Scaling Radar — August 21

2026-08-21

40 candidates, 29 new alerts, eight of them meaningful.

New alerts

Cat Match (SoftoVerse, 7 days) — 9 countries, all of them cheap: PH, VN, ID, MY, TH, PK, ZA, HK, AE. #2 in the Philippines, 550 reviews a day on a week-old title. This is the beginning of the phase, not its middle.

Bendy's Nightmare Run (Joey Drew Studios) — launched on both platforms at once: 35 countries on Android (#4 in Chile), 19 on iOS (#3 in Canada), 9 and 4 days old. No soft launch at all, a full salvo on the IP from day one.

ASMR Cleaning: Home Makeover (Amazuro, 45 days) — 1 → 3 → 27 countries, #16 in Czechia. Sat in one country for a month, then opened up sharply across all of Europe and SEA.

Hair Salon Halloween Party (Uchiha Global, 4 days) — 17 countries, #23 in Argentina, install bracket 1,000,000+. And zero reviews with it: the volume is there, the live audience is nowhere to be seen.

Unscrew Bolts Puzzle (139 days) — 1 → 14 → 19 countries, #10 in Egypt, the whole entry across MENA and LATAM.

Driving School: Car Parking 3D (Cheetah, 162 days) — spent a week shrinking from 15 countries to 3, and now it is 23 countries and #12 in South Africa. A restart of buying, not a continuation of the old campaign.

Goddess Diff (LanFei, 14 days) — 6 countries, all Asian and premium: JP, KR, HK, SG, NZ, FI. An expensive test on a young title.

Another 21 are noise: one country, close to zero reviews.

Breakdown

Out of the whole batch only two are genuinely early: Cat Match and Smash Land! (Flow Games, 7 days). The second went 2 → 12 countries in three days, but came in from the other side — US, DE, NL, Scandinavia, 727 reviews a day and +99% on the rate. Same age, mirror-image geo strategies; both are worth watching right now.

Bendy formally tops the list on signal strength, but we did not catch it early — 35 countries on day nine leaves no room. The value is elsewhere: both platforms at once, which means the budget is big and deliberate.

Water Sort: Romantic Dream (Blue Blaze, 10 days) — a fourth consecutive run in the plus: 1 → 4 → 7 → 11 → 17 countries, all tier-1, install bracket jumped up. The tidiest rollout of the week.

And Craft Battle: Block Wars (Coup Coup), which took 44 countries on day three the day before yesterday, has added nothing in three days: 41 countries, #3. The salvo was a one-off.

Movement

Gainers: Jam Bus: Sandfall 17 → 23 countries and #40 → #26 — a sixth day of steady growth. Block Bloom: Color Blast (Nebula) 4 → 25. Crafty Blox World holds #14 across 24 countries. Triple Harvest 17 → 22.

Losers: House Makeover: Dream Clean 13 → 3 countries and #26 → #52 — yesterday's favorite folded in three days. KPOP Sandbox: Demon Hunters 13 → 5. Chameleon Paint 26 → 15. Smash Out: Cannon Fest 3D 11 → 5.

Publishers

Nebula Studio — four titles in the charts and +29 countries in total over the week: Block Bloom 4 → 25, GOGO! Blast 4 → 10, Tap Tile! holds 47 countries and #8. Portfolio buying, not one lucky title.

Coup Coup is holding both of its crafts: Craft Battle (41 countries) and Craft Builder (9 → 16). Nova Games is carrying Jam Bus on its own — the second title is standing still.

Deltas are over 3 days, not 24 hours.

Scaling Radar — money, August 21

Out of today's forty candidates, exactly two close the loop.

Medal Hunter: Military Game (Ten Square Games, 106 days) — 43 countries in Top Free, #1 in Czechia, and at the same time Grossing #28 in eight countries with a 500,000+ bracket and IAP up to $99.99. The only one on the list where a wide rollout and money move together. The age is no longer early, and this is not a find but a model of what a properly working buying operation looks like.

Bendy's Nightmare Run — Grossing #99 in the US on day nine of its life, with 35 countries in Top Free. One country and the tail of the chart, but for a title that was nowhere at all yesterday, it means IAP switched on immediately.

Water Sort: Romantic Dream (Blue Blaze, 10 days) — install bracket jumped to 50,000+, IAP catalog up to $99.99, Grossing empty. Normal for a ten-day-old title: it is rolling out carefully, and the money logically lags behind.

Next, those who have had the volume for a long time and still show no money.

Triple Harvest™ (Flyfox, 65 days) — 1,216 reviews a day, 22 countries, bracket jumped to 1,000,000+, IAP up to $49.99 — and zero countries in Grossing. Two months, a million installs, an IAP catalog assembled, and the title does not enter the paying charts at all. Either conversion never took off, or the entire economy is on ads, in which case the IAP catalog is decoration.

