Mobile idle RPG Gunner Cat has secured significant performance metrics in the casual game publishing market after surpassing a cumulative revenue of 20 billion KRW (approx. $15 million) globally in a short period. This marks the first commercial success of a distribution structure that selected the hybrid casual game publishing sector as a new business this year and launched a dedicated brand called ‘Flick’.
Launched globally in June, Gunner Cat, developed by Yusu Games, is an idle shooting RPG created by a small team referencing artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Based on the concept of a cat character with a gun mining resources, it adopts a ‘reincarnation’ system as its core mechanism, reinforcing character stats every time a certain stage is reached.
User retention and financial efficiency metrics for the in-game battlefield were also revealed. Based on an intuitive play loop, it marked a Day 1 retention rate of 50% for new users and a Day 7 retention rate of 25% from its first month of service. The Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) metric through marketing optimization also recorded a data flow rising up to the 157% line.
Optimized publishing tactics matched to a small-scale developer also served as a catalyst for revenue growth. The publisher minimized the allocation of development resources while transplanting an ‘exploration’ system and a new monetization model (BM) to supplement late-game content. By combining this with its proprietary ad-tech know-how, the publisher observed a fluctuation range where revenue metrics initially at around 7 million KRW per day expanded up to a maximum scale of 350 million KRW per day after live server stabilization.
The proportion of overseas market revenue following global user-targeted marketing is also on an upward trend. As of the September closing, it was tallied that 75% of the total cumulative revenue was generated from overseas battlefields. In particular, the North American (U.S.) market established itself as a core indicator of global traffic, with the average daily revenue figure increasing up to 16 times compared to before the expansion of global promotions.
Future operations will unfold in a direction that supports continuous content updates tailored to global user feedback, based on the fast decision-making structure and development flexibility of the small development team. A publisher representative stated that this commercial figure is an example of proving publishing capabilities and ad-tech competitiveness in the global market through numbers, adding that they will continue expansion into user traffic preemption competition across the global market by broadening partnership infrastructure with various indie and small-scale developers moving forward.
