Have you already seen the head singing inside the toilet bowl—the viral TikTok remix of Biser King’s Dom Dom Yes Yes? If you have, you’re probably already stupefied by the popularity of the entire Skibidi toilet trend; and if you haven’t, just sit down and get ready for a new episode of Matrix.
We have recently closed in on this trend due to the sharp increase in the number of mobile games it has inspired. As we began to research it, we realized it was all over the social media with millions of views! So, we asked ourselves: where and how has it all started?
History
If we tried to plot a timeline, it would start with Biser King releasing his song Dom Dom Yes Yes in June 2022. Somewhat later, it became popular on TikTok because of the guy with the dancing belly (Yasin Cengiz) who used it as his background sound. Then, almost a year later, in January 2023, YouTube creator DaFuq!?Boom! uploaded his first short with the head singing a remix of Dom Dom Yes Yes inside the toilet bowl.
After the second episode of the series, the Skibidi toilet trend went viral. And we mean really viral: there are сurrently 38 episodes in this universe released, as well as multiple spin-offs, and the most popular one has 134M views and 5.6M likes!
The Plot
There’s a bunch of theories behind the plot of this short series and a number of thoughts on what the message is supposed to be. We have picked a couple we find the most exciting, but feel free to dive into the “uncovering the truth” videos on YouTube to find out more!
The First Skibidist on Earth
So, what DaFuq? Well, if you look at his page with the longer YouTube videos, you will find out that our main character had existed long before all this toilet nonsense started. However, compared to the Skibidi shorts, those videos are way behind with their number of views, averaging from 1 to 2 million only.
Thus, we understand that the universe existed in the pre-Skibidi era. There’s one episode that tells us how it all began: it’s called Every Nightmare. Here, we can see our character in front of some dark space with many elevators and different characters flying around inside them. We tend to believe this is where different universes overlap and interact. This is the moment when we see the Skibidist and hear the song for the first time: it comes from one of the elevators. The Skibidist approaches fast and reaches our main hero, supposedly turning him into the first Skibidist in our universe by touching his head.
The Cameramen
In the first few episodes, everybody seems pretty tolerant to Skibidists, and some people even want to turn into them. However, very soon Skibidists start to take over everything, which makes people realize they need to protect their universe. One of the theories then is that people actually failed this mission, so they fostered a stronger race to fight back: the Cameramen. These are humanoids with cameras instead of heads.
Supposedly, people have engineered Cameramen this way to protect them from turning into Skibidists, since the latter need to actually touch a human’s head to turn them into a new Skibidist.
There’s yet another theory why the creator decided to go for Cameramen in particular. There are tons of memes online about how a cameraman never dies—even in the most dreadful circumstances; there’s a good chance that DaFuq!?Boom! wanted to exploit it as well.
The Speakermen
Moving forward to the next few episodes, yet another race is introduced that is here to support Cameramen: these guys have speakers in place of their heads (ingeniously, let’s call them Speakermen). The leading theory about this lot is that they came to beat Skibidists with their own weapon: music. Also, it’s the first time that we hear another song but Dom Dom Yes Yes.
All Speakermen use the Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears for Fears. Ironic, isn’t it? If you look up the message of the song, you will discover that it portrays political leaders around the world all wanting as much power as they can get. Context is also essential here: the song was written during the Cold War and the ongoing arms race between the capitalist Western and the communist East. So, are they fighters or peacekeepers? We say, let’s wait for more episodes to find out!
Hidden Meaning
Now then: what’s the actual point of this series? Is there a deeper meaning to the entire thing, or is it just another absurd cringe? We tend to stand with the former. In one of the “uncovering the truth” сhannels, an interesting theory is presented that DaFuq!?Boom! offers us a deep and graphic ironic take on viral content in general, depicting how it is capturing more and more of our personal time and attention. It’s essentially a digital epidemic that digs into people’s brains and continuously spreads from one another because we’re actively sharing it.
Reasons Behind Success
So, why has it gotten so viral now, if the universe had, even without Skibidists, existed long before? The Internet suggests several reasons:
- It’s creepy. And people love creepy things! It’s scientifically explained by the ejection of adrenaline that elevates the mood and an opportunity to learn how we behave in crisis situations.
