Trends Podcast

A Squid Game knockoff typed into a prompt box hit three and a half million plays in four weeks. The app it lives on pays its maker when people play.

The maker goes by Tyo Studio sixty-nine. On the twenty-ninth of August they started a game on Astrocade, an app where you describe a game in words and it comes back playable.

What came back is a run through seven trials.

A player sprints down a sand track and freezes when the doll turns around. At a tin tray, the player carves a star out of a candy with a needle.

Then comes a glass bridge, crossed one pane at a time. The wrong pane drops the player into the dark.

Tyo Studio built a test pad into it. Inside the code sits a panel only the creator sees, with buttons to skip a stage, come back from the dead and see through the glass on the bridge.

On the thirtieth of August they hit publish.

Astrocade has a rule for the moment a game gets picked for its feed. In its words to creators, the maker earns a hundred dollars right off the bat. After that, the money follows the plays.

The feed is where the plays come from. You open Astrocade and scroll a column of games, each tile with its play count on it. One tap starts a game in the browser.

Crab Game sits in the row called Players' Choice.

By its fourth week the counter under it read three and a half million.

Then the copies came. Crab Game was remixed ten times.

Remixing on it is now switched off.

Making a game used to cost the maker money. A maker spent months learning an engine like Unity before a friend could play anything. Even the new prompt tools for apps charge the maker about twenty-five dollars a month for credits.

Astrocade's founders took the same prompt box and paid the maker instead.

In May they raised fifty-six million dollars from Sea and Sequoia. David Cahn, the Sequoia partner on the deal, wrote down why: plays on Astrocade went from six million a month to a hundred and forty million in five months.

That same week, Astrocade's page for creators said the company was putting ten million dollars into creator funds. It also set a bar for getting paid on plays: a hundred thousand plays in thirty days.

Crab Game's counter passed that bar thirty-five times over.

What those plays paid Tyo Studio, neither side has said. Astrocade keeps its rate per play private.

Last October it told creators that some of them made over seven hundred dollars in a month from games that took a few days to build. In May its founders told Fortune that top creators make thousands of dollars a month. Those are the company's words about its makers, from a company that is recruiting more of them.

For Tyo Studio, each of those ten remixes competes with Crab Game for the same players.

Remixing is on by default on Astrocade, so a hit gets copied the week it lands.

The bigger threat sits inside the trials. The doll, the candy and the glass bridge come from Netflix's Squid Game.

If Netflix objects, Crab Game and its three and a half million plays could come down in a day. The Trends report predicts that a rights holder will force a game generator to pull games like it.

Then there's the pay. In May the creator page carried the ten million dollar line and the hundred thousand play bar. Today it says: earn based on plays.

Whatever Tyo Studio earns per play can change whenever Astrocade decides it changes.

Rec Room shows the cost side. The social game platform, once valued at three and a half billion dollars, gave its players a prompt tool. By its founders' account, each player who used it cost more than they brought in.

The tool also frustrated the creators who'd spent years learning Rec Room the old way. Rec Room shut down on the first of June.

Astrocade pays its makers on purpose.

Astrocade's CEO told Fortune the company is most inspired by YouTube, the way it nurtures its creators. A feed needs new games each day and the cheapest supply is to pay the people who make them.

Roblox runs that model at scale. Its creators earned one point seven billion dollars in the twelve months to September.

When I mapped this market for the Trends dot V C report, the payout was the piece the app builders have no reason to copy. Their buyer runs a business and brings the traffic.

A game maker brings a game and needs the players.

If you want in, start where Tyo Studio started: on the feed. Build for its players, read the counts from launch day and remake the one that lands.

One game a week is fifty a year, each one a shot at the Players' Choice row.

Game engines charged you to make a game. This feed pays you a hundred dollars when it picks yours.

A Squid Game knockoff typed into a prompt box hit three and a half million plays in four weeks. Subscribe at trends dot V C and get next week's market report.