Nice Plans Studio has raised $3 million to launch a new mobile shooter, Ricochet Squad, and rethink the genre.
The Limassol, Cyprus-based company will use the funds to further develop Ricochet Squad, which has already achieved its product market fit.
Pixeldog, a family office, led the round, with $600,000 coming from the founders. Previously the team built Tacticool, a mobile-native shooter named one of 2019’s top five competitive mobile games by Google Play and installed more than 30 million times. The game generated more than $90 million in revenue.
Ricochet Squad has already outperformed Tacticool in average revenue per user (ARPU), retention and early monetization during soft launch. In 2024, the game doubled early retention to match top shooter benchmarks; and achieved a near top-percentile player-to-payer conversion rate for the genre in 2025, with 4% to 5% on day one. Ricochet Squad is already hitting its stride, onboarding thousands of new players.
Ricochet Squad offers players a fresh and innovative experience, unlike anything they have seen in other shooters focused on precision aiming and solo play. It emphasizes action, tactics and autofire, delivering an experience designed for mobile. Behind the scenes, the game runs on a network architecture that’s unconventional for shooters.
The studio runs a full game simulation on the server, which makes real-time destruction possible — a player can shatter a massive concrete monument, and every other player sees the exact same debris, in the same place, at the same moment.
Players combine abilities to create powerful team combos — one hero can drop a gravity funnel to pull enemies together, while another follows up with explosives for a full wipe. Matches are fast-paced 3v3 battles where physics, destruction, and smart coordination decide the outcome.
Roman Malakhov, CEO of Nice Plans Studio, said in a statement. “Our mission is to evolve mobile multiplayer through games built on shared foundations: physics-driven combat, reimagined controls, meaningful teamplay, and systems designed for long-term engagement.”
In its next games, the company will further expand its gameplay formula, introducing a chemistry engine (fire, ice, etc.) and vehicles.
The studio is now preparing a Series A raise to scale Ricochet Squad and accelerate a portfolio strategy grounded in physics-driven combat. A recent market report from DataIntelo projects the mobile shooter segment to surpass $24.3 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 12.5%, which is exactly the wave Nice Plans wants to ride.
Origins
The founders Roman Malakhov, CEO, and Dmitry Koblyk, game director, have spent the past eight years shipping and scaling mobile shooters together. They started the studio in 2024 and it now has 21 people distributed around the world.
“On our previous game Tacticool, we learned a lot about how to make real-time PvP (player-versus-player) game on mobile,” said Koblyk. “We had many challenges, and we wanted to make the second version bigger and learn from our mistakes. So we changed the setting, made the graphics more appealing to a wider audience, and our main focus was on the core gameplay.”
The sandboxgame will have more interactions between heroes and the environment. The game has physics-based gameplay. You can throw a grenade and someone, they can catch it with a kinesis power and then toss it away.
“Every hero can interact with every physical object,” Koblyk said. “We are distinct from other shooters because we have simple controls. We only have three buttons and two analog sticks. We really don’t have a lot of buttons, and we can play like a new generation Fortnite. We have auto-aim mechanics in our game, where the hero automatically shoots when he sees an enemy.”
The game has a bright, colorful look, not unlike Fortnite. The aim was to create characters who would be appealing to a wide audience.
The team has looked into AI, and they have used it for some art prototyping. But they’re not using it on a wide scale yet. The game also doesn’t have any Web3 features.
Over time, the company may take the game to new platforms beyond mobile. But that’s not in the near future. The company has started testing the game in the Philippines, Poland and the United Kingdom. The goal is to scale up the game to a global launch this fall.