Puzzle Monthly #3: the Merge 2 Secret Tell-All Episode

I mean, no offense, but this is the nerdiest group of people I've been on a [ __ ] call with ever. This is insane.
I think that's that's fair. Good timing.
Hello everyone and welcome to Puzzle Monthly, your favorite podcast for everything puzzle. I'm your host AC, chief product officer at Rotage Lab, and writer and consultant at The Construct of Fun. Today we have
Laura Tarranto, puzzle queen is usually my title. I currently work for Microsoft at Minecraft, but puzzle games in my heart will never die. Tom?
[laughter]
Puzzle queen is an amazing title, and also CPO is pretty good as well. I am experimenter at the experimentation group.
I'm David Nelson, troublemaker, and uh
[laughter]
uh CEO at Magnetic, and I and I'm the chief foil to Laura. My mission in life

is to like, you know, find ways to, you know, argue more with Laura.
[laughter]
Nice.
All right, so no news today, and we're going to jump straight into the main topic today, which is merge, and if they are ever going to take over match three, or what is like in their future. And Phil, do you want to take the lead with like introducing the whole like history of merge, and maybe talking about what we think lays ahead in their future.
Uh special guest, hi.
Phil, you may know me from my other guest appearances on Twig, recurring guest star. Laura, I think you have a great analytic history for merge, and I just play one on TV, so I'd love to learn from you. Before we get into economy.
Oh, that's so kind. All right, so we are going to talk about merge today. We decided we're going to scrap the news because there's so much interest there's so much jam-packed into what's happening with the merge segments. We I think there was a couple things we'll discuss in terms of was merge

meant to be this way? Did we all believe it was going to make have a resurgence and a comeback? We'll go into all those points. I'll start with the brief history and I have to fully disclose this is from a previous podcast I did on 2.5 gamers when we covered merge, but it gives a very good history of casual merge as a subgenre. First earliest game was Fry Fox's Trip Triple Town. This is way back when. So this is like an old this is an old category. Triple Town was with the bears. You're trying to It was a very difficult game. If I were I remember playing it be like, why is this so hard?
[laughter]
And then we had a couple years later we had 2048. Now we have this break into merge. So merge when you think about it has two main variations. There's merge three and merge two. And I'm glad we have Phil here today because the economies behind them are very different. Full disclosure, I worked on Evermerge. So that was where I was before I joined My Cafe. Well, who's considered kind of the grandfather maybe of the merge two variation within the subgenre is probably Gram Games Merge Dragons. I know it was created by I

think his name is Rey Massa. Going way back when I believe Gram bought it from him and then they they developed it further. They came out then with Merge Magic. Then we had Evermerge from Big Fish Games. And then we started to see Microfun. The reason I I pause at Microfun is because they are going to be a major player in the in the following conversation we're going to have. So then we had merge two. Merge two had an interesting start. So when you think of merge two, think of Merge Mansion from Metacore and think of Magmatic's Travel Town. Now now Magmatic I think went through a acquisition and I believe Why am I blanking on their name?
Moon Active.
Moon Active, yes. Then we had Love & Pies from Trailmix. And then we had kind of our big players again. Microfun came back with Seaside Escape and Gossip Harbor. And then we'll go into later how much they're doing. So what is merge? I call it pretty game math. A lot of it is. So, if we look at merge two, you're basically merging two items to get another item, merging those two

items to get another tiered item, and you're basically trying to continually merge to get more and more items. And merge two means you're merging two items to get this next level item. Merge three, the difference is you're merging three items to get this next tier item. You think they're the same until you realize how much energy it costs to reach each tier. This is a very rough diagram, but it shows the estimated energy per merge to get to each tier. So, if you have a tier nine item, you're basically sinking 512 energy into this. I'm going to pull this Travel Town simple. You merge, cost you energy. You basically merge to create an item that satisfies a specific order. The order usually deducts the item for your your board that you just spent all this time and energy merging, and then you get something in return. Usually, it could be coins, it could be tools, it could be some sort of loot box, it could be a random thing from that, depending on what the game all the game loops are a little bit different. You get that thing from the order to build an upgrade something usually in your meta. From that, you get XP, you get more items,

