Merge Gardens and its aces up its sleeve. Analysis of the restart of the game

How the casual game Merge Gardens from the Finnish Futureplay studio managed to enter the top ten most successful merge projects after three years of obscure existence and earn more than $11 million, Belka Labs game designer Ksenia Chursina analyzed in her deconstruction.

Ksenia Chursina, game designer at Belka Labs

Project history

The Merge Gardens game appeared in stores in Australia and Canada in early 2020. In September of the same year, the project was released worldwide. The game quickly reached its peak revenue of around $ 900,000 per month at that time, and then fell to a plateau of $ 400-500 thousand.

The metrics did not show high values in subsequent years, but they did not collapse either. With minimal purchases and organics (the level of monthly downloads since the summer of 2021 was no more than 100-110 thousand), the game remained on a plateau in terms of cash.

A cute game about restoring Grandma's garden and would have continued to go with the flow if the studio had not made major changes to the project. Thanks to them, Merge Gardens' revenue soared sixfold. This happened two and a half years after the worldwide release of the game.

To understand what allowed the game to earn more, you first need to figure out two things:

• What is Merge Gardens?;
• what it was like before 2023.

Which Merge Gardens was at the start?

In 2020, the cheerful hedgehog Gatsby met the player in the cozy but abandoned Grandmother's garden. He taught how to combine flowers to extract nectar from them, clear territories and explore the garden.

The game quite accurately followed in the footsteps of the founder of the merge-3 genre — Merge Dragons, but there was one caveat. The gameplay of classic merge-3 games (some also call them merge-5), as a rule, boils down exclusively to combining objects on a huge map. However, in Merge Gardens, in addition to the garden with Grandma, there was a full-fledged mode with match-3 mechanics.

The game was designed so that neither of the two main mechanics was mandatory. The game did not require the "stars" from match-3 for further work in the garden in the manner of Gardenscapes, and did not force you to explore the garden in order to continue playing match-3. The player himself chose what is closer to his mood today and now. How much time does he want to spend on a chip swap, and how much on perfecting the flower garden.

However, there was some connection between the mechanics. The garden allowed the player to earn boosters for match-3 mode, and completing match-3 levels gave rewards that could be useful when working in the garden.

How was the core gameplay built in Merge Gardens?

To open new locations, the player needed to grow his Wildlife Score — the total "strength" of the flying creatures at his disposal.

To build up the Wildlife Score, it was necessary to search for, improve by combining or buying new eggs from which the creatures hatched.

The creatures are essentially workers who collect nectar from plants. The more creatures there are, the more plants can be processed at a time. But the workers get tired of a lot of tasks. Periodically, they need to take a nap.

An additional incentive in development was given by tasks from the Grandmother, for which the player received asterisks (they, of course, could be combined into stars and further into asterisks to increase the reward contained in them) — a kind of containers with resources for further development.

The main shortage of a player in the bark is free space. This is how almost all games of the merge genre are arranged, especially merge-3, because the player needs three objects to combine, and for optimal play and getting a "discount" when combining — even five.

The situation does not change with the opening of new locations. In fact, there is no more free space, because along with new locations, new objects and new small sub-mechanics appear (for example, generation of new plants, extraction of wood and gold), which easily eat up all the free space.

Any approach to solving the problem of free space leads the player into his crow of monetization. Game currency can be spent on:

• opening of new zones;
• resetting the creatures' rest timer;
• Buying new eggs;
• purchase of bundles containing flowers and/or nectar;
• Purchase additional rewards after completing levels;
• disclosure of an analogue of a chest with a valuable object;
• etc.

In match 3 levels, the project also adheres to the rails familiar to the genre. The player's deficit is moves, to a lesser extent lives. The player can buy more moves when he is trapped, or he can stock up on boosters in advance to avoid this.

Who plays at Merge Gardens?

As a rule, merge is played mainly by women.

