Metacore puzzler Merge Mansion is close to hitting €400m in lifetime earnings, says CEO Mika Tammenkoski, who has just hired ex-King VP David Telenius to take the game into its next phase.
The announcements come as the Finnish firm reports its 2023 earnings: €162m in revenue and operating losses of €5.6m. Revenue is up 26% year-on-year, and Tammenkoski told us that Metacore was “close to reaching profitability already last year”.
Merge Mansion’s new general manager, David Telenius, joins Metacore from King, where he most recently served as VP and head of production for Candy Crush Soda Saga. He brings with him over a decade of experience at the Candy Crush maker, where he has worked across several different leadership, production and business development roles.
“Merge Mansion has over 50m downloads and the game’s lifetime revenue is already close to 400m Euros,” Tammenkoski told us. “But in many ways, we feel like we’re just getting started with Merge Mansion: our ambition is to build it into a long-lasting, billion Euro game that’s enjoyed by hundreds of millions.”
We also asked the Metacore boss about some of the other titles it has in development. They are still mostly under wraps, including Everdale, the cancelled Supercell game that was acquired by Metacore in January 2023.
But Sails of Fury, a soft launched puzzler formerly known as Merge Vikings, has been killed, said Tammenkoski. It will cease to operate at the end of June. “While it was a hard call to make for a game this far along, the game wasn’t reaching the ambitious targets we’d set for it, so we decided to collect those learnings and are already putting them to use in other game development projects,” said Tammenkoski.
“We currently have new games under development and are set on finding and scaling our next hit game,” he continued. “Last year, we began investing more heavily in new game development and building a strong pipeline of games by, for example, recruiting more heavily for our new game teams and appointing a head of new games to steer that work.”
Metacore’s headcount is now over 200, having opened a new Berlin office in October last year. The developer is also “evaluating new markets and assessing the potential for opening up a new office location,” added Tammenkoski.
