Time Blast: Will it revive the Rest of the Genre?

It is no secret that puzzle games dominate a significant share of the mobile gaming market. Over the last decade, the puzzle market has become fiercely competitive, with various subgenres vying to capture the attention of puzzle players. While Match-3 remains the dominant force in this competition, we've seen other subgenres like Merge taking the second place, while others, like Tile Match, showed potential but ultimately fell short. Merge surpassed Blast last year and looks like “Pair” which mainly has Physical Match and Tile Match will do the same at the end of this year. That said, the second spot in the puzzle market remained largely uncontested until recently. Before Merge games took over the second spot, Blast games were the Pepsi to Match-3's Coca-Cola. There was a significant gap between Match-3 and Blast, with Blast holding a solid second […]

Ahmetcan Demirel September 2

Analysis

Win Streak: Gift That Keeps on Giving

Puzzle games have a simple yet addicting core loop: playing levels. Since playing levels is the core action, beating them becomes the primary goal for players as they continue enjoying their favorite puzzle game. However, having a simplistic target like "beating levels" brings joy only to a certain extent. Experienced players who churn through dozens of levels every day aren't satisfied with this simple target; they expect more in return for their investment of time and, hopefully, money. This is where the most crucial player motivation for puzzle games comes into play: Win Streak. The main goal is still beating levels. It is your core action and you are expected to repeat it again and again indefinitely. But by creating new rewards tied to the success of that core action, players are incentivized and rewarded in multiple ways, enhancing their […]

Ahmetcan Demirel August 5

Analysis

Iteration over Innovation? Case: Makeover Match

Making games is hard. As player expectations rise and market conditions become more challenging, creating a successful game and maintaining that success is becoming increasingly difficult. It looks like these are not enough to stop Tactile, the Danish studio behind smash hit Lily’s Garden, from working on a new title since they launched their latest game Makeover Match in March 2023. Although the Tactile team has several titles under their portfolio, the well-known swapping mechanic is not very common among their games. Especially with their two most recent titles Lily’s Garden and Penny & Flo, Tactile has been a stronghold for story-driven puzzle games with the collapse mechanic. Releasing a match-3 game with the swapping mechanic is certainly a demonstration of their eagerness to take on a new challenge. However, quite counterintuitively, the strongest aspect of Makeover Match is the […]

Ahmetcan Demirel June 10

Analysis

AppLovin’s Modern Community and The Power of Game Narrative

Making a successful Match-3 is one of the most challenging tasks a mobile game developer can tackle. To succeed, you need a top-of-the-line game engine in addition to an engaging and differentiated metagame, and, even if you have both, you need a robust UA campaign to entice players. You will be competing against some of the most profitable game businesses out there with some of the heaviest war chests possible. You need a lot of stars to align and hopefully don’t run out of money in the process. That’s why so many of the top Match-3 games belong to a handful of developers. The top of the charts belong to: King with their Candy Crush games, Playrix with ‘Scapes games and Fishdom (still going strong!), and Dream with Royal Match. AppLovin is coming right after them with Project Makeover and […]

Ahmetcan Demirel May 20

Analysis

Tile Busters: Leaving The Reddest Ocean To Find A Blue Spot

Almost 2 years ago, the entire games industry was amazed by the announcement of a gigantic $55M seed round raised by Spyke Games. Many successful game company founders would jump on the chance to exit with $55 million, let alone receive it as a seed investment. So, Spyke Games showed how ambitious they were from the start with one of the largest seed rounds the games industry has ever seen… Of course, to secure this type of investment, you need an extraordinary team with unique backgrounds, and Spyke Games had just that. The co-founders of the company come from Peak, Zynga, and Riot, where some held co-founder or key team roles. If you are wondering how they all came together, I recommend listening to the podcast episode where Rina Onur (Co-founder of Spyke Games who is also one of the […]

Ahmetcan Demirel December 11

Analysis

Tile Match: The new Match-3 or the new Merge?

It’s hard to keep secrets in the gaming industry. Once players show interest in something you've created, many game developers worldwide quickly become "inspired" by your game. While finding the blue ocean is the enduring hot topic for game developers, staying relevant as that ocean turns red is a rare and more valuable skill to possess. Some of those oceans are extremely hard to enter once they turn red. It's not necessarily due to the exceptional quality of existing games or the lack of potential for improvement within the genre. Instead, the audience interested in the genre is not sufficiently large enough for late entries. This heavily contributes to what we call the first mover advantage. Merge was a great example of a genre that appeared to be “the new Match-3”, but eventually evolved into a smaller genre dominated by […]

Ahmetcan Demirel October 9

Analysis