you get more tools. Usually, that building that thing can cost coins. Again, it varies in the game. And when you level up, in most cases, not all cases, you can get more generators, and these generators generators on the board are the things you tap that produce the items in which you merge.
[laughter]
So, all of these games vary a little bit in terms of what have these game loops work. So, Merge Mansion is a little bit different here. They have tasks instead of orders. Their level up is, I believe, outside of their main game loops a quite a bit. And then you have the I have I think I put this as a side a side loop where you have just merging tasks. And then I also looked at Gossip Harbor. Now, this one, I opened Gossip Harbor this morning, and I counted 10 pop-ups for live ops events. I want to say this is the last known a game live for Gossip Harbor and Phil can jump in and and correct it and go through it later and see how it's changed over time. And I will pause there and hand over to our next which I assume

will be Dave.
[laughter]
There's a couple of things I think is really interesting. If you look at especially Merge Mansion, Merge Mansion to me was it's Merge core with Playrix's meta. You were opening up areas and like there's a person and there's a story and all that kind of stuff. And you got to go back a little bit in time but there was a while where we were all very excited about what we call visual progression. So instead of just moving on a saga map, you're uncovering new areas and there were narratives and there were characters and there were benches with all sorts of different types of wood and painting and oh my gosh, the metal work. Can't even imagine the different metal work. It was it was fascinating. But that was considered more interesting and this is like the time when Playrix blows up, Homescapes, Gardenscapes blows up. One of the interesting flows there is from that Merge Mansion which I mean I played to the end of I think three times and they kept resetting progression and then I stopped playing to the end of it cuz it was like I didn't want to get reset again. Gossip Harbor is closer to using a real match dry style, right? It's a

nice core and events. And that's the the latest and I think it's very interesting that that is probably that's one of the most powerful things. Last 30 days I've got Dream at 138 million, Playrix at 132 and microphone at 124 million. So I mean it's basically they took Merge and added events and an economy to it that's driven by events and became one of the most monetizable games and publishers on the planet in casual.
The thing I find interesting David is like when we get to the debate about Gossip Harbor, right? And why why does Gossip Harbor succeed where Merge Mansion does not, right? Cuz that was the news this week is that Metacore is basically in many ways shutting down and Merge Mansion is going to supercell. The game has not been able to sustain in the way that Gossip Gossip Harbor has accelerated and beaten Candy Crush. I mean, this is a magnificent moment. This is a titan. This is making more money. And the thing that I find interesting about the live ops explanation about why Gossip Harbor succeeded where the others haven't is that it tries to take from

the match three playbook, right? So, we get a bunch of events which try to do things like Lava Quest where you don't have a fail state though. This is This is the main problem with these merge games cuz there's no fail state, right? So, the the whole economy paradigm in merge differs. And so, I think the question is like how does Gossip Harbor adapt its live ops conditions to that? And I don't think it's done a great job right now except it's just layered on more [ __ ] Like to give an example, one of the core live ops features that Gossip Harbor has is that it creates a sideboard where you're merging along the sideboard to advance along a reward track and you're progressively unlocking more and more tiles in this sideboard, which again is something that you would never imagine in match, right? Like you don't want to divide players time outside of the core. More to your point, David, like every genre evolution seems to emphasize the meta less and less because it's ultimately not where you spend resources that trigger purchases,

right? Like what what do match three players want to do?
If there's no fail state in your core, you need to put the fail state in the meta. That's it.
But you Gossip Harbor doesn't do that though.
You do
have FOMO where you're progressing along the event? Like they have an they have a main usually invest in express event. Like they had an Easter event recently where you're going up levels. You're basically you're earning event currency. You're going up kind of it's kind of war bondish from Helldivers interesting. Like you have kind of these pages of content. You got to meet these minimum spend currency event spend thresholds and then you can unlock more and more. But ultimately, it's like basically decorating a space in Royal Kingdom or Royal Match that is fleeting. Right? The space is gone after the event. It doesn't feel like you're accumulating in the same way.
Somebody like actively I hate merge. It's so boring. It's so boring.
Get out of time.
Yeah, seriously. [laughter] You're banned.
Dude, merge people only.
Laura, it made me laugh when your slide earlier on where you had the merge three thing and you couldn't even be bothered to like do the full diagram for merging

three [laughter] of something. Because it takes too long.
It takes so long.
It's not a fun thing to do. And so this is this is how I think Gossip Harbor works well with live ops is by splicing splices the gameplay like regularly with a reason to stop playing it basically. Like every minute, every couple of minutes or so it will be, you know, there's a reason to come out of this and get a like a pat on the head because you fulfilled an order or you've earned enough currency to do the next thing or you know, many different kind of like distractions from the fact that you are doing this like extremely repetitive and futile thing. And also the board is really messy which the like OCD part of me I just can't get over. Like just let me clean the board up. Let me get rid of all this trash or at least organize it somewhere. Come on, guys.
Well, that means Gossip Harbor like is being successful despite its core mechanic. Like you're describing something that like Gossip Harbor is

