Having reached the highest rank of TOP4 on the bestseller list and gained 4.72 million downloads on iOS within 3 days, how is the performance of the first game of the "new" Lingxi?
Recently, Lingxi Games has rolled out new moves.
Its new two-dimensional basketball-themed game Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak was officially launched on October 23.
In terms of market performance, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak had already topped the iOS free game chart during the pre-download phase, and climbed all the way to the 4th highest position on the top-grossing chart after its launch.
It is worth noting that Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak is the first heavyweight public beta new product of Lingxi after its "de-Alibaba" process, so its product performance and user acquisition actions have attracted wide attention from the industry.
What are the specific details? DataEye Research Institute will discuss this product today.
Market & Product Observation: Highest Ranking Top 4
(1) Market Performance Observation
According to Diandian Data, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak was officially launched on iOS on October 23, and pre-download was opened as early as October 21. On the day pre-download was made available, the product immediately topped the iOS free game chart and remained at the top until its official launch on October 23. As of October 28, after the first weekend following launch, it ranked 12th on the iOS free game chart.
Its performance on the top-grossing chart is equally impressive. On the first day of launch on October 23, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak only ranked 36th on the iOS top-grossing game chart, but it kept climbing in the following two days and broke into the top 10. On October 27, it reached its highest ranking of 4th on the iOS top-grossing chart.
In terms of specific data, Diandian Data shows that as of October 25, the total number of downloads of Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak on the iOS platform reached about 639,000 (including the pre-download phase), with estimated revenue of about 4.72 million yuan in the first 3 days after official launch.
Overall, as a new two-dimensional game that is neither a big IP title nor an open-world work, it has gained remarkable popularity at the initial stage of launch, and its revenue momentum is also quite eye-catching. It is worth noting that after launch, the TapTap score of this product remains at 8.2 points, with users recognizing its high-quality content, while negative reviews mainly focus on operational issues such as resource benefits, high pay-to-win intensity, and level-locking design.
DataEye Research Institute believes that topping the free game chart can be achieved in a short period through user acquisition and topic hype, but for a two-dimensional game, being able to steadily rank in the top 10 of the top-grossing chart at the initial stage without a sharp drop in player scores indicates that users have a very high acceptance of this product.
(2) Product Observation
In terms of gameplay content, players act as the new coach of the team in the game, and their main tasks include recruiting players, conducting training, and making on-the-spot command decisions. Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak does not have the "operation threshold" of traditional basketball mobile games. Matches adopt the mode of automatic calculation plus manual command, where players make strategic choices in key rounds, giving the whole game a strong "basketball manager" vibe.
In terms of off-match character progression, each player has six-dimensional attributes: shooting, jumping, dribbling and control, defense, physical strength, and awareness. The core of progression is to improve these six dimensions: players arrange weekly training plans, and promote attribute growth through random events, weekend activities and other mechanisms. For character acquisition, the game is equipped with a "player gacha pool", where players consume specific resources to recruit characters, which is consistent with the logic of traditional two-dimensional games.
In terms of art design, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak adopts a dual-track system like most two-dimensional games: Japanese-style two-dimensional illustrations are used for plot presentation, and exquisite full-body character artworks with normal human proportions are used to attract players; after entering the match, characters turn into 3D Q-version avatars with 3 heads tall, simple lines and simplified facial details, but with smooth basketball movements — this is a functional art style that "serves the actual performance of the game".
(3) Summary of Observation
From the product perspective, the initial market performance of Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak is quite considerable, with remarkable performance in both product popularity and revenue generation capacity.
DataEye Research Institute believes that the project team targets the group of "sports + character progression" players. In the past, most of these users were occupied by products such as Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and Haikyuu!!: New Journey, but restricted by the relatively niche nature of sports themes, the overall market size was not particularly large.
The difference of Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak lies in two aspects: on the one hand, basketball has far higher public awareness in China than horse racing and volleyball, and the setting of energetic beautiful girls playing sports is more in line with the preferences of male players of traditional two-dimensional games; on the other hand, the official amplifies exposure through NBA collaboration — although NBA fans are not the core target users, this collaboration can help the product gain cross-circle attention and build trust among a group of general sports male users who are interested in basketball.
Essentially, it cuts into the "sports + character progression" track that has been verified by Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and Haikyuu!!: New Journey, but replaces the niche themes with basketball which has a larger mass base, thus expanding the user boundary from "hardcore two-dimensional game fans" to the reach of "two-dimensional game + basketball" users, and gaining initial popularity. Whether this momentum can be maintained in the follow-up still requires continuous observation.
