Merge Mansion’s mischievous grandma is more than a fun hook for Metacore’s flagship game. She also increasingly reflects the kind of player downloading the merge puzzler, which just passed its fifth year on the market.
Metacore CEO Mika Tammenkoski tells us that yes, five years after launching Merge Mansion, of course the market has become much more saturated and competitive. And the many, many soft launch games that the company has released (and then dropped) in the last year shows us that.
“I think anyone working in the industry can attest to the current challenges related to discoverability and scaling new games,” Tammenkoski tells us.
“In casual games, we’re seeing players aged 45 to 50 plus driving growth and revenue, yet they show less appetite for discovering new games…the average casual gamer was once an over 35-year-old female. It’s no surprise that today we are serving players who are over 70 – the scope has been expanding.”
“This pattern is important to acknowledge when developing games, old and new,” he continues. “We see that merge 2, together with the strategy genre, are showing meaningful growth.”
When Merge Mansion launched five years ago, Tammenkoski says the audience for casual puzzlers with a deep story was “largely underserved”. Today, many more games across all categories are “investing in story and brand” like Metacore does, he says. “I think it’s a great direction for the industry, but it definitely raises the bar for us to come up with something new.”
Indeed, regular readers of our soft launch game updates will have noticed more than a dozen Metacore games drop in and out of soft launch in the last year or so. “Our ambition level is also really high when it comes to launching a new game,” explains Tammenkoski.
“The data needs to show enough attraction for the game for us to move the game forward…validating our hypotheses and testing early on is a crucial part of our approach. Some games move forward in the development process and some don’t, that’s business as usual.”
And so it appears that among others, Grandma’s Solitaire Stories, a spin-off starring Merge Mansion’s sinister granny, has not made the cut. But Metacore says it will continue to develop and validate new games, and could also add more new office locations after it opened up a Berlin office in 2023. But further expansion is being considered very carefully.
Tammenkoski’s outlook for the next five years is just as pragmatic. “There’s often a tendency to look for the next big thing,” he adds. “Looking back at the last five years, there haven’t been too many of those…existing things are stabilising and continuing to evolve.”
