After beating Fall Guys at its own game, Stumble Guys creator Kitka now has Fortnite in its sights.
The Finnish studio’s second game, Battle Guys: Royale, is designed to make battle royale on mobile truly casual and accessible. And it should be launched globally by the end of the year if everything goes to plan, says Kitka’s community manager Antti Nguyen.
“I’d say that it’s a crossover between Stumble Guys and Fortnite,” says Nguyen. “It’s like a really streamlined version of a battle royale…I don’t think there has been a really serious attempt at making a more casual battle royale on mobile.”
“Battle royale players are really really competitive, so I guess that nobody really saw a good market fit for it…would players be interested in casual battle royale? We are just testing, so we don’t know either if it’s going to work out – but the numbers look pretty good now that we’ve soft launched.”
Battle Guys: Royale entered soft launch in early May on Android only. It’s currently available in Indonesia, Spain, Poland, Finland and Greece, and was also briefly available in Philippines and Pakistan, according to Appmagic.
In trying to distill down the battle royale experience for mobile, Nguyen says Kitka has focused on reducing the number of buttons on screen, and only allows players to carry one weapon at a time.
Matches are no longer than five or six minutes long, and technically it’s designed to work smoothly on any device – so unlike, say, COD: Warzone, it’ll be accessible to all players in all markets globally.
And obviously, given the studio’s history, there is ongoing dialogue between Stumble Guys’ new owner Scopely and Kitka around this second game. But Nguyen is keen to stress that Scopely is not funding Battle Guys or is involved in its development in any way.
“We are 100% detached from them, so they have nothing to do with the game,” says Nguyen, who adds that Scopely does not own the rights to the ‘…. Guys’ brand (Mediatonic and Epic might also have something to say about that too, to be fair.)
Following Battle Guys’ soft launch a few weeks ago, the “numbers seem to be good”, says Nguyen, who noted that it is already getting picked up by influencers.
“What really helps us is that the influencers that we used to work with during Stumble Guys were small channels during that time, but a lot of them grew to millions of subscribers,” says Nguyen. “So they just want to help us and to make content on the game, that’s really boosting our numbers.”
And in the same way Stumble Guys came together remarkably quickly, the Kitka team hopes to have the game ready for a global launch in 2024. “I think by the end of the year we will have globally launched,” added Nguyen. “At least that’s the hope for now.”
The Finnish studio still only has 11 full-time staff, even after Scopely bought its breakout hit Stumble Guys in September 2022. Earlier this week, Nguyen told us the full inside story of how Stumble Guys beat Fall Guys at its own game.