trying to lure away its players away from the core mechanic and it's succeeding through that. Is is that it?
I thought Jen had a good point on I think it was Deconstructor of Fun last week where she was talking about appeals to different kind of like personalities or kind of like brain types basically. It's just something that I've never got. And obviously I'm sure there were obviously millions of people that do get it. But like for me I'm just like where's the progression on the game board? This is why I I like match three because you solve a puzzle and then the next time you go back from the meta is a different puzzle and you solve that and there's a kind of nice kind of that's satisfying whereas this feels like going into my teenage daughter's bedroom and every time I open the door is it's still a mess. I'm like the one when we used to play this game.
I disagree Tom and I actually think it strikes at a lot of work that you and David did at King which is about overcoming challenge and I think that's one of the motivations that Merge gets after. So I'll give you one example in

Gossip Harbor there's the dog quest. So you remember in the merge board you have different townsfolk with different orders and those orders consist of different items that you have to merge up to be able to satisfy and then to claim the reward for satisfying the order. One of those chains is a dog and to be able to get the dog merges from the dog house which has a cool down timer.
Yeah, the drain I hate that one.
Yes. Yes.
I hate that one. I remember this now.
[laughter]
Very important very important game design element because the order persists for a very long time and so what that does from an economy perspective that's really interesting is it reduces your board efficiency because essentially you need to dedicate your board to basically storage to progress along this event which gets into why this is such a different paradigm than than match. But being able to complete that order after and by the way I think it was around seven days. I mean it's it's kind of crazy how slow the features get unlocked in Gossip Harbor key features like the multiplier which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And overcoming that was just like such a huge motivation to me satisfying order

requests being able to claim an order that I've been working on. Every day Tom I'm making linear progress because there is no fail state right? I mean you could think about idle games in the same way where the numbers just go up. And this is just such a steady state of progress and organizing the board as you mentioned is also something I do quite a bit. Like I enjoy the cleaning cuz if you go on to Reddit the pro way to organize your board is so that if you're left-handed the thumb that you have is being able to swipe across the open board state. So basically you're using the edges of the board for your generators or items that you're not frequently touching just to just to get the UX perspective going. And so kind of like organizing this and like satisfying these different things, it's it's about bringing order to chaos in many ways but about being it hits so many different motivations. This isn't this isn't an evolution of match. That's what I think people need to understand.
[clears throat]
This is a whole new paradigm.
[laughter]
Mhm.
The playbook has been rewritten.
Well, that's what I got from your article was like and this is what I thought this is what I'm kind of looking forward to getting into is like the

economics of it. There's number one the kind of like complexity with which you can like balance the game board, I guess and serve up kind of a task for the player to solve. But there's another thing which I'm assuming must be there is the kind of control you've got over what gets pumped out of each generator and what each person asks for. So like when you next time I open the game, I probably will fulfill three orders like immediately and I feel like cool I'm off to a good start and then maybe that's the thing which gives me a 20-minute session instead of a 5-minute session.
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So, I want to jump on something you both said, the dog event. Just I want everyone who's listening to understand how frustrating it is. You basically, yes, I want to call out especially cuz this is a point I want to make about the pitfalls of merge, which is around clutter storage. This dog event is

basically a it's like a long-term quest that sits on your board that you can never really solve in one session or even in one day because the cool down timers are so long and the actual generator for it to generate the items that the dog wants only only pop out enough items to maybe make one tier merge or two tier merge. And sometimes zero. If you already have on your board from previous days some tier three, tier four items and you're then you have to start again cuz you ran out of items, whatever that generator pops out for the dog is not going to be enough for you to create another tier three or tier four item. So, this thing sits on your board. And this is I think one of the pitfalls of merge. Doesn't matter if it's merge two or merge three, they both face this problem. We have so much time we put in a game. If we are in merge three, you end up spending like the time organizing your board instead of doing things in the game that generate revenue. And that is one of the pitfalls of merge three and it is so frustrating cuz you have so many items, you have so many chains, and then you have to keep track of everything, figure out which ones to

