The Hottest Game Mechanic of 2025 🪙

The hottest game mechanic of 2025 is... coin flipping.

0:00 - Flip a coin with me
2:19 - Number goes up
12:11 - The concept of 20%
14:41 - The "ladder"
17:57 - "Meme games"
19:27 - Commenting on humanity with a coin
22:39 - Committing to the eSports bit
26:21 - Simultaneous invention

To watch the developer interviews, subscribe monthly at https://ko-fi.com/matthorton

Unfair Flips on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/39...
Q-UP on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/37...
Music from the original soundtracks of Q-UP and Cobalt Core

At this point you’re probably aware of the game, Unfair Flips, where you flip a coin with the single goal of getting 10 heads in a row. Northernlion has played it. I’ve already made a Short about the game. The game has reached a meme status that often leads to financial success for these smaller, simpler games.

And in the latest Steam Next Fest, a demo for another coin flipping game has come out. Q-UP is a completely different take on flipping a coin, as impossible as that sounds. Where Unfair Flips is stripped down to only the slightest amount of mechanic on top of the basic probability of a coin flip, Q-UP puts that simple game of chance into the context of eSports. This is a video game that straight up looks like Apex Legends or Overwatch or Marvel Rivals. You have seen a video game UI that looks like this. The design is Fortnite maximalist, including a shop, messages from the developers, a carousel of fake news hits about the game, and even daily challenges. You can actually, really queue up with your friends for coin flipping matches. It is a tongue-in-cheek take on eSports that actually does have an interesting game within it, even if the coin flips themselves are completely random.

These games are wildly different takes on a goofy idea, and the distance between those takes leads to thematic differences that I find really interesting. Yes. The two games where you flip coins both have things they’re trying to say. I promise.