After the ‘state of mobile’ trends talk, there were three other sessions of interest to mobile game-makers at GDC 2025 on Monday – two from Metacore, and one from King. Highlights below:
Behavioural psychology in F2P
Merge Mansion’s product manager Tim Shepherd did a fun explainer on concepts like anchoring, conditioning, the Ikea effect, social proof, FOMO and the Monte Carlo effect that game-makers can use to keep players engaged and, of course, monetise better.
What stood out here was, in the case of the Ikea effect, the idea of IAP bundles players can build themselves. Like Ikea furniture, building things gives you a sense of ownership over that thing. So why not have players build their own bundles so they can choose which specific in-game items they are buying? I’d not seen this before and it’s a neat idea.
The big Candy Crush Soda Saga reboot
King’s Abigail Rindo and Paul Hellier talked through a post-COVID team reboot that happened on Candy Crush Soda Saga, following a player survey.
It found that 80% of its players played Soda Saga as a second or complimentary game to Candy Crush Saga, but also more surprising stuff like COD: Mobile. The team was also aware that Soda had not seen any major new features for some time, and the team had fallen into bad habits.
So King embarked on a team reboot or sorts, reorganising the game’s leadership in order to remove to siloing of teams and halt the evolution of ‘microcultures’ within the game team.
As well as rebooting the team, it also reworked some of the core game elements, like the switcher, and rebooted notifications, after finding that some players were getting 40 pop-ups a day.
The game’s meta is also being rebooted and launched this summer. King ditched the ‘Saga Map’ in Soda years ago, which led to a slightly more muddled sense to progression for some players. For this meta shift, the team created seven different prototypes and tested them in a sort of tournament. The idea here was “to make sure we were enforcing the core loop, not replacing it”.
Metacore on mobile’s maturing market, ‘damaging’ UA ads and more
Mika Tammenkoski began by countering Matthew Ball’s claim that the mobile games business is “mature and not worth the effort”. He obviously disagrees, but he did acknowledge that a maturing, if not fully mature, mobile game market means that what worked in the past won’t work now and in the future.
Tammenkoski said that game-makers should remove their own personal interests when making games, and build them around what audiences actually want. Metacore is built on pleasing ‘high intent’ players, he said, by leaning on player fantasies to make Merge Mansion, mixing in elements of mystery that resonate with its player base.
He also stressed that sustainable long-term games can only work when they’re built on compelling IP, like Merge Mansion, and even suggested that it could eventually become a TV series or film due to player demand.
Misleading mobile game ads are damaging to perceptions of mobile games, he added, and said that Metacore has effectively gone in the opposite direction with its high-end story-led Merge Mansion marketing.
Mobile game marketers should also look beyond over-reliance on tried-and-tested UA techniques, he said, and cited Metacore’e celebrity and influencer-based marketing campaigns as well as out-of-home activity.
To finish, he again warned that mobile game makers should also be wary of how mobile games are perceived as a result of their marketing – and later in the post-talk Q&A he added that he would rather mobile marketers look to replicate triple-A games and higher-end brand marketing than focus too much on a ‘race to the bottom’ in user acquisition.