merge, which ones to hold because you might be asked for that item, you might need that item, etc., etc. And in merge two, not only do you have board to clutter, where I think these games tend to fail is if they become inventory management games. And I've been sorry, I've been playing a lot of Pocopia. I have the same problem with Pocopia. You end up having so many items that half of my time in game is moving items around. Whether it's figuring out which ones I have to keep, which ones I have to store. Am I going to buy more storage? I think that's one of the worst ways to monetize in this game because it's monetized based off of frustration than fun. Same with Tokopedia. I have so many items. I'm figuring out what storage boxes, where do I put them, and I'm running around moving things into storage boxes. I need to have some sort of hierarchy or organization in my mind to know where I put things. And that's where I feel like these games can fall down.
That's an enormously important aspect you mentioned Laura is that because the board state is persistent and what people need to understand is when we say persistent, you can have stuff on day zero of Gossip Harbor or Merge Two game that persists until day 360, right? I mean, I think I was still

getting rid of cobwebs unlocking the board by day seven. Again, Gossip Harbor just has its own trajectory. It's crazy [ __ ] But the thing you mentioned is that you have the storage space. So it's not just the board, but you can put things in storage. You can spend a hard currency to get more storage spots. And the reason they need to have storage is because the game has this persistent board that if I want to give you more generators, and again, generators are the things where you tap them, you spend energy, you get an item that you merge up to satisfy a request. If I want to introduce a new item type, I basically need to introduce a new generator or I can make it a drop table on a prior generator, which is another interesting aspect. Although that has its own baggage and again, you're just changing weights, you're not, you know, it has a different economic effect. And because the board state is persistent, me just getting new generators as a designer for item type quests means that your board efficiency goes down, right? Because essentially there's going to be a piece of your board that's dedicated to this generator, which may not be active to any of your quests which you have going on. None of the items you need need like a scuba a scoop here scuba gear. I don't

need scuba gear right now. I need cake and I need carrots, damn it. And so your scuba gear generator is just going to sit on the board. And remember, it's a fixed board space. And so this is this affects something called board efficiency, which again the game design solution for this how this starts to unfold let's do storage. I agree with you Laura it's sloppy game design that they haven't really figured out yet.
I agree with every point you're saying. It is sloppy game design.
And yet they make more money than Candy Crush. So like maybe not. It is remarkably solved and I would like to say and I know not everyone agrees on it but there was for ages people said merge two is not monetizable. It'll never monetize. It's very very engaging. That was the like way people talked about this like four years ago. Incredibly engaging. There's no money to be made at all and that's obviously not true now. It's completely the opposite and that's the other question I have. Maybe this is what all the you know in people think but like looks like the audience likes it and I mean will we have as many merge two games as we have merge three games out there making you know 100 million a

month or will there just be one or will there be lots? There's still way more opportunity on the board for these for these games.
Good one.
[laughter]
And that is an interesting thing to discuss is like bringing those two things together right like the therapy session of moaning about never being able to clear the god damn board up and the fact it makes tons of money. I wonder what the next kind of iteration of the game players like how do you improve that? I think someone was saying before we started speaking on air like when's the royal match moment like is there a further ascension for the for the genre?
This is early innings. I mean I always like to say that one of the craziest things is that the super light ball that many people on this podcast have written about in match three was this huge innovative moment that took 10 years to figure out we should have an additional win streak. I mean so [ __ ] obvious and it took us over a decade or more to come up with this innovation. We are in rumspringa moment for merge right now. Like there merge games left and right. La- ladies

and gentlemen there are merge games that are integrated with short form dramas where you play the merge game then you get a short form drama. There's another merge game which actually has a tile core. I think it's called like Merge World Tour. So, you're actually are playing merge and then you're going you're playing like tile buster games. There is crazy [clears throat] [ __ ] happening. I'm getting ads left and right. I think definitely solves
there are merge two games in your match three games also. They put merge in your match in case you like merging while you match. You can merge while you match. When you guys are describing my board is messy and it's really annoying, it kind of sounds like a soap opera to me, you know? It's like soap operas in order to keep soap operas interesting, you know when you're finally going to get these two characters who've never been able to finally meet and then finally meet, that's when you find out this other person just wants to play again in a car accident. This is basically the same mechanic, you know? Not that I've ever watched soap operas, I've just heard about it. Okay.
If you're going to make a soap opera, I understand the point. Make it a good soap opera. Like, do you know what I mean? Go innovate on the generators. Go do something wonky with the generators.

