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 co-founders of Peak) chatted with Mishka about her journey and how Spyke Games was founded.

When they announced this heavy war chest, they were trying to stand up against one of the best-performing games in the market: Coin Masters. Their first title Royal Riches targeted the social casino market. However, similar to many other games that attempted the same, it didn’t achieve immense success. It is still live but is most likely in autopilot without any feature updates being done anymore.

The Pivot

So, what is next after realizing the market you were trying to enter has one of the thickest walls? You pivot. And pivot that they did. We talked about the emerging Tile Match subgenre in a previous article and also deconstructed its first success story with Zen Match in another. Being located in Istanbul just like the original developer of Zen Match, Spyke Games must have been inspired by their success story. Adding the fact that some of the co-founders worked at Peak (that developed two successful blast titles in Toy Blast & Toon Blast), they went ahead with their own take on the Tile Match subgenre. Thus, Tile Busters was born.

Before delving into the game and its details, it is worth noting how the metagame of Tile Busters is constructed. It is just a copy of the metagame that Royal Riches had which is what social casino players have been used to for a long time with Coin Masters. The game offers players towns to construct, made up of five different objects that evolve from their initial form. After all five objects are constructed, the town is complete, and the player progresses to the next town. While there isn’t a narrative or elaborate decoration, the game still offers a satisfying sense of progression. This demonstrates that even when your game doesn’t succeed, there’s still a lot to gain in terms of knowledge and even features.

Tile Match Remastered

When you’re developing a game in a well-established market, it can be challenging to introduce significant innovations. Players are accustomed to a specific type of game, and the incumbents have already fine-tuned their best practices. Tile Busters, however, is a game belonging to a fairly young Tile Match subgenre. Surely, Zen Match has been out there for quite a while, but there was no serious contender until Tile Busters showed up. So, the playing field was wide open for Spyke Games to innovate…

And they didn’t even have to look too far! As explained in more detail in our Tile Match article, Tile Match is based on another subgenre called Mahjong Solitaire. Tile Busters includes the fundamental elements of a Tile Match game, much like Zen Match or other games within that subgenre, which set them apart from Mahjong Solitaire games:

• Square tiles with universally recognizable symbols on them
• A rack at the bottom of the board for collecting tiles before matching
• Matching those collected tiles in groups of three

While implementing these three elements would put your game in a better position compared to most Mahjong Solitaire games, it may not be sufficient to distinguish it from other Tile Match games. So, Spyke Games tapped into their puzzle experience from Peak and summoned one of the key elements of every successful puzzle game: Obstacles!

Before Tile Busters emerged, Tile Match games primarily depended on tile positions for level design variability. There were some novelties here and there, such as the wave structure in Zen Match, but they didn’t truly enhance the depth of the gameplay experience. Tile Busters solved it by introducing obstacles into the game. Match-3 or Blast players are quite used to having different obstacles throughout the levels. They are one of the key elements determining the difficulty of any given level. So, Spyke Games didn’t need to invent an entirely new concept, but they managed to incorporate obstacles that were well-suited to the Tile Match game design.

Of course, it is not as easy as just slapping some obstacles to the levels. Because Tile Match has a relatively strategic but deterministic gameplay, introducing an obstacle could potentially block a player’s progress in a level. Unlike a Match-3 level where the cascade triggered by your last move can clear obstacles, a Tile Match level can quickly become too difficult. So, Tile Busters usually introduce obstacles that are removed by making 3 moves or less. While a Match-3 game has the luxury of offering larger obstacles that require making several matches even with specific colors sometimes, a Tile Match game has to be much more forgiving in terms of creating obstacles.

This still leaves Tile Busters with a wide range of obstacles to steal from Match-3 games. They use the simple ones like chains or ice that most of the Match-3 games have. In addition to those well-known and proven Match-3 obstacles, they show their adaptability by using less-known ones like the “Frog” from Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells. They’ve also introduced their own unique obstacles that fit the Tile Match gameplay, demonstrating their ability to not only imitate but also innovate. All of these are presented as a kind of reward for the player’s progress, making the introduction of a new obstacle a significant milestone of achievement.

How to steal the first spot in 8 months

Tile Busters serves as a great example of how it’s still possible to dethrone the number one in a subgenre, even in a market where the established leaders have a significant advantage. It took them less than 8 months to start from scratch to become the top Tile Match game! Of course, there is the fact that Zen Match was suffering for a long while, especially after being acquired. However, it is still quite impressive how Spyke Games was able to reach their current point so quickly. So, how have they performed so far?

Although it was released around the beginning of October 2022 on both iOS and Android, Tile Busters stayed under the radar until March 2023. Since last March, the game has been increasing its revenue quite steadily. Despite experiencing a slight decline last September, Tile Busters achieved a relatively stable revenue performance, positioning it just outside the top 50 grossing games in the US. Now, it ranks higher in terms of revenue compared to long-standing successful games like Merge Dragons and emerging success stories like Chrome Valley Customs.

