Thread by @ZhugeEX

Ok, Let's go on a journey.

Over the past two weeks the #MuseDash hashtag on TikTok has been blowing up.

It first started blowing up on Chinese TikTok (Douyin) where it has nearly 400m views. Overseas it has nearly 60m views.

So what is Muse Dash and why is this notable?
1/

Muse Dash is an anime style music rhythm game developed by a team in Guangzhou, China and published by XD Network, also China based.

The game has been out for over a year and is doing well for an indie title

Please note some of the in game art is 18+ as noted in Steam tags

If you use TikTok then you've probably come across the #MuseDash trend yourself. While it has taken on various forms at this point, it started out on Nov 8 as a simple live wallpaper video that had characters from the game in it

These videos captured the attention of many people

As the trend started to grow many TikTok creators added their own take to it. Whether it was creating more advanced live wallpapers, dancing along to the music themselves, or creating funny videos around the trend such as the example below.

Viewers had two questions:

The first being: How could they create these live wallpapers or use them themselves?

It turns out these had been created using Wallpaper Engine, an app on Steam that lets people create or use live wallpapers on their desktop

So people downloaded it

This explains why Wallpaper Engine, seemingly out of nowhere, was the 9th best selling SKU on Steam last week despite no sale or promotion.

Active users of Wallpaper Engine increased notably after this trend because of videos like those above.

https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1330577965344821255?s=20

The second question viewers had was: Who are these characters?

The TikTok community set out to organically answer this, whether it be in the comments or via videos

What started as just a live wallpaper, led to numerous creative videos and the promotion of these two apps/games.

So what was the impact on Muse Dash as a game?

In China the game jumped from #46 to #1 on the iOS paid game chart. It has been #1 since Nov 15.

On Steam the title doubled its concurrent user count in the past week.

Overall the game has now passed more than 2.4m unit sales.

XD Network did indeed capitalise on the trend once they noticed what was going on and did two things.

1. A sale for the game / in game content.
2. Further paid promotion in TikTok (Douyin) to drive people to the game. (They said 200k went from Douyin to buying the game).

The creation of the trend and the initial promotion of Wallpaper Engine / Muse Dash was completely organic, and it once again shows the power of new social apps and those communities (global scale)

It's not the first example of games blowing up on TikTok and won't be the last