Like, the dog has legs, but like and go figure out what else to do with that. I mean, I loved the fact that Travel Town retired their generators. That's an interesting twist.
[laughter]
You're so wrong in this. You're you're right that it's a a soap opera, but you're wrong on like the complaining about the board clutter. Like, this is not match three, right? You don't get to rebaptize your crimes every new level, right? Like, this is what is so good about match three that people don't understand is that there's very little persistence, right? There's only a coin balance you've got to sink out, right? So, you can basically do whatever you want wherever you want inside of that core and people are going to be back on a new a new level the next time. These these crimes persist, right? It's very similar to power leveling. So, if you if you continue to commit these crimes of sloppy game design, your inventory's going to start to grow. It introduces all this other UX into the game. This is not your mama's match three economy, you know?
[laughter]
This is again, David, this is a new paradigm. Like, very bad things can happen. Like, to give you another example, like there's persistence in generator upgrades. We should talk about

that.
the high-level flip still is that the game board in Match 3 is temporary and there'll be a new one. So, there's always variation there. In which case, the original versions, you know, with the Saga map or with the Playrix games, the outside is pretty stable. Like, you're working through it but slowly and it's there the next time you show up. And now, we're looking at Merge 3 and maybe the direction is the merge, the core itself is stable. So, you need to make sure that all the external things are fluctuating and changing all the time. That's where the freshness is.
I was thinking about what Blast is well, how that's I mean, that's that is one board that's always the same, right? And then that becomes the challenge, doesn't it? In that you're locked into this space and you're locked into these certain and so you end up with the challenge is a purely internal one. Is that am I going to be smart enough to clear these next three blocks? Whereas I one of the things which I find frustrating and I wonder whether is an edge that can be sanded down or like

improved upon is the fact that there is there's no skill in Merge, really. You're just like it's very kind of low stakes. Should I tap this generator 20 times or or that one or five times? And you end up with this kind of I don't know, the board is just so static that I wonder whether this making it more dynamic, the kind of like changing the dynamics of it, like unlocking it adds a bit more fun, makes it a more dynamic experience.
There is a board event that I would I'm surprised Gossip Harbor waited so long to tell me about which was that they give you no cool downs for a period of time. Which was just like, wow. I was I was merging left and right. I was getting that dog getting that dog left and right. Remember they have new items that get dropped onto the board. They have that you like a piggy bank will sometimes give you gold. They have the treasure chests where you can also merge up. And then again, they do choose to use a different board for the live ops events. Remember we were about that earlier, which is almost like sacrilege, but again they they have to because of

the persistent board states. That is their clean slate, their tabula rasa.
So I actually like the separate boards. One of my favorite events was Metacore's Merge Mansion's fishing event. I actually found that super fun. It was a separate merge board. The gist is you merge you're basically merging up to get an item which is a fishing rod and there's three different types of items. Three different types of fishing rods. And then each fishing rod has a chance it's like a loot box where you try to you have a chance to catch a fish and each of the fishes have different weight and different rarity and you're trying to collect all these fish. I loved that.
Yes, that's
Yeah.
called Lucky Catch. I thought that was super fun. There was no [clears throat] inventory. You didn't have to worry about it because it wasn't like you're managing this long-term persistent progressive state, right? So you got a little bit here and there and it was a great thing to do while I was waiting for my my generators to re- basically be able to generate or I needed energy to recharge. This event I thought was a great combination of a collection mechanic that I can choose what type of rod I want to merge, what

type of fish I can catch.
The other thing that Gossip Harbor that I will say when we talk about kind of like Gossip Harbor differentiation is they've also added battle passes to these layers on top, which I think have been very interesting because the live ops events that you're mentioning Laura particularly in Gossip Harbor, remember you have a finite amount of event currency, which is ultimately the energy that you're using in the special event. So they ration it in a different way, which again gives you economy segmentation opportunities, which I think is interesting. I'm hearing a lot more about segmentation these days. And they also have a battle pass that that it basically accelerates your progress along the event, which I think is is pretty nice. They they layer on to.
I still cannot really understand how Gossip Harbor was able to surpass Candy Crush and kind of like get the whole merge market behind its back while Merge Mansion just like failed. Like still we're talking about these live events or the person board state or like the organizing the clutter, all of those like exist both in Merge Mansion and Ghost Pirate Boat. So,

like, I I'm sure there is no like single single answer or single reason to it to it, but what are the main reasons Ghost Pirate succeeded while Merge Mansion just didn't?
I haven't solved that puzzle, and the best answer we can come up with is stacking live ops events. I agree that the live ops events are not as effective as I would expect in match. Like, I don't think Lava Quest works as well in Merge as it does, and I think they're still trying to figure out that playbook. But, what they do is they layer on a bunch of them in a way that I don't think has been done in other merge games yet. The counterfactual I would give is let's imagine two worlds, one of which you get a stable source of energy income, which again is your main gameplay enabler, is your energy which they use against generators. Let's assume that you have a certain amount of income, and then let's assume you get a certain amount of that income from live ops rewards, right? That's one of the loops that's really effective in Gossip Harbor. And we basically hold income constant, right? So, in one experiment, you don't have any of the live ops rewards, and the other ones they're sourcing it through the live ops. Going through those live ops

