Four years in, Trailmix has just revamped Love & Pies’ core gameplay and economy to stay competitive in the increasingly fierce merge 2 space.
Trailmix GM Felicity Gracie-Herst, a veteran of King, Microsoft and NDreams, has led those efforts. Speaking to us ahead of the opening mobile session at Develop, she described her role as bringing Love & Pies “up to date with what players expect” in terms of live ops and features.
That work will keep Love & Pies competitive in an increasingly packed merge 2 space, she says. “Love & Pies launched in 2021 and so much has changed since then in terms of competition and distribution,” Gracie-Herst tells us.
“Merge 2 was barely a genre – now it’s a red ocean. Bigger games, both merge and in the wider casual space, have emerged with really polished experiences and so much live ops content you never need to stop playing or switch to a second or third game – engagement really feels like the battleground now.”
Player insights are a particular focus for the Love & Pies team. Trailmix is “pretty obsessed” with its players, says Gracie-Herst, and to keep on top of player demand her team runs regular in-game surveys and “all sorts of audience motivation and persona research using external agencies”. That’s on top of the data analytics you’d expect.
“We have a toolkit of AI and automated tooling for analysing player sentiment via community, socials and player support, run by our player experience function,” she continues. “All of this has had a big impact on our recent feature launches.”
“But sometimes the most powerful methods are the old school ones, like just talking to players,” she continues. “We are currently working on a new Discord-powered platform to do this more officially with some of our most highly engaged ambassadors.”
Keeping on top of what competitors are doing is also important, of course. “It’s par for the course in casual – once someone hits on a great event idea or booster type it propagates so quickly,” says Gracie-Herst.
“In a small team we don’t yet have the scale to crank out the live ops calendars of our competitors – although we are working on it! – so we have to prioritize for impact.”
When it comes to adding new features and balancing new with proven features, Gracie-Herst says she’s not really a believer in the industry standard 70/20/10 ratio of ‘Proven, Better, New’
“I don’t think you can live in that mode forever, if you want to compete you need to innovate,” she tells us. “I think you can innovate within constraints, often it’s the Better space rather than the New space that is the richest, for example adapting features that work in a different genre.”
There are new games incoming from Trailmix, too. There are no specifics yet, but they are being “built with distribution and community in mind from day one,” says Gracie-Herst. “We’re not just relying on paid channels, we’re creating systems that help the right players discover the game and stick around.”
“That means building tighter feedback loops through our community channels, and using new tech, including AI tools, to surface actionable insights from real player conversations. Our new games are very player-centric – we’re creating them by deeply understanding and addressing players’ spoken and unspoken needs.”
