on Age of Apes, including titles like Ape Commandos, Monkey Clash, and Monkey Control. All of these "ape" themed SLGs share a similar framework, with the difference lying in the types of mini game.
Tap4Fun’s approach relies on a mature framework that uses a broad net strategy to quickly test the feasibility of various mini games, while also enhancing its response speed to market demands.
Theme differentiation, as represented by Top Girl, and mini game, as represented by Age of Apes, seem to be the current directions Tap4Fun is exploring. Whether these directions will help Tap4Fun return to greatness remains unknown, but as long as it’s still in the game, the outcome is yet to be determined. The key lies in what cards Tap4Fun plays next.