events, I would argue is just it's an engagement pleasure. Like, people want to progress through the side events, even if it doesn't have as big of an effect. They want to progress through the Lava Quest. Like, these are fun ways to get energy. They give me a reason to constantly merge. And that doesn't sound like a super compelling answer, so I think there could be some things under the engine we could talk about. The engine just as we have in match three is a huge part of how the game runs, and it's underneath the hood. You don't see it, which is really the orders and I would argue the generators and some of the economy aspects.
Okay, then what what lies behind the core engine UI as well? Okay, live ops event you have all like thousand people Chinese team, and you are like well versed in managing the live ops and stacking them on top of each other. All right, but the part that I don't get, and I'm literally asking this because I don't know the answer to it. What lies behind that like core engine difference between Gossip Harbor and Merge Mansion?
To remind remind listeners about what we mean by the engine, remember that you're getting towns people that come to you with a request for an item. And you want to merge up the items to reach the

level that they're requesting. And when you do that, when you complete that order, they go away and then sometimes a new order spawns. So, there's this whole conditional space on for instance how many towns people have orders, right? So, you could say, "Oh, let's do three towns people have orders at any one time." Or you could say eight people have orders, right? And the more towns people you have, the higher your board efficiency because it's more likely that the items on your board contribute to one of the things that they're requesting, which is another interesting variable to test. So, you've got not only the number of people there, but you've got the level of the item that they're requesting. And you also have whether or not there's a cool down involved. Remember, that's another different constraint. Not all the generators have cool downs that are tied to energy. Sometimes there's only so much generations that you can do with them. And so, you have to come up with a rule set of how you're going to serve orders to players. Remember, it's not linear. Persistent board space and non-linear orders. There can be chains like we're talking about the dog man. So, after you complete the dog chest chain, which is really long, they serve you another one, which is a very long

chain. So, they always have one really long chain going. But all of that is system design logic that is being optimized, AB tested. For instance, what happens if I give you a really long chained order and then a really short one and then a really long one, right? We talk about S curves in match three all the time. What is the optimal order pace is something that I think Gossip Harbor could have unlocked, and it's harder to get good information on this. Well, I hope someone comes up with a tool. But I would say that's harder to make evaluations about, but I suspect But I don't know, feel free every everyone else to tell me like it just feels like there's so much there's so much underneath under the uh hood stuff you can do in merge. This is kind of interesting we're looking at I just pulled just US. So, we can try to like you know, look at it cuz somebody even Lisa you see here is like you know the Merge Mansion releases and here we've got Travel Town. And there we've got Gossip Harbor and the big increase. If I do ARP Dow, what do you think the relationship's going to be in ARP Dow here?
I think Merge Mansion doesn't monetize well. I think Travel Town I think it's

probably going to be the same stack rank with some difference and variation.
I would think that Gossip Harbor is growing. It has highest ARP Dow and growing. Travel Town second and Merge Mansion third.
Okay, cool. And here you see the breakpoint means something changes here.
I know it switches at the end. Merge Mansion comes back. I was mostly right.
[laughter]
That's survival bias.
This is audience doing well. If you look at active users, I think that is true. I mean the the there's there's a stop of a push and so you get this a drop here. This is pretty interesting though. I mean the fact that Travel Town and Gossip Harbor like have basically the same Dow, right? And yet if we look at revenue ex- extremely big difference in ARP Dow. Revenue per download I think is kind of fascinating too cuz here it looks like Travel Town is the one that's kind of struggling. And I mean the interesting part here is I mean if you look at it from downloads I think I mean you see that the they're able to

do twice as many Oh, yeah, not quite twice as many but like you know whatever 60% more installs and yet do that with a better RPD revenue per download. Better ARP Dow is driving better revenue per download. Merge Mansion doesn't really look like the whipping you know like the it actually looks like Travel Town is the one that struggled.
Which is a crazy cuz at one point they were leading the pack.
But I mean maybe they were just strongest because they bought installs.
It came at a time when they started to really put live ops into the game. They definitely changed the balancing. I feel like they took the game they bought it and then they threw everything in it needed.
So do we have a date for when it was bought? I mean, is this the point when our dog goes up? Then otherwise, I don't really see it.
islands acquisition.
Well, we could definitely say is there's a step change. Gossip Harbor monetizes much better with a bigger user base.
Wish I could take all three of these games, merge them together into this like and then create this like perfect merge two game that takes the strongest bits from each

