Chrome Valley Customs has passed $40m six months after launch – and is set to overtake Beatstar as Space Ape’s top performer.
Space Ape boss Simon Hade told us that the puzzler has amassed 12m downloads and over $40m in revenue since its launch in June 2023. It is on course to overtake Space Ape’s music game Beatstar, which reached $125m lifetime revenue back in November 2023.
“We’re expecting Chrome Valley Customs to grow and be our biggest grossing game within the year,” Hade told us. “For context Beatstar took two years to gross $120m and Transformers six years to gross $150m – our other games did around $50m each.”
Space Ape is now doubling down on the casual puzzle market by growing the Chrome Valley Customs team and launching another title in the same space.
“The Chrome Valley Customs team was 50 at launch, is now 75 and we’ll get to 90 plus soon, which will make it the largest team we’ve run to date,” says Hade. “We’ve still got a sizable team on our music games, around 25 people, and around 15 people on our Transformers game. But we see most of our growth coming from casual puzzle games now, with Chrome Valley being the big bet for this year.”
The new casual puzzler after Chrome Valley Customs will again be focused on an underserved audience within the puzzle category, Hade adds. “In the past I’d feel a little bit ashamed to say we had ‘only’ one game in development but given the state of the mobile market and the unrealised potential for Chrome Valley Customs I’m feeling good about it.”
“The team has a very specific focus on an underserved audience within this big category, similar to the process that led us to Chrome Valley Customs. It will share a lot of the underlying infrastructure of that game, but from a players’ perspective it’s going to be a completely new thing.”
Chrome Valley Customs game lead Geoff Gilles elaborated more on the process of running the title at his Pocket Gamer Connects talk last month, in which he compared the process of balancing a match 3 game campaign to his previous career in portfolio management.
“You’re basically trying – with hundreds of stocks and other financial instruments – to maximise the return and minimise the risk,” he said.
“When we do campaign optimisation, all of my finance background just comes back and I feel like I’m doing portfolio management, but now trying to optimise 2000 plus levels and maximise spend and minimise churn.”
Gilles says his team uses a complex process to balance the game’s churn, end game purchases, attempts per success and difficulty curve, which is explained in the video above. He says the process has led to a 10% ARPU increase.
“We have built a really cool spreadsheet full of intelligence, and can with a few clicks rebalance a level that has been flagged as too easy or too hard. This used to take countless hours for the match 3 team and now it just takes a few minutes.”
“We’ve automated being able to flag good and bad levels,” he adds. “We rework the bad performing levels and track their before and after stats. 35% of our level reworks were improved, and this has led to 1.23% churn reduction while increasing end game purchases. This is purely from balancing the game right.”
