REMEBER “Big Watermelon?” When the game came out on WeChat last year, it accumulated more than 15 million players in just two days. It is such a simple casual game that let many mobile phone users spent hours and hours in merging fruits to form bigger ones until they finally create a giant watermelon.

This month, another addictive game has been gripping Chinese WeChat users. “Sheep a Sheep,” a rough translation of the game’s name “羊了个羊,” has gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. The game’s WeChat index, an indicator of a topic’s popularity on the super app, hit 174 million Sunday. Its peak was 242 million Sept. 16, 60 times that of Sept. 13.

This match-the-tiles game, which was created by the startup company Beijing Jianyou Technology, features a series of tiles with pictures of items shepherds would use in sheep husbandry. At the bottom of the screen is a bar of seven spaces for you to place the tiles. Place three matching tiles in the spaces to eliminate them and once you’ve eliminated all the tiles, you win.

It sounds easy but it is rare that players are even able to win at Level 2 and the game’s brief introduction boasts that less than 0.1% of players can complete all the levels. When clicking tiles, players have to pay attention to how many spaces are left in the bottom bar. Plus, when choosing each tile, players should calculate their next moves. The most annoying part of the game is that players have to watch repeated commercials to gain tools in the game; even so, many still spent hours being soaked up in the game because they believed they could win at last.

The popularity of “Sheep a Sheep” once again proves the vitality of casual games on WeChat but experts say their viral hits won’t last long because “this kind of games’ popularity lies in trending topics on social media, and the quality of casual games has limitations,” National Business Daily quoted iiMedia Research CEO Zhang Yi as saying.

“‘Sheep a Sheep’ is a hard but fun game, but it’s a built-in game that is low-cost. In the fierce competition of mobile phone games, once a casual game’s popularity has diminished, its revenue will soon slump,” said Liao Xuhua, a game analyst of Analysys.

Beijing Jianyou Technology was founded in 2021 with 1.17 million yuan (US$168,000) in registered capital. Its biggest shareholder Zhang Jiaxu holds 85.5%, while 10% is owned by Leiting Games, a subsidiary of G-bits Network Technology Xiamen Co. Ltd. that develops multi-player online games.

(Cao Zhen)