What Makes Merge 2 Games So Popular in 2025?

[Music] Okay, let's move on to merge 2. There was a piece of news in mobile gamer biz again where one of the trail mix GMs Felicity Gracie Hurst gets on to talk about a lot of Love and Pies, which is a game that has done really well in the merge 2 space. has been one piece of news and it was interesting on why she's doing this PR push or what's up at Trailmix and then we got a separate piece of news from Tristan Clark who is a co-founder at Trailmix reporting on LinkedIn that this is going to be his last week at Trailmix. So there's there's two things going on here. There's the merge genre news and there's how Trail mix fits into it. Jen, what's going on in merge?
Yeah, so I took a look I used to love this genre as a human. I have since pivoted to your favorite all-in hole and the royal kingdom and royal matches. Had no time left in my life to continue to

play Merch 2. Uh, it's on fire. So, I looked at Sensor Tower US
year-to- date data. So, that's what we're going to look at here. It is the number two top revenue subgenre in puzzle. It's number two right after the royal matches of the world. And more importantly, it's the number seven top revenue subg genre overall of all subg genres, right behind squad RPG. One of our favorites. Again, this is just US year to date. Love and Pies is a top seven game in Merch 2. Gossip Harbor's number one $und00 million year to date in the US alone. Super super impressive. Crest, it's not mice nuts anymore, right?
Mhm.
Not mice nuts. That is next one is just basically showing that the genre during the last 12 months has doubled in terms of inapp purchases which is a quite a growth and you know we're talking about declining market and this and that but look at merge 2 just growing and then I put in few of the top games as well as

love and pie to just see how well this trailer mix title has fared as the genre has doubled. So, Gossip Harbor is essentially the game that is driving the growth on the genre as a whole. And of course, there's plenty of new games that came in. Travel Town, Seaside Escape, Merge Mansion have been kind of holding steady, but Love and Pies has actually, you know, it's tiny compared those four largest one. Love and Pies has actually lost about 30% of its monthly revenue since the beginning of the year. So, it's not fairing too well for Trailmix. And looking at Merge Mansion, which is another Supercellowned SLbacked company in the same genre,
Metacor, right?
Metacore. Yeah, they've been they've been holding steady. They used to be the number one. I think they took the position from Zingga and now they're at number four. And so, everybody else is kind of keeping steady. Seaside grew a

little bit, but it's really the Gossip Harbor that is absolutely just crushing.
Yeah, they're crushing it. And then Travel Town, uh, which was taken over by a Chinese company,
Travel Town. Yeah, that's Israeli.
Oh, Israeli. Okay.
Yeah.
What's going on in Puzzle is really interesting is that especially in the last year or so, it's really broken into all of these different subg genres where you can really get into what's working and what's not working within each of these. Love and Pies is basically the original for Merge 2. They're the OGs. that's what everyone copied. And I think they've just had a difficult time keeping up with what everyone else is doing and how they've really added in all the monetization. They've taken a lot of social casino monetization components, meta collections to to really drive the category. So, oh, let's go back to shooters cuz you know it's not a podcast with us if we don't talk about shooters.
So, uh life service shooter game comes to a premature end and this is Steel

Hunters from Wargaming. It's a mech game that we actually covered to quite a detail on this Twig episode a few episodes ago. We talked about Steel Hunters versus War Robots and Chris Sides was actually a guest host on the podcast and he came pretty hard at Steel Hunters talking of their gunplay and how they used the UE5 templates if I'm correct what he was mentioning and it felt very generic. It looked different, but the play was not that interesting. And he was right. So, it looks like Steel Hunters didn't make it. And Wargaming still continues with tanks and a little bit of ships. I don't remember if they have plates.
We We need to talk about this next week, but I think the biggest story in all of this is Mecca Break, baby. Like,
Mecca is on [ __ ] Steam. It broke over 100,000 CCUs. It is a Japanese free-to-play Mecca game and you have a deep deep layer of customization. It

goes full full eastern and I think this thing Oh my god, I'm so excited to play this. I haven't I'm not deep enough in to provide a review. Let's talk about it next week. My aspirations for the Gundam franchise are held in this this video game.
Oh wow.
It looks really cool.
Wow. It's a shooter like action.
Like but like you're like flying. But wait till we get to the home menus and look at progression is what I say.
Mecca break.
Oh
yeah. Look at all the character customization. And let me tell you, this is uh different different cultural norms.
Yeah, they look really enhanced.
Really enhanced. Yeah. Anime uh pushed to the limits.
Yeah.
All right. Well, [Music]