A new episode of Games and Names, a podcast about the gaming industry from AppMagic and WN Media Group, has been released. This time the guest of the podcast was Arseniy Lebedev, CEO and co-founder of the Original Games studio. The hosts talked to him about the merge-games market.
Just below are the main theses of the issue. As for the full version, you can listen to it on:
The origins of merge games
The pioneer of the merge genre is the studio Spry Fox. In 2010, she released the puzzle Triple Town. In it, three identical chips located on adjacent squares were combined into an improved version. Three or more improved versions were combined into an even more improved one and so on.
Triple Town
The difficulty was that there were several types of chips. With incorrect space management, different types of chips blocked each other’s evolution. Therefore, the free space on the playing field always ended. At the same time, the player’s task was to put chips on the field in such a way that an empty space remained on it as long as possible.
This is how the merge-3 genre appeared, which remained niche for a long time.
The situation has changed thanks to the appearance of Merge Dragons!, in which the Turkish studio Gram Games successfully rethought the original concept. Thanks to the innovations, the game has retained the basic principles of merge, but at the same time it has become very reminiscent of the classic builder. Construction, harvesting and resources, opening zones and timers appeared in it. Along with the new mechanics came monetization based on the sale of time and rare resources, which allowed the game to earn $ 20 million a month at its peak.
Despite the success of Merge Dragons!, not all developers were ready to follow in this direction. Many teams were interested in creating merge titles that were less overloaded with mechanics, simpler and more understandable to a wide audience of players.
The Finnish studio Metacore, which launched Merge Mansion in 2020, became a pioneer here. The key innovation of her flagship project was that two items instead of three became enough to get an improved version of a particular chip. The corresponding subgenre was named merge-2.
The Original Games studio followed in the footsteps of Metacore. Its founder Arseny Lebedev believes that one of the reasons for the emergence (and at the same time popularity among developers) of the new direction was the desire of young teams to get into the casual market, while avoiding direct competition with the box office colossi match-3 and merge-3.
Young studios, even with investments, were unable to compete with King or Playrix in the casual market. It was impossible to keep up with the market leaders not only because of the size of their teams, but also because of the amount of resources they could invest in promotion: “It all comes down to UA, how much you can spend on optimization.”
Lebedev believes that another reason for the popularity of the genre among teams is that the development of merge-2 is close to creating hyper-casual titles: “You make a simple gameplay, and then you scale it.” At least, this is the principle followed in Original Games. The team divides the development of the game into many short cycles, within each of which the game goes through many iterations. As soon as any of the approaches works, the team begins to develop it.
Merge Inn
Merge Inn development and Hybrid monetization
Speaking about the short development cycle, Lebedev noted that it took only two weeks to create the first prototype of Merge Inn, which included core gameplay.
At the initial stage of development , the team was assigned two tasks:
- using animals as characters (this, according to Lebedev, was a very risky decision);
- to create a meta that, on the one hand, would be endless, and on the other, not very deep (without construction and decoration).
Original Games conducted nine visual style tests on Facebook. As a result, the studio settled on a culinary concept with cartoon characters depicted in the Disney style. It was he who showed the highest level of user engagement.
“Culinary themes are great for merge games,” Lebedev shares. — “There are a lot of ingredients in the dishes. There are also a huge variety of dishes themselves. And the more chains you’ve made, the crazier the result.”
Lebedev considers it important for the user to be interested in finding out what he can get by combining certain chips. Not all developers understand this, because, according to him, in many merge titles there is a boring setting where there is no place for surprise.
The focus on the culinary theme not only allowed Original Games to create infinitely long chains of item evolutions, but also helped to achieve a retention level comparable to more complex merge games.
As for monetization, according to Lebedev, the game earns very well from rewarding advertising. The team managed to find the places in the game cycle that are most successful for converting users into viewers. At the moment, half of the game revenue comes from advertising, and the second half comes from micropayments.
Merge Inn
The state of affairs in the merge-games market and operating issues
Lebedev believes that there are three types of companies that are currently engaged in games in the merge genre:
- large studios that make their way to the very top, spending huge sums on UA and teams;
- small teams offering innovative products with non-standard combinations of mechanics, thereby gaining a foothold in the niche;
- companies that are trying to win back market share by creating clones of popular titles.
Regardless of the approach, it is impossible to achieve success in the merge-games market today without a good liveops strategy. The task of the latter is to achieve the correct segmentation of the audience, and then within each of the segments to form a loyal core of paying and playing users.
Lebedev calls Moon Active, the developer of the Coin Master mobile slot blockbuster, the leading liveops specialist. Not all teams have comparable resources, however, based on their experience, Lebedev assures that the liveops team should be four times larger than the development team.
Also, according to him, the developers of merge games should learn from the authors of hyper-casual titles. “Having decided to introduce a mini-game into a large project, why not first test the level of its involvement on the audience of interest by launching it as a separate hyper-casual title.”
Merge Mansion
The main problem of merge games and its solution
Lebedev claims that the main problem of merge games is long-term retention. He believes that a casual game can be considered successful only if it is able to retain players for at least two years.
The problem with merge titles is that each of them is a field for combining items. And the place on this field inevitably ends with time. It doesn’t matter if the game has a strong plot or a great liveops. One way or another, the developer is forced to offer the player a new field with completely different content, thereby essentially zeroing out the user’s previous progress.
This is exactly what hits retention. According to Lebedev, no one has yet come up with a universal solution to the problem.
However, according to him, one of the solutions may be an advanced social functionality: “The core of the audience, which, in fact, is focused on by liveops, is well involved with various social tools, so perhaps the development of social functionality may be the way out.”
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More about merge games can be found in the podcast release below.