In October 2020:

• The audience of Merge Dragons consisted of 86% women (with a predominance of groups 25-44 and 45+);
• The Evermerge audience consisted of 83% women (also with a predominance of groups 25-44 and 45+).

However, against this background, the audience of Merge Gardens is abnormal. In it, the audience is distributed more evenly in terms of gender: 56% of women and 44% of men (there are no differences by age groups from other games).

By now, the situation has changed. The male audience was expanded on all projects.

Currently, 73% of women are in Merge Dragons, and 63% are in Evermerge.

Merge Gardens remains the "most masculine merge" among popular projects, because the percentage of women here in July 2023 is only 60%.

What happened to Merge Gardens in 2023?

In January 2023, a high-class CG creative appeared in advertising networks in the spirit of a series of commercials for Merge Mansions. The creative looked more like a trailer for a high-budget cartoon than an advertisement.

In it, the audience was told the story of a red-haired girl with glasses, who inherited an estate with a garden that had seen the best years and required large investments for renovation. When Rita, the lawyer, shows the main character the ivy-covered possessions, and then suddenly turns into one of the figuratively trimmed bushes. The girl touches the enchanted lawyer and learns that she is able to remove the artisanal curse. The last shots of the video show numerous enchanted characters frozen in various poses. And each of them promises the player a story.

There is no Gatsby hedgehog in the video, nor a cute Grandmother resting on a rocking chair.

So we got to the first and main component of the new Merge Gardens formula "2023 Edition".

A narrative twist

The previous characters were nothing more than a function: they introduced the player to the world and reacted to his progress through the garden. In today's mobile market, this approach is considered outdated.

A similar problem was solved for a couple of years by the developers of the above-mentioned Merge Mansion from Metacore. They deepened the plot by deepening the existing characters and increasing their number.

As for Merge Gardens, its authors, in order to match the time, completely rethought the narrative component of the game.

The game has a protagonist, the main character. If earlier the face of the Grandmother, whose quests the player performed, constantly hung in the corner of the screen, now there is a portrait of Daisy, a resourceful and cheerful (but not without cunning) girl, tidying up the garden and saving people from the curse. It is she who creates the player's attachment to the house and garden, which they want to restore.

Lily's Garden inspiration can be guessed in the modified house

The research has gained narrative depth. The player does not just transform the territory: he finds enchanted people and learns their stories stretching over the last century, and through them the history of the estate as a whole.

The characters enchanted into the bushes have become the gameplay driver of clearing the garden: figures peeking out of the fog attract attention and motivate the player to open new zones.

The player, especially at the start, is encouraged by a large number of dialogues. Instead of functional replicas, the narrative has been replenished with phrases revealing the characters.

To support the narrative, the creators have introduced a number of new features.

• Character cards are an animated portrait with a brief history of a character (the player is shown a character card at his debut in the plot, for example, after Daisy disenchants another bush).

The player sees the closed cards. This additionally motivates you to move along the plot. At the same time, it allows you to track your progress.

• Memories are small bits of history. The player gets them by solving match-3 levels. They work to engage and retain the player in a similar way to character cards.

• The character is a gardener (he, of course, also needs to be disenchanted). It acts as an exchanger, allowing you to exchange various objects for various new eggs.

Merge Gardens Enhanced Edition

The visual has also undergone many changes as part of the relaunch.

For example, if earlier, when creating graphics for match-3 levels, developers focused on Gardenscapes, then in the new version they focused on Homescapes.

Not only the approach to displaying chips has changed, but also the chips themselves. Instead of fruits, the player combines things more suitable for the detective-mystical bias — books, cameras, hats.

In general, the game began to feel different. Including tactile, at the level of working with the interface, in terms of playing animations, visual effects. Better, clearer and cleaner.

Before

After

Before

After

Narrative Marketing

The third pillar of rethinking is the approach to promotion. The narrative not only gave motivation to play the game. It became a solid bridge between the game and its marketing, provided a seamless transition from the advertising campaign to the scene of action.

