At the recently concluded Tencent Games conference, a total of 42 game products were showcased, including 16 self-developed titles, 17 publishing titles, and 9 investment-related titles. The lineup covered 28 cross-platform products and 20 PC-only or console products. Among them, 15 were entirely new products that had not yet launched in the domestic market.

Among these new titles, the dark cosmic fantasy roguelite deck-building card game ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ began its public beta in China on May 28. It was the fastest product in this batch of new games to go live, and also Tencent’s first anime-style game launch of the year.

01

After Two Rounds of Player Testing, ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ Finally Goes Live

Four-Day iOS Revenue Approaches RMB 6 Million, Meeting Expectations

The game was developed by SUPERCREATIVE, a team under Korean game company Smilegate and also the developer of ‘Epic Seven’. Tencent is fully responsible for publishing it in China. Strictly speaking, it is not a brand-new game: its international server officially launched in the second half of last year.

The Chinese server obtained its publishing license in August 2025, opened pre-registration in mid-October, launched the “Navigator Operation” test in mid-to-late November—a non-monetized, data-wipe, closed test for Android and PC—and started the “Deep Diver” test in mid-March, a limited monetized data-wipe test for mobile and PC. In early May, the public beta date was announced. Before the public beta, pre-registrations had already exceeded 5 million.

Let’s look at some concrete performance indicators after the public beta launch.

In terms of chart performance, on the first day of public beta the game topped the iOS free games chart and climbed to No. 29 on the iOS top-grossing games chart. Although its ranking on both charts later declined, the drop was far slower than that of most new games during the same period. It currently sits at No. 18 on the free games chart and No. 47 on the top-grossing chart.

Changes in ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’s iOS Free and Grossing Game Rankings Since Public Beta

In terms of market performance, on the iOS download side, the game opened pre-download one day early on May 27 and recorded 131,000 downloads that day. On the public beta launch day, daily downloads rose to 162,000, then fluctuated around that level for the following two days. However, downloads dropped significantly on the fourth day of public beta, and current daily downloads are around 60,000.

Trend in iOS Downloads for ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ Since Public Beta

On the iOS revenue side, first-day gross revenue was estimated at US$170,000, or about RMB 1.15 million. By the fourth day, daily revenue had grown to US$230,000, or about RMB 1.55 million.

Trend in iOS Revenue for ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ Since Public Beta

As of now, four days into the public beta, ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ has accumulated roughly 670,000 iOS downloads, with total iOS revenue estimated at around US$860,000, or about RMB 5.83 million. Its RPD, or revenue per download, stands at US$1.29, approximately RMB 8.7.

Judging from these short-term results, the Chinese server of ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ has delivered a qualified performance, and has even exceeded original expectations.

02

The Chinese Server Focuses on Solving Three Major Problems

The Experience Needs of Different Player Groups, International-Server Weaknesses, and Version Cadence

The reason the outside world had some concerns about the game is mainly that, although its broad positioning is that of an anime-style mobile game, it does not tilt fully toward “emotional experience and character development.” Instead, it places greater emphasis on gameplay.

The core gameplay of ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ is multi-character DBG deck-building. In each battle, players deploy three characters; each character contributes four exclusive starting cards to the card pool, and players fight around character cards, action points, and draw cycles. Inside combat, the game further layers in roguelite elements, deck development, team composition, equipment, and flash-card choices. The experience resembles ‘Slay the Spire’ plus ‘Darkest Dungeon’, with turn-based combat and a breakdown system. Outside combat, players need to level up characters, raise their constellations, develop potential, and configure support units.

Through the above core gameplay setup, ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ builds a loop of “challenge and discovery—banking results—releasing satisfaction—then challenging and discovering again.”

In an interview with industry media outlet Jinghe, the Chinese server’s publishing producer said the game attracted roughly three types of players in its early stage. The first were users brought in by the development team’s previous title ‘Epic Seven,’ who already had a foundation of awareness around high-quality 2D art and long-term operations. The second were DBG and roguelite deck-building players with strong interest in the gameplay itself. The third were anime-culture users attracted by the art style, world view, and monster design.

The choice of combining deck-building, roguelite elements, and anime-style games helps avoid direct competition on the main anime-game track, and quite a few companies have made similar attempts. Yet the success rate has long been low. For example, NetEase’s ‘Black Surge Night,’ launched in 2021, shut down less than a year and a half after release due to broken numerical balance and overly aggressive card-pool monetization.

Image from Game Pioneer

Therefore, given the composition of its player base, the first challenges ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ must face if it wants to succeed are: how to strengthen the intuitive experience for anime-game players; how to integrate the current decision-heavy and random core gameplay with the contradictory logic of anime-style gacha and character development; and how to lower the entry barrier for non-hardcore players.