of these three and then actually puts in a decent story.
This is also interesting. Like area under the curve or whatever for Merge Mansion is pretty big and it looks like it's kind of peaking out. Like this is it for Gossip Harbor. It isn't growing like it was here, but maybe they're just taking a little bit of a break before they go back to growing. So, I mean worldwide they're I mean, way bigger. That's pretty interesting, isn't it?
Mhm.
I have too much fun, man. Sense of Tower, you are my game of choice.
[laughter]
That's concerning, but yes. But yeah, I mean, they're still driving installs. Just looks like maybe rest of world while US is still going on, but like this is healthy and there's a lot of places that they're doing well in. Do you see that like here's the push and then after you know, it's become quite thin.
Yeah, but that Merge Mansion's rough. Like as a game it it once you have like the you know, you start to play let's say okay, here's a car

example. You're driving like you know, low range car, but then you get into a Ferrari and you're like, "Wow, this Ferrari is great." and you don't realize how smooth it can be and then it's solving some of the problems from your old car. That's what it kind of feels like Merge Mansion scratch that itch of merge two. But then when we had Travel Town Gossip Harbor came out, we realized how good it could be. And now I'm waiting this is why I want to put all of them together and then we're waiting for the next gen like the I don't know whatever a helicopter or whatever the example would be.
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What is the next for this genre, right? So, I think you're right, David, that the Gossip Harbor growth is starting to teeter out a little bit. It'll probably flatline. I mean, just to be clear, it's been beating Candy Crush consistently for the last couple weeks. So, if it reaches this equilibrium, how many fast followers do you see? I mean, there's so many optimizations going on. I guess I'm curious, what do you guys see happening on the optimization side? Like, we talked about the Royal Match moment, but is there something more specific when we think about the different paradigm of the game design that we could figure going after? You know, and I say that with people who have gotten in the weeds in match. Like, what what else can we screw with in merge or we think will be screwed with over the next year or two? Where's

my super light bulb for merge?
I mean, like the doubling your energy and the output was kind of similar to that super light bulb effect, although it was taken from the social casino games.
Mhm.
I would expect them for a merge game that kind of experimented with a more level-based structure to see how that turns out for like the world of puzzle place because you have a bunch of like match players who are used to having like this whole like level-based progression which Tom mentioned earlier, and I think if some merge game, I don't know, through like a live ops event or even as as it's like a part of its core uh mechanic, served this level-based progression which, I don't know, maybe you get a new world once every like five levels. So, I'm just like making things up. I think that would be an interesting experiment which, like, the mer we've seen merge the merge games taking features from other like genres,

simulation, social casino, you name it. Maybe the the level structure might be the thing that they can borrow from the actual puzzle games on the market.
That's one of the great things about match, I think, is it feels so satisfying, right? Like, when you make a match or you make a power-up or whatever, you get that amazing UX feedback, and it feels great. There are all those beautiful animations in Royal Match where you get the big like bouncy bombs. Lots and lots of tiny bits of feedback which in Merge I'm just like I don't know, man. It feels like doing the washing up or something. Like it's just it's so dry. Like lots of the stuff I see coming out at the moment is innovating on IP, like brand and positioning, and meta. Not so that much in core gameplay. And I think there's definitely like we we talked to the people a lot about that. It's like unless the core gameplay is fun, you're kind of capped. And at the moment I don't think the core gameplay is particularly fun.
I I have to say the market disagrees with you.
It's trying to
[laughter]

I think I've dug around now in such a town and I found out why Gardenscapes is shrinking. And it's my favorite uh way to shrink a game. You launch another game because you think that that game is better.
Oh, I see Side Town.
And I mean and that's that's how you And look at this. You know, revenue per download. And they're all super excited about it.
Flumblet. Wow, talking about ARPDAU. ARPDAU
And you know what I think? This is the thing. We could maybe do an entire episode on how do make your cap your company by being like, "Hey, we're even better than that. So we're going to make a second one and it's even better for the first 6 months." And then you're excited and then you release it and it cannibalizes and your company flatlines that never goes back to growth.
But I'm not talking about a company that did that. I'm talking about a company that did that.
[laughter]
AND I MEAN I PREFER TO CALL THIS THE soda method, but you know, hey,

