This is a guest post by Marina Yeremenko, a Senior Designer at King. Before that, Marina was a Senior Game Designer at Social Point, working on the acclaimed Monster Legends. As a true industry veteran, she's also worked for MissinGames and Gameloft too. If you like her article, please comment below and let her know!

While I was browsing through my Instagram some time ago, I got an Ad for Love Nikki Dress Up Queen. At that time I was looking for more games like Covet Fashion but with a larger gameplay variety. Love Nikki turned out to be much more than that - an RPG about fashion.

Then Pocketgamer.biz did an article about the game and I couldn’t agree more.

“Love Nikki, underneath its cute exterior,

has an incredibly deep RPG with tons of content...”

- Ric Cowley, Pocketgamer.biz.

The title was launched in US in 2017, and during the same year it hit the Top 100 Grossing on iOS. Now this is surprising because as you know very few Asian games succeed in the US. And Love Nikki was originally made in China and published by Tencent.

Aside from that, the most surprising fact is that the game was designed for a female audience with a quite hardcore meta from Japanese RPGs. Cherry on top is the anime style, that is believed to be more favoured by men in the West.

Overall, this mix would seem like a very risky idea (not to mention the sometimes random use of English), but it worked!

Revenues since launch have been growing constantly. On the graph below I marked the game’s releases in the main countries. It is clear that the anime style dressing game is popular not only in Asia but is growing fast in the US as well.

So far on all platforms it earned a Total Revenue of over $ 140 M.