The craze for football drafting games has now produced two amateur-made App Store hits.
38-0 is a football drafting game made in days by a hobbyist that has entered the top end of the UK App Store games charts – just like 38-0-0.
Creator Josh Pavey told us that with no marketing or PR support the game has passed over 100k downloads on iOS since launch on Thursday June 11. During that time it broke into the top ten in the UK App Store games chart, and led the Simulation genre chart for a day or two.
At the time of writing, it’s in 26th spot in the games chart, a few places below Pixel Flow and Royal Kingdom and ahead of Chess.com, Subway Surfers and Township.
Pavey told us that the top markets for the game are the UK, Ireland, EU, US, Australia and New Zealand. An Android edition of 38-0 is also awaiting approval, at the time of writing.
His day job is in advertising, but Pavey is also a self-taught hobbyist coder who has been dabbling in his own side projects over the last eight or so years. Like 38-0-0 maker Deniz Sancar, Pavey noticed the buzz around basketball drafting game 82-0 and decided to make a ‘proper’ iOS football drafting app, instead of the web apps circulating in group chats and on social media.
“Evidently I can’t take credit for the idea with seeing 82-0 and the other style games over the last couple of weeks online,” he told us. “I am still amazed nobody actually went the app route first! I only saw 38-0-0 after launching – but fair play to them, they look to have smashed it out the park on the App Store too, I’m all for everyone winning!”
Pavey says he used a mix of Opus, Gemini, ChatGPT, Cursor and OpenCode to build the game early last week, and used Cloudflare Workers to add the multiplayer component.
“Likely wouldn’t have built it anywhere near as quick without AI certainly speeding up mockups, testing suites for multiplayer smoke testing and GPT for cleaning up any poor code,” says Pavey. “I recommend anyone who has access to models they should definitely be toying around with whatever pops into their mind as the models have become quite ridiculous in recent months.”
38-0 has already been updated several times with new game modes, multiplayer and sharing options. There’s no monetisation in the game just yet, though, as right now Pavey is just enjoying the ride.
“I have toyed around with monetisation in the last few days but I’m just getting a thrill alone from seeing the player count continue to rise and retention keep up,” he adds.
“I think I’ve had about 10 hours of sleep since Friday to be honest, I am constantly building out new potential features and additions since it rocketed up the App Store… long live Celsius drinks and Starbucks keeping me going these last few days.”
