Monster Strike: The Billiards Game That Saved Japan's Facebook

In 2013, Mixi was in trouble. Once Japan's answer to Facebook, the social network was losing users to Facebook itself, Twitter and the messaging app LINE. Its rescue came from an unlikely place: a phone game in which you pull back a monster with your finger and let it fly, bouncing off walls and enemies like a ball on a pool table.

That game was Monster Strike, released in Japan in 2013 on iOS and on Android on 14 December 2013. By October 2018, analytics firm Sensor Tower estimated it had earned more than $7.2 billion worldwide, passing Puzzle & Dragons to become the highest-grossing mobile app of all time at that point. It is still one of the biggest games in Japan more than a decade later.

A legend behind the slingshot

Monster Strike was created by Yoshiki Okamoto, one of the most famous producers in arcade history. At Capcom in the 1980s and 1990s, he worked on games including 1942 and produced Street Fighter II, the 1991 arcade game that launched the modern fighting game. He later founded his own studio, Game Republic, before joining forces with Mixi.

Okamoto's idea was simple: take the satisfying physics of pinball and billiards and turn it into a monster-collecting RPG. You flick your monster at enemies; it ricochets around the arena, triggering Bump Combos when it touches allies and dealing heavy damage with Strike Shots when charged.

Multiplayer in the same room

Monster Strike's secret weapon was local multiplayer. Up to four players can team up on one quest, and the game made it easy to invite friends who were physically nearby. In Japan, that turned it into a playground and train-carriage game, with groups of students and office workers huddled around their phones taking turns to flick.

Each player takes a turn in sequence, so a co-op session feels like a board game night: you watch, shout advice and cheer when someone lands a perfect angle. Monsters come from the Hatcher, the game's gacha, and can be fused, evolved and powered up over time.

The money and the movies

The results were extraordinary. Mixi reported Monster Strike content revenue of 19.4 billion yen in the July to September quarter of 2014, then 30 billion yen in the next quarter. By late 2014 it had overtaken Puzzle & Dragons as Japan's highest-grossing mobile app. Analytics estimates put it at about $1.3 billion in both 2016 and 2017, making it the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2016.

By May 2018, more than 45 million people had played. Monster Strike became a media franchise too, with a YouTube anime that premiered on 10 October 2015, several films starting with Monster Strike The Movie in December 2016, and a Nintendo 3DS spin-off in 2015.

The game that stayed home

Not every move worked. Mixi launched an English version for North America and Australia in 2014 and a Korean version, but neither caught on. Korean support ended on 30 November 2016, and the English version closed on 1 August 2017.

The lesson was that Monster Strike's success relied on something hard to export: a culture of playing together in the same place, often on crowded trains and in school breaks, that is particularly strong in Japan.

Why it matters

Monster Strike shows that a great mobile game does not need cutting-edge graphics. It needs a single satisfying action, a reason to play with friends, and a steady flow of new things to collect. It also shows that a company can reinvent itself through games: Mixi turned from a struggling social network into a games and entertainment group largely because of one title.

Our take: if you live in Japan or play on a Japanese account, Monster Strike is still a joy in co-op. For the broader story of how Japan learned to regulate gacha during that era, read our kompu gacha history.