whatever. You could you know, pick your
Speaking of that, I love soda.
[laughter]
You're going to have to find me and find me. Here's another question which I think is interesting. You rarely see incredible um jump in um ARPDAU. It doesn't happen that much. It's hard to do it. If you go and look on Sensor Tower at ARPDAU for a bunch of games, they're pretty much going to be stable. And that's because the ARPDAU is so in the DNA of the game, it's really hard to make it jump, you know? So, like the the if if you're making a game and you think that it's got 50% more ARPDAU than the other game, then you'd rather dump installs into that. And the problem is when it looks like that in the beginning cuz you've got everybody hyped and because you've got all your targeting good on that audience cuz you made that kind of game before, so you think ARPDAU is awesome. And then as you scale, it just turns out to be the same as the other one. And then you've got two games that are eating each other talent-wise, marketing budget-wise, and you don't go anywhere.
Let me press you on the mechanic piece a little bit. Why do I not have hard level labeling for the orders? Why is that idea not

around? Why do I not get a label telling me a level is hard? This was the biggest win in the match-three playbook. This feels so obvious to me.
Gossip Harbor does have They do have order rankings based on one they do with the card collection, so you can get better rewards and better cards for certain orders on the board. So, like you can get a three-star card pack versus a one-star card pack. And then they also kind of do it not for hard, but they do rank them in the sense that by the coin the payout. You can see the payout. So, but it's not it's not based on difficulty. I I would say they do something like it to basically like in the what you give versus what you get.
But the whole lore of the hard level labeling experiment that I think it was King's experimentation group ran is that you don't change the underlying difficulty, right? And you just add the label. It was the label itself that made players feel like they were overcoming something.
I mean, do you think that's going to be fundamentally change the game to like see a revenue spike?
10% according to some people.
I mean, the order coming in and actually

having them like a you know, here comes the next order. You you're like, "Oh my god, that's a harder one." I I think I I should Someone should test that. Let us know if anybody tests it, please.
One concept that I will tell you with that is like, if you see a hard order like on your order list, you might be discouraged to like merge towards it.
exactly what people said when we did the hard level eight winning at the beginning. They said it's not going to work because everybody's going to be discouraged and going to quit. There's a woman that was like, "I'm laying in bed next to my husband. We both play Pyramid Solitaire Saga. And he has hard levels that I don't, and it's not fair. Why don't I have them?" That was an actual comment. And then we were like, someone needs to So, it turned out it was the opposite. It was engaging. And I mean, I think everybody, if you're making a puzzle game and you're afraid of difficulty, you're screwed already. You might as well just go back to scrolling or whatever and not bother making games. Difficulty is required.
The only thing though I would offer is that there is no difficulty in merge. There's no fail state, right? So, does

that translate in the same way you think? Cuz really you're pricing difficulty and time where there was at least an illusion of skill in match.
Yes. Somebody out there who has a merge game, please run the experiment.
I'd like to pitch this group another idea that's been on my head that affects the economy. So, we talked about the multiplier, we alluded to it, which is this idea that you turn it on and it consumes your energy at twice, 4x, 8x the normal rate, and it increases the level of the item that's generated. And when you do that, it's easier to merge higher level items because essentially the energy that's embedded, so to speak, or foregone by that merged up item is higher. Why can't I set my multiplier to be higher for individual item generators rather than my whole board state? Like, I would really love to supercharge one of my generators or incent it or put into overcharge or use a consumable against it so I could basically burst a quest along. Like we were talking about the dog quest, which has a cool down. Man, I wish I could burst it a little

bit more or I had more control over each of my generators.
To your point, your question, Phil, you asked what we would change. There's four areas that I would look at for the next merge game, what how I where I would focus the innovation. One would be story, capture the audience better, and then choose generators in space. Should generators be on the board? How should generators be working? How should they retire? That area that you're asking about is the area that if I was going to go build a merge two game, I would be looking a lot at generator. And then the last three are, build a game that doesn't need storage, and two, is there room to experiment in multi-boards?
Well, I agree with you and I actually would combine it with one of the earlier ideas, which is just make semi-persistent board states, right? Which we're talking about earlier, which is like, okay, for 10 levels, this is your board state. And so basically, you can fix the generators to a level range. I think that that sounds tantalizing.
I think we need to we need to wrap up on, you know, multi-board states and like, [laughter] you know, this this is like, you know, I mean, no offense, but this is the nerdiest group of people I've been on a [ __ ] call with ever, and this

[laughter] is insane.
Walk us out, AC.
Yeah. So, everyone, I think any kind of like experienced merge player got some PTSD out of listening to this whole episode. And for the ones that managed to stay until the end, thank you, and see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.
Cheers.
Bye.
Bye.
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Thanks for listening.