User Acquisition Observation: Massive Concentrated Explosion of Ad Placement Plans
(1) User Acquisition Status
According to DataEye-ADX data, after the final round of test on September 2, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak launched multiple rounds of large-scale material tests in early September and mid-to-late September respectively, with the peak daily number of tested materials close to 700. After September 19, the number of materials dropped, but the average daily number of placed materials still remained close to 100.
On October 20, the day before pre-download was opened, the number of placed materials increased significantly. On the day of official launch, the number of daily materials exceeded 1200, reaching the recent peak, after which the number of placed materials dropped obviously.
It should be noted that the increase of material volume after launch is a conventional operation rhythm. What is really noteworthy is that the corresponding number of ad placement plans is extremely high.
DataEye-ADX data shows that 1200 pieces of materials on the first day of launch were associated with more than 22,000 sets of plans, and 970 pieces of materials on the second day were associated with more than 65,000 sets of plans, showing an obvious rhythm of node-concentrated and explosive placement.
(2) Creative Materials
DataEye Research Institute sorted out the high-performance materials of Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak in the past 30 days, and summed up four directions:
The first type is NBA collaboration themed materials: This type of materials takes "official authorization", "All-Star jersey" and "authenticity of basketball" as hooks, and uses "gijinka (girlification)" as the gimmick, targeting general basketball users and sports anime audiences.
The second type is character display materials: This type of materials emphasizes the combination of "beautiful girls + hardcore basketball", focuses on showing the attractive figure, appearance and hardcore technical movements of characters, subverts the traditional male-dominated narrative of basketball, and corely attracts light users of two-dimensional games.
The third type is character short skit materials: This type of materials attracts attention through short skits performed by characters. The advantage of this method is that besides showing character personalities, it can quickly catch up with internet hot topics, such as the plot where the player is only allowed to play when the team is far behind in the match, gets mercilessly mocked, and finally shouts: Basketball girls, let's go!
The fourth type is gameplay display and welfare bombing materials: This type of materials mainly shows game content, including how to carry out character progression and in-match strategic choices, with the core purpose of proactively educating the market that this is not a traditional competitive basketball mobile game. At the same time, it shows a large number of welfare elements, such as 200 free gacha pulls, optional SSR characters, and NBA skins. It is a pure conversion-oriented material, which is responsible for pushing hesitant users over the download threshold.
(3) Summary of User Acquisition Observation
Overall, Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak did not adopt the SLG user acquisition model that "cultivates users over years", but used a small number of high-quality materials paired with a large number of differentiated targeting, bidding and placement combinations to quickly gain traffic, reach more target audiences, accumulate a group of core users after official launch, and then rely on organic traffic and word of mouth to retain users.
DataEye Research Institute believes that this placement strategy is essentially an extensive play of "trading volume for probability", but it also reflects the consideration of the project team: on the one hand, as the first product of the "new" Lingxi, the team needs a "satisfactory" performance, and stacking placement plans may be the most straightforward and effective solution; on the other hand, the project team tried the "two-dimensional + sports + character progression" track for the first time, so they need to quickly verify through a large number of bidding combinations to figure out user acceptance in a very short period of time.
It is also observed that the product not only obtained official endorsement from the NBA brand, but also invited well-known basketball influencers and two-dimensional KOL "Rabbit Girl" to endorse the product. These partners have high audience verticality. A large number of placement plans essentially aim to maximize the value of materials, reach real target users in a wider range, and finally complete conversion.
But it is undeniable that this strategy also exposes the reality that the project team has insufficient material content production capacity. Moreover, a large number of plans will compete for traffic with each other, which will easily drive up the marketing cost and lead to the marketing budget being consumed in advance, thus affecting the follow-up user acquisition rhythm — after the explosive period of Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak passes, the real market challenge will emerge.
Final Notes
In August 2026, Alibaba and CITIC Capital officially reached a share transfer agreement for Lingxi Games, under which Alibaba sold all its shares in Lingxi, and the transaction is pending subsequent delivery procedures. Basketball Girls: Fly to the Peak is the first public beta new game launched by Lingxi after the transaction was officially announced, and it is also regarded as an important debut of the "new" Lingxi to the market.
In the past, Lingxi's product