Regarding the anime-style attributes, the game’s world view is set in an apocalyptic despair filled with dark fantasy and Cthulhu-esque flavor. Its opening narrative also has a grand hook: “Chaos” is a disaster that devours the universe; contaminated planets undergo mutations, and life gradually loses itself amid mental collapse and physical distortion. The character illustrations are extremely vivid and refined. A “manual unlock” switch hidden in character files directly benchmarks against ‘Goddess of Victory: NIKKE.’ In addition, the illustrations shown when characters accumulate stress and enter a breakdown state are also a key attraction for anime-game players.

GIF 1 — GIF from Game Pioneer

For integrating the current core gameplay with anime-style gacha and development, the game’s solution is an “extract after combat” approach: powerful decks that players build in roguelite dungeons can be saved directly as “archives” and used in specific mode stages. At the same time, season cards updated continuously through the seasonal system allow more characters to appear on stage. This not only connects in-run randomness with out-of-run development, but also helps achieve the goal of long-term activity.

As for lowering the barrier to entry, the game mainly addresses this in two directions. First, inside the game, the current and future Chinese-server versions are continuously adding beginner guidance and system tutorials, such as a “big-data team recommendation system” and highlighted display of suitable flash cards and equipment during runs. Second, the official team has continued to encourage more KOLs, KOCs, and players to jointly build a content ecosystem, allowing the community to help new players understand and integrate into the game.

Beyond gameplay, the Chinese server public beta also faced doubts because of a series of negative actions by the development team during the early international-server public beta.

On October 22, 2025, the international version, ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare,’ officially launched in more than 170 countries and regions worldwide. On that day, it entered the top 50 iOS free games chart in 31 regional markets. First-month downloads reached 2.96 million, and first-month revenue reached US$23.7 million, or about RMB 160 million.

International Server’s iOS Free Games Chart Performance on the First Day of Public Beta

However, at that time the game experience was not actually so complete. Problems included frequent localization and translation errors, suspicions of AI-generated artwork, and issues with development investment and numerical balance. The largest wave of negative feedback was triggered by the “marginalization of the protagonist.” Producer Kim Hyung-seok was questioned for “excessively interfering with the writing and forcing several scenario writers to leave.” These factors later caused market data to fall rapidly: daily active users plunged by 35%, the negative-review rate once soared to 78%, and the rating dropped from 4.3 to 2.9.

To avoid repeating those mistakes, the Chinese server public beta rewrote the main story from Chapters 1 to 5, positioning “Faust” as the absolute core. This thoroughly resolved the overseas launch’s early pain points of sluggish narration and poor experience. The team also carried out comprehensive voice rerecording and UI readability optimization, and introduced Chinese-server-first characters “Fei” and “Ruixiang,” whose designs deeply integrate ancient Chinese Nuo culture.

At the same time, on the first day of server launch it directly opened the internationally best-received “Wailing Spiral Tower” and “Sortie” modes, avoiding the awkward overseas early-stage situation of “thin early content, with the core unlocked only later.” In terms of reducing grind and burden, it optimized PT point calculation logic, so some card copying and deletion no longer negatively affect PT value; opened stored-data editing; added the campfire “Meditation” function, allowing players at in-run campfires to spend opportunities to retrigger “Inspiration”; and greatly optimized synchronization of combat-power development.

The welfare package is also quite sincere. Free-to-play newcomers can receive basic launch benefits worth 73 pulls. The beginner pool offers 200 pulls to choose 10, and the game further grants a selectable five-star main combatant, a selectable five-star support combatant, and the extremely core EGO breakthrough material “Omega Code” to players who meet login-day and level requirements.

Finally, regarding the version gap with the international server, the Chinese server’s publishing producer also said in an interview that the Chinese server launches on a more mature version, while resource supplementation and seasonal-cadence adjustments will be used to smooth out the gap with the international server as much as possible. It is expected to achieve global synchronization in around two months after launch, with most content expected to sync directly with the international server during the summer.

03 Conclusion

Overall, thanks to its innovative and logically complete gameplay structure, as well as the Chinese server’s targeted adjustments and optimizations based on the international server’s shortcomings, ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’s strong short-term results are within reason.

As for long-term vitality, the international server can serve as a reference. Although it encountered turbulence in the early public-beta period, the game’s subsequent performance stabilized. It was not until January 2026 that monthly revenue fell below US$10 million, reaching about US$7.52 million, or roughly RMB 51 million. This year, monthly revenue has fluctuated between about US$3.5 million and US$8.5 million, with May revenue at US$8.57 million, or around RMB 28.5 million. As of now, total international-server revenue is estimated at US$70.21 million, or about RMB 475 million, with Japan, the United States, and Korea ranking as the top three markets at 28.75%, 24.65%, and 14.47%, respectively.

Monthly Revenue Trend of International Server ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ Since Public Beta

It can therefore be seen that the game’s gameplay and packaging have their own core audience in T1 markets, and its capability for long-term operation has already been verified. Since the Chinese server also has solid external market conditions and product quality, its future is certainly worth looking forward to.