When we look at the download performance, on the other hand, we see a crucial update affecting the game’s fate. Just before Tile Busters began acquiring users more rapidly, it had an update that introduced multiplayer gameplay. We’ll discuss in more detail how Tile Busters uses multiplayer gameplay and various events to keep players engaged. However, the fact that the update introducing multiplayer gameplay coincided with an increased user acquisition budget highlights the significance of social features in the game. So, Spyke Games didn’t go full throttle with its user acquisition efforts until it introduced a 1vs1 mode, catering to competitive and social players.

In addition to how the game performed with respect to its IAP revenue, there is another monetization tool that Tile Busters is using: ads. I can’t confirm whether it’s an A/B test or a permanent feature of the game, but as soon as I completed the 100th level, I began seeing interstitial ads after every second level. I believe this has to be a deliberate effort in monetizing non-paying players that retain for a long period. And I think it is a great way to support the game’s overall success and sustainability. If you have a player who stays engaged long enough to reach the 100th level, occasionally displaying ads can be a relatively safe method of generating additional income without negatively impacting future revenue.

How to keep your players engaged 24/7? Live Ops!

As a significant part of the entertainment industry, games need to keep their players entertained for as long as possible using various methods. This means that while having an engaging core gameplay is important, it is not sufficient on its own for long-term success and a sustainable position in the market. And the most common solution games use sounds much simpler than it actually is: live events.

As user acquisition costs rise, making it more challenging to expand your player base, optimizing the value derived from your existing players has become more crucial than ever. Running live events on a continuous basis and using them as a reason for your players to interact with your game has almost become table stakes at this point. While numerous games excel at handling Live Operations, Royal Match is often regarded as the prime example of best practices in this field. Their initial success was built on the excellent core gameplay experience they offered. However, what has kept them at the top of the grossing charts is their ability to run multiple live events concurrently. Every time a player opens Royal Match, they are presented with various types of events that encourage them to play more levels.

Many other games took a page out of the Royal Match Live Ops playbook and began implementing their versions of in-game events to offer more content to their players. Tile Busters, on the other hand, does not only take a page but takes the whole book and writes a couple of more chapters of their own while running Live Ops! The sheer amount of events that are live at the same time in Tile Busters is just astonishing. The game ensures that engaged players have a wide variety of events to participate in as they play more levels and make progress in the game. The screen can seem a bit crowded and going through all the pop-ups might take some time. However, these elements are designed to provide more reasons for players to engage with the game.

In fact, Tile Busters makes its content so relatable that it has game-wide updates accompanying the seasonal events! Players who played the game during Halloween didn’t need to participate in any particular event to enjoy the Halloween-themed festivities. If you opened the game during the Halloween season and played a level, you would immediately notice a hard-to-miss update. The tiles were all using Halloween-themed images, different from their normal versions. And it is not tied to any particular event but is given to all players that play the game. This might seem like a small and insignificant change, but it contributes to the game feeling more vibrant and integrated into the players’ lives.

Returning to one update that kickstarted the increase in the UA budget, it introduced several ways for players to participate in multiplayer competitions. The game features the standard events where players engage in time-limited races against others, aiming to complete a specific number of levels in the shortest time possible. It also offers a league event with promotions and demotions to create an even longer-lasting competitive gameplay. There’s another event in which you can bet 60 coins to compete asynchronously against another player. The goal is to win more levels within a 15-minute time frame and potentially earn 100 coins as a reward. Finally, players can also play a synchronous 1vs1 level against others in real-time. There is often a question about the authenticity of multiplayer gameplay, with players wondering how many of their opponents are actually bots. Even if that is the case, I think creating bots that feel genuine and provide an engaging multiplayer experience is also an admirable success. So, Tile Busters has not only introduced innovative core gameplay but also implemented numerous successful ideas in Live Ops.

What is next?

I think it is obvious that Tile Busters will continue doubling down on its powerful Live Ops machine. They’ve already made great progress, and there’s no apparent reason for them to stop optimizing it further. However, there still might be a couple of things they can experiment with:

• Enrich the metagame: The current metagame that we discussed in the beginning is a very light one that is borrowed from their previous title Royal Riches. I think a richer metagame that provides a deeper story either through decoration like Homescapes or exploration like Merge Mansion can prove useful. The key question here revolves around the return on investment for such an update, as it would demand the consistent creation of content to enrich the metagame. But it’s something that has already been proven useful by many games on the market, so it might be worth trying.
• Randomness, randomness, randomness: The biggest obstacle limiting the success of Tile Busters is the inherent determinism that Tile Match has as a subgenre. This is a very difficult problem that may not even have a clear solution. However, I strongly believe that any improvement in adding randomness to the gameplay experience will prove useful in the long term.

Tile Busters may be a quite young game, but its team certainly isn’t. They must already be experimenting with these and many other new things to innovate the Tile Match space further. I think we are going to see other Tile Match games in the near term replicating the success of this game and creating a more competitive landscape for everyone.