In the latest edition of SensorTower’s Global Revenue Rankings for Chinese Mobile Game Publishers, Microfun has surpassed Papergames and 37 Interactive Entertainment, securing the sixth position on the list.
This achievement is attributed to two of its merge games—Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story and Seaside Escape: Merge & Story.
In November last year, these two games topped the global merge game revenue rankings, with Gossip Harbor even surpassing Genshin Impact, reaching Top 4 on the global mobile game revenue chart at the time.
Earlier, AppGrowing conducted a follow-up report on Gossip Harbor. In brief, Gossip Harboris a Merge-2 (two-in-one) game that follows the classic cycle of “tap to generate items, merge items, complete orders, earn coins, renovate.” However, the game stands out through its narrative centered around an independent woman, offering a unique touch.
Shortly after, Seaside Escapealso followed suit. Although it made slight adjustments to the gameplay, it retained the classic Merge-2 design, with the plot shifting from a “single mother running a restaurant” to “a falsely accused celebrity returning to her hometown to revive a resort.”
This thematic differentiation ensured market segmentation for both games. Beyond the products themselves, Microfun also adopted different user acquisition marketing strategies to avoid the “competition with itself” scenario.
01.Similar Products, Different Market Strategies
In the second half of last year, both of Microfun' products exhibited significant growth. From a market perspective, this is closely tied to its increased advertising spend.
AppGrowing monitoring shows that by the end of August, both Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape had seen noticeable rises in advertising efforts. However, Microfun allocated more resources to Gossip Harbor.
By the end of August, Gossip Harbor’s daily ad spend surpassed 1,000 ads and continued to climb, breaking through 3,100 ads.
Meanwhile, Seaside Escape’s daily ad spend was below 400 ads, with no subsequent rise beyond 1,600 ads.
Besides the differences in scale, the regional focus of the two games also varied. Gossip Harbor employed a traditional market strategy, focusing primarily on developed countries in Europe and North America.
In the past six months, markets like Canada and the United States each accounted for around 15% of ad spend, with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom together making up more than 50%.
For Seaside Escape, the past six months saw South Korea outpacing the U.S. in ad spend, and Japan accounted for more than 8%. The total resources allocated to these two Asian markets exceeded those for Europe and North America.
Mexico also had a noteworthy 11% share of ad spend, indicating that the market strategy for Seaside Escape was to expand not only in mainstream European and American casual markets but also in emerging and developed markets.
In terms of creative materials, there are clear differences between the two games. Gossip Harbor focused more on the storyline in its ads, using the characters' tragic experiences to evoke sympathy.
For example, one ad showed a divorced couple with their daughter looking sadly at her father, who responded with a disdainful expression. The scene shifts to depict the mother and daughter arriving at a dilapidated house on a stormy night.
Notably, these story-driven ads would often feature a choice-based gameplay demonstration, where players could “choose between two options” to help the mother and daughter improve their situation. However, the choices often resulted in failure, heightening emotional tension and prompting users to download the game.
On the other hand, Seaside Escape ads primarily showcased gameplay, emphasizing time limits to stimulate a sense of challenge.
One ad featured a supermarket shopping simulation, where players had to merge items to fill a shopping cart within a limited time or fail the challenge.
Other ads explored non-merge mechanics, such as a conveyor belt puzzle, where players needed to pick up the correct items to eliminate baskets, failing if the criteria weren't met.
The most popular recent ad features a gameplay loop where players must replace missing Mahjong tiles in a column using tiles from a given pattern. This video also incorporated live-action and PvP elements.
02.The key to breaking through lies in thematic differentiation and gameplay fusion
According to data.ai, the in-app purchases of merge games reached $975 million in 2023. AppMagic data shows that, in May this year, Merge-2 games saw monthly revenues of $60.5 million, a 107% year-on-year increase.
Overall, while the merge game market is still relatively small, it is growing rapidly with massive potential, though the competition remains fierce.
Despite holding two leading products in the genre, Microfun continues to delve deeper into this market. Through AppGrowing's Top Publishers, we can see that Microfun is also working on a new merge game, Flambé: Merge and Cook, though it has not yet launched a large-scale ad campaign.
Flambé: Merge and Cook follows the Merge-2 gameplay model, but unlike Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape, it emphasizes restaurant management with a focus on cooking rather than a story-driven experience.
Flambé: Merge and Cook weakens the narrative aspect, focusing more on the core merge mechanics, though it’s unclear whether the storyline will be further emphasized later.Based on its title, it seems that theme is the primary focus of this new game’s differentiation strategy.
Meanwhile, Century Games has also turned its attention to the merge game with Tasty Travels: Merge Game, blending travel and food.
BoKe recently released Merge Restyle, another Merge-2 game, where a brief animation opens the story of a woman catching her partner cheating before leaving angrily.
While the narrative parallels Gossip Harbor, it doesn’t develop further. The game focuses on home décor and pet companionship as its selling points, exploring the possibility of thematic differentiation.
Having previously reached the top of the merge genre with Merge Mansion, Metacore Games recently launched a Merge-2 game centered around reviving a shopping mall, as well as the Viking-themed Merge Vikings, which fused COC-style combat with the merge genre.
Merge Vikings keeps the full Merge-2 cycle, where players generate items and combine them to complete tasks. Soldiers and defensive buildings can also be generated and merged within the game.
This thematic packaging combined with merge gameplay shows that Metacore is trying to break out of the merge genre’s traditional audience base, much like 37 Interactive Entertainment did with Puzzle & Survival, merging match-3 and hardcore survival themes with SLG elements.
Overall, Merge-2 has become the mainstream gameplay in the merge puzzle category. Developers are primarily opting for thematic differentiation to stand out from the competition, often incorporating simulated management elements.
However, gameplay fusion may also become the next area of exploration for this genre, blending casual gameplay with mid-to-hard core elements to break into new audience segments.
While casual games have long been a lucrative category in the global mobile gaming market, with match-3 games dominating, the competition has grown saturated. The rise of merge puzzle games indicates another promising direction for developers aiming to conquer the casual gaming market, with the potential for explosive growth in this rapidly expanding category.