The narrative in Merge Gardens starts exactly from the moment the trailer stops. Creativity is so important for the game that a link to a YouTube video with it is embedded in the diary interface.

Speaking of YouTube. Simultaneously with the launch of the UA campaign, the official @MergeGardens channel appeared, where videos on the game are posted.

The title trailer became the basis for the landing page.

On the official Facebook page of the game*, the relaunch was accompanied by numerous announcing intriguing posts about the future of the game and a touching farewell to the old roster of characters.

Futureplay is generally active on social media, trying to increase the recognition of Merge Gardens at all venues. The game has official pages on both Twitter and Instagram*.

In general, the Finnish studio in the advertising campaign focused on the narrative and building an original recognizable brand at the peak of those who preferred mislides. And, apparently, this approach is still working for Merge Gardens. By July last year, the game reached a plateau of $ 3 million per month with an installation level of 400-600 thousand.

I find the case interesting enough to follow it further. Performance marketing will require more and more new approaches, but so far Merge Gardens has managed to move forward in the paradigm of gameplay and cinematics trailers.

Gameplay in the service of history

Have there been any gameplay changes?

It's a pretty complicated question. At first glance, no.

Merge-the mechanics of clearing the garden still offers the player to collect nectar from flowers using flying creatures to clear blocked cells. Even the topology of the map remains the same. Match-3 levels with lives and boosters have not gone anywhere.

But upon deeper analysis, it becomes clear that the evil vines lie in the details.

One of the main gameplay innovations is Daisy's levels (of course, the player's levels). Now it is the levels that block the next zones, and not the total strength of the flying creatures at the player's disposal.

Previously, a player could play the merge component, earn gold in it to buy eggs (or boost himself in this matter with gems) and, by increasing the Wildlife Score, open the next zone. It was not necessary to pass the match-3 levels.

Now, to raise Daisy's level, you need to complete the quests that Grandma used to give out. Among these quests, there are tasks that require completing one or another match-3 level.

So two previously independent cor-mechanics got the missing connection. Even if the player is not forced to play match-3 for the sake of earning a unique resource, it will no longer work to ignore this mechanic.

The resource-deficient model has remained the same: the player will constantly struggle with the lack of free space in the garden and buy more moves in match-3.

The fifth element

As we know, it is more efficient to combine objects if you take five instead of three. Only in this case you get a bonus. The fifth element in the formula of the updated Merge Gardens is comprehensive LiveOps and monetization.

The project has been in operation for about three years. This allowed him to build up a large LiveOps content base for both mechanics. Merge events alternate and combine with events for completing match-3 level lines or using boosters.

All events within the framework of the update received a new visual and narrative. They were carefully arranged in a well-thought-out schedule. This gave the player the motivation to stretch out each session and return to the game as often as possible during each day.

Events can be wrapped in a meta-event, for example, during basic events, the player can collect puzzle pieces. If he manages to collect everything, he gets a cool prize as a reward. For example, a valuable egg.

The situation with monetization is somewhat different. Some aspects and tools of monetization have remained the same. For example, the in-game store has hardly changed.

On the other hand, all the monetization mechanics that are standard for modern free-play games have appeared: season pass, gacha mechanics, personalized offers, cascading offers with free initial involvement, subscription to gems, and the like.

Important: part of the monetization of Merge Gardens has become based on advertising. I managed to count six entry points:

• an advertising bubble with resources flying over the playing field;
• offer a random booster for watching ads inside the match-3 level;
• containers whose timers can be instantly reset by viewing ads;
• getting additional moves in match-3 in exchange for watching;
• Skip the Wildlife rest timer in exchange for watching;
• Increase rewards after completing a level in exchange for watching.

Conclusion

Merge Gardens is an interesting case study.

In fact, the game had a soft restart last January. A change in positioning, the addition of a complex (by casual standards) plot, updating graphics, making