Kitka Games’ Stumble Guys has passed $40m in lifetime IAP revenue and 225m downloads, according to Appmagic data sourced by mobilegamer.biz.
The Fall Guys-like game is breaking over $500k in revenue per day at peak times. Appmagic data does not include Apple and Google’s 30% cut or ad revenue, so the total gross revenue figure will be higher. On July 16 it was installed 1.9m times, its record download day to date.
Mobilegamer.biz understands that Kitka is not spending big on traditional UA channels, and much of the game’s success is through paid and organic influencer support on social media, particularly TikTok. Creator @theussxd’s top two Stumble Guys videos have 21.6m and 13.4m views at the time of writing, and another creator, @k3n10n, has posted Stumble Guys videos with 7.1m and 2.6m views.
So who are the small team behind this huge success? Kitka Games only appears to have five employees: CEO Olli Lahtinen, CFO Teemu Määttä, community manager Antti Nguyen, back end developer Olli-Matti Jormakka plus senior sysadmin and backend developer Joonas Alhonen.
Until 2020 Kitka boss Lahtinen was CEO at Boom Karts maker Immobile Games, which released the game through Hill Climb Racing studio FingerSoft. Prior to that Lahtinen was team lead and lead programmer at Kajak Games on platform Hopping Penguin, and also worked in programming for Mobilive and in prototyping at Wooga.
CFO Teemu Määttä is a former co-founder, COO and CFO at Critical Force, maker of online shooter Critical Ops. Community manager Antti Nguyen’s background is in accounting and finance, and backend developers Olli-Matti Jormakka and Joonas Alhonen are both former Immobile Games staffers.
While of course the gameplay style is very reminiscent of Fall Guys, the Stumble Guys meta is straight out of Brawl Stars. GameRefinery research says the game monetises through Gems, Stumble Tokens and ads. Gems can be bought in exchange for skin gachas, tournament entry fees, the Stumble Pass and also skipping battle pass tiers. Stumble Tokens are for rarer skin gachas. Ads pop-up at the end of each round for non-payers, and incentivised ads gain players spins on the lucky wheel.