People Jam: Seat Puzzle (Solid Games, 70 days) — the same diagnosis, only harsher: 1,745 reviews a day, the highest rate in the whole batch, 25 countries, 500,000+ installs, IAP up to $99.99, Grossing empty. And the best rank slipped #43 → #47 on growing geo: they are paying for reach and the return is falling.

Jam Bus: Sandfall — the bracket moved to 100,000+, geo has been growing for a sixth day, Grossing is still zero. I flagged it yesterday and repeat it only because the volume has grown since and the money side has not budged.

Unscrew Bolts Puzzle — the bracket jumped from 5,000+ straight to 100,000+, twentyfold, with zero reviews a day. Installs are growing past any visible audience.

And two cases where the bracket does not square with activity: Hair Salon Halloween Party — 1,000,000+ on day four with zero reviews, Craft Battle: Block Wars — 1,000,000+ on day five, also zero. Both with an empty IAP catalog. The volume is declared, there is no trace of live players.

Scaling Radar — week in review

The window is incomplete: six days with data instead of seven.

What happened to the ones we flagged

Six rolled out, and they are the ones that were praised on merit. Water Sort: Romantic Dream — 7 → 17 countries without a single pullback. Zoodoku! on iOS — 3 → 7 countries and #24 → #8, the call holds for the third time in a row. Block Bloom (Nebula) sat on 4 countries for four days and then went to 25 — a rare case where the pause was not death but preparation. POINPY (Devolver) — 19 → 35 countries and #37 → #3, pulled back to #12 by Friday.

Now the misses, and they matter more. KPOP Sandbox: Demon Hunters — I talked it up on Wednesday as an entry riding the series wave: 13 countries, CL #28. By Friday, 5 countries and #40. The wave turned out to be shorter than the buying. House Makeover: Dream Clean — the same script: 13 countries and #26 on Wednesday, 3 countries and #52 today. Both were flagged on the third day of their run-up, and both folded on the fifth; the conclusion is simple — four days of growth in a row is not yet a phase.

Craft Battle: Block Wars — the 44-country salvo in a single day that I wrote about on Wednesday has not added one new country in three days. It has not deflated, but it has not moved either: a one-off dump, not scaling.

Separately, Chameleon Paint — 30 → 15 countries, #18 → #48: it bled out slowly across the whole week, and daily snapshots do not show that.

Genres and geo

The only genre adding countries en masse was Puzzle: +0.64 countries per title across 217 games in the sample. Everything else with meaningful volume is either flat or losing: Casual at zero across 402 games, Simulation −0.15, Arcade −0.41. The sharpest contractions were Roleplaying (−1.9), Strategy (−1.67) and Adventure (−1.35) — nobody was entering there this week.

The cheap-test map for games under two months old: Chile (14 entries), Malaysia (14), Peru (14), the Philippines (13), Denmark (13), Poland (12), New Zealand (12). Denmark here is not about being cheap — Scandinavia is taken as a premium read.

On iOS the map is completely different: Denmark, Vietnam, Japan, Germany. Android is launched in batches of dozens of countries, iOS pointwise and one at a time. Those are different budgets and different decisions, and they should not be measured with the same ruler.

Publishers of the week

Nebula Studio — four titles, +29 countries in total, and all of them alive: Block Bloom 4 → 25, GOGO! Blast 4 → 10, Tap Tile! 47 countries and #8, Zoodoku 29 countries. The main portfolio player of the week.

Oakever — four titles, +16 countries, but differently: Meowdoku and Amaze GO! are standing on their 35 and 46 countries, and the entire gain came from two coloring titles. Not a run-up, but a budget reshuffle inside the portfolio.

Tripledot holds nine titles across both platforms and started two new ones this week — Code Word on Android and its crossword on iOS. KAYAC — seven titles, and the whole weekly gain came from a single Ragdoll Skater (+25 countries).

Money for the week

223 titles jumped their install bracket upward, and 53 of them have an empty Grossing with a full IAP catalog in place. The biggest: Crafty Blox World (500,000+ → 1,000,000+, 43 days, IAP up to $29.99), Paint & Hide: Color Guys — from 50,000+ straight to 1,000,000+, twentyfold, with #1 in Top Free and zero in Grossing. Bus Crowd and Arrow Puzzle — 100,000+ → 500,000+, same story.

The opposite pole, where buying pays back: Clash of Critters (1,000,000+ → 5,000,000+, Grossing #5 in 45 countries), OOC: The Playable Anime (#2 in 36), Quack Bag: Duck Mafia (#14 in 35 with a 1,000,000+ bracket). All three are hybrids with real depth, and that is exactly the line splitting the market right now: pure HC drives volume and does not enter the paying charts at all.