I was reading on Unity’s blog how Bridge Race was on its way to become the world’s most downloaded hyper-casual game. Bridge Race is a game developed by Garawell Games, a 7 person game dev studio based in Istanbul. It is their first title as well. And according to data.ai, Bridge Race was the most downloaded hyper-casual game worldwide in 2021 and 2022. So how does a new game dev studio launches their first title and that goes right to the top?

Well, the key is their game publisher. You see, they partnered with a popular mobile game publisher and studio called Supersonic and that’s what helped them – obviously having a good game also helps. Supersonic was started only 3 years ago by ironSource, an Israel-based ad network that has been around for a while. Somehow Supersonic partnered with Unity, and now they’re being offered as a solution to Unity developers. It’s Supersonic from Unity.

Back to the Bridge Race game devs, before partnering with Supersonic they entered a competition and managed to win the Silver Medal (and a big cash prize) in the Supersonic Superstars competition. Aha, now we’re getting somewhere. That’s how I found about the Supersonic Superstars competition and their awesome prizes.

What’s Supersonic Superstars?

It’s a yearly competition for hyper-casual game developers. That’s right, only hyper-casual games are accepted in the competition. If you’re a game dev you know what hyper-casual means, but if you’re a regular user you might be in the fog. Well hyper-casual games are those games that are very easy to play, have minimalist interfaces and usually free to play. The Supersonic Superstars competition starts on September 19th and ends on October the 31st, 2023.

Ok, so what are the prizes, and what are the conditions to participate.

First, if you’re a dev that published a hyper-casual game, these are the conditions you must meet to be able to enter the competition:

  • Your game can be published or not, but if it’s published it must have fewer than 10K downloads right now.
  • You can submit an unlimited amount of games
  • The game can’t have been previously submitted to Supersonic or tested by them
  • Only Android and iOS games are accepted
  • The prizes will be awarded only for games submitted between September 19 – October 31, 2023

When they mention “tested by them” they actually mean testing a game’s potential. How’s that done? Via advertising. They basically create several ads for a game and then run campaigns for it. What they’re interested in is the CPI metric (cost per install) and retention rate. Ideally you’d have a low CPI metric and a very high retention rate. This would mean it’s easy to get new installs for your game and players keep it on their phones.

As far as the prizes go, these are the several tiers of prizes offered:

  • $2,000,000 top prize. The highest awarded prize that’s offered to all games that achieve more than 8 million downloads on iOS/Android in the US. This is the minimum prize, actual revenue can be higher.
  • $1,000,000 top prize. Same as above, just that you need 4 million downloads on iOS/Android in the US. They don’t mention the period of time, but I assume for around 2 months as long as the competition is running.
  • $200,000 top prize. Minimum guarantee for any approved and launched games during, or as a result of, the competition. The game must pass some CPI/retention level tests.
  • $100,000 TikTok trend prize. This prize is for any approved and launched games based on a TikTok trend. Basically you’d look at trending TikTok videos through a game devs’ perspective and try to extract game ideas from the real life.
  • $25,000 CPI prize. Game prototypes that hit a CPI of $0.25 or less and D1 retention >30% on Facebook, iOS/Android in the US.
  • $15,000 CPI prize. Game prototypes that hit a CPI of $0.30 or less and D1 retention >30% on Facebook, iOS/Android in the US.
  • $5,000 CPI prize. Game prototypes that hit a CPI of $0.40 or less and D1 retention >30% on Facebook, iOS/Android in the US.

So that’s pretty much it. If you’re a game dev that wants to publish a hyper-casual game check Supersonic too. The advantage is that they have the knowledge and the money to test out if your game has potential, a thing that it will take you a lot more time & resources to test. But with them, you kind of pass the responsibility: Submit your game to Supersonic.

They also have a short demo on how you can publish a game with them: