The mobile market continues to experience a boom of games in the genre of “three-in-a-row”. Following a series of clones of Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga, big players begin to present their “homemade preparations”. Next up is Big Fish, which recently published Cascade.
I’ve been biting my nails for months and waiting for the hype around the genre to come to naught. This, however, does not prevent me from running one or another game in the “three—in-a-row” genre every day. However, I did not reach level 200 of any of the “sagas”, unlike some of my colleagues, who are now starting to feel sick from novelties of this kind. And it is looking at them that I begin to fear for the genre. On the other hand, there is an opinion that, in terms of monetization, casual projects are not as strongly tied to individual users as, for example, hardcore projects in which individuals make a cash register.
In addition, since more or less successful “three-in-a-row” continue to appear on the market, and King seems to be far from bankruptcy, we can assume that everything is still good in this segment. Perhaps there is fatigue at some industrial level (yeah, this one also couldn’t stand it, also developed and published match 3), but not at the user level. Although I have heard comments a la more than once: “Oh, a new game, and why is it so similar to game N, no, I won’t play, I keep playing that one.”
I mean, yesterday Big Fish published its own “three-in-a-row” with slot elements.
The game has an 8×7 field, in each cell of which there are crystals. Under the field there is a shelf with seven cells, in which there are seven more gems. The user can interact only with crystals from cells, but there is another limitation: a crystal can only be transferred from an n-cell to the n-row of the field. When the cells are empty, the player presses the Spin button and gets a new row of gems.
The original mechanics with the traditional match-3 “body kit” is spoiled by the nondescript and poor animation graphics.
Anyway, we are very interested in how the project will show itself in the near future. Yes, we are aware: Big Fish has a lot of traffic, but whether it will help to achieve Cascade success is unknown.