- It’s cringy and absurd. As with horror shows and games, cringe allows us to prepare ourselves for experiencing something—in this case, something majorly upsetting—in real life, thus allowing us to fight our anxiety and insecurity.
- Ongoing plot development. This is something we are always looking for in action movies and series, and it’s accomplished perfectly in this case: with every episode, there’s a new plot twist, a new weapon, new strategic maneuvers—all of it helping capture and hold our attention.
- Hidden meaning. Still not 100% sure that there is one, but let’s have some faith. The chance of a hidden meaning finally being revealed keeps that thrill ongoing, keeping us more invested in the action, as well as looking for small clues. And in the end, if you’re right, you will celebrate the triumph of your smarts.
Skibidi Toilet Games: Market Overview
So far so good? Let’s then move on to the more practical things and discuss how this trend has flooded the mobile games market. First, we will look at all the game releases since the beginning of this year that have “Skibidi toilet” in their names or descriptions.
daily releases
There are 380 games in total, with 204 action titles and 176 others, including fake calls, wallpapers, mods, coloring, images, tips, fan art, memes, and pranks. The peak falls on late May and early June. It seems that the developers have somewhat cooled off about this trend… but the users really haven’t!
daily downloads
Total downloads for all the existing apps are peaking, so we should keep an eye on the trend: there’s a good chance it will continue to show impressive numbers for quite some time.
Deep Dive Into The Games
To give you a better idea of what’s going on with the games in this market segment, we have put together a dashboard with top 10 titles by downloads.
Looking at the graph, we can easily identify an undisputed leader with almost 2 times more downloads than the next game in line. However, let’s keep in mind that the winner has been on the market for longer, with its release shortly after the trend became popular, while other contenders mostly saw the light at the end of May 2023 only.
The first game to look at is, of course, Hunt Skibidi Toilet by Nicholee Breyman, which has already acquired 916k downloads since its January release. The game is a hypercasual first-person shooter where you, as the main character, have to shoot a preset number of Skibidists approaching you with progressively increasing speed. When the level is successfully completed, you earn cash that you can spend on new weapons.
We won’t dwell on Nextbots in Backrooms: Shooter, since it doesn’t really exploit the Skibidi toilet universe, but simply uses the skins from associated games for the monsters that the main characters have to kill in addition to many other hyped scary creatures.
Thus, we turn to Hunt Toilet 2 by Hai Duong. Since its latest version release at the end of May, when the game was probably updated to include the Skibidi toilet trend, it has acquired 125.5k installs. The game itself is a hypercasual arcade where, as a Cameraman, you have to fight against Skibidists, earning coins for defeating them and eventually upgrading to a Speakerman. Two more things to note: firstly, this Skibidist game is blended with something completely different that does not exploit the trend at all; secondly, you really cannot ignore the ads that pop up just about every 5 seconds. We’re expecting their revenue numbers to soar!
At this point in the article, it’s getting frustrating that most of the top 10 titles from the trend only use the Skibidi toilet as a monster for their games, ignoring all the other elements of the universe. So, to give you a better perspective on what’s out there, we are adding a video overview of gameplays from 6 more titles inspired by the Skibidi toilet trend that didn’t make our top 10 yet have already caught public attention.
Conclusion
It seems like we’ve managed to grasp this trend in its upward phase this time, since the series is still in progress and the ending is yet to be revealed. Although the number of new game releases is going down, overall downloads of participating titles are still on the rise. Can we expect a second wave of new games? Let's see where it’s going to take us.
As we have done many times before, we can again highlight how social media trends provide inspiration for developers to build games based on new universes. This time, the key inspiration space turned out to be YouTube-based, with its catchy shorts that don’t require too much time to focus, its unique character that pulls in views, and its catchy viral song that gets stuck in our heads after we hear it just once.
Thus, bringing together all the factors that capture the gamers’ attention, this has quickly moved into the hypercasual space that is well known for exploiting fast-moving trends. What sets it apart this time, however, is that only a few developers have involved the entire new universe so far, many of them opting instead for only incorporating the main villain as an additional feature within some of their own existing scenarios.