Scaling Radar — report for July 25

2026-07-25

Run #1, cold start. There's no history yet, so this isn't "who accelerated over 3 days,"
it's "who currently looks like a game in a buying phase": young + wide geo + a fast inflow
of reviews. Full deltas will appear from the third run onward.

Coverage: 47 countries, ~150 chart positions per country, 295 games in the database, 56 passed the
age and genre filters, 23 scored above the threshold.

Who to look at first

1. Meowdoku! — 71.5, the leader by a wide margin

OAKEVER GAMES, 67 days from release, #1 in Canada, 34 countries, 1,508 reviews/day
against 101k accumulated. Reviews per day are ~1.5% of the entire review base daily, meaning
the bulk of the audience arrived recently. Sudoku mechanics in a casual wrapper.
Looks like a game in the thick of scaling rather than at its start — we may have caught it
a couple of weeks late.

2. Royal Smash! : Physics Puzzle — 58.5, the earliest entry

CYPHER GAMES, 25 days from release, #1 in Turkey, but only 14 countries, 474 reviews/day.
Now this does look like the beginning of scaling: a test on cheap Turkish traffic, top 1
in the genre, geo not rolled out yet. If it shows up in BR/MX/ID in a week — confirmation.
The main candidate to watch.

3. Warline: Sniper Strike — 57.1, an anomaly

Powerfantasy HK, 3 days from release and already 30 countries. This isn't gradual scaling,
it's a salvo launch with a budget ready to go — you do that when the mechanic has already been
validated on another title. Strategy/Action, i.e. hybridcasual, not pure HC.

4. Colony Flow! — 51.6

ABI GLOBAL, 42 days, #4 in Brazil, 23 countries. A classic profile: young, already out on
cheap traffic, but coverage isn't maxed out yet.

Patterns visible right away

Century Games — 3 titles on the list at once (Family Farm Merge 57.0,
Hotel Legacy 48.3 and one more). That's no accident: the publisher is buying for a portfolio of
merge games in parallel. It's worth tracking at the publisher level, not by individual games.

OAKEVER GAMES — 2 titles, both in the top (Meowdoku 71.5, Amaze GO! 59.5).
GOODROID — 2 titles (CubeAway 50.6, Bus Traffic Fever 48.7).

A split into two groups by age. The young ones (3–42 days) sit in 1–23 countries —
those are the ones entering scaling right now. The older ones (67–162 days) hold 30–45 countries —
those have already scaled. For your task the first group is more interesting,
even if their score is lower.

Turkey, Brazil, Israel, the Czech Republic, Pakistan — the countries where candidates take
top 1–4. Cheap traffic works as an early indicator, as expected.

What to keep in mind when reading

• A cold start inflates everyone equally. The "chart jump" component is fictitious on the first run
• and damped by a 0.45 multiplier, but it's still present. Absolute score values can't be compared
• with future runs, only within this list.
• Reviews/day on the first run are calculated as "total reviews ÷ age," i.e. it's an
• average over the whole lifetime, not the current rate. For Meowdoku (67 days) that understates
• the real current inflow, for Warline (3 days) it overstates it.
• Age is taken from the first release date. A game could have sat in soft launch in one country
• for a year and only now gone into buying — by age it will look old.

What's next

Real value appears on runs 3–4, when the deltas kick in: who added countries,
who jumped in the chart, whose review inflow accelerated. That's also when the
is_new_alert flag starts working — games that made the list for the first time.

Royal Smash! and Colony Flow! are worth watching separately — if they add 5+ countries
in a week, it means we caught them right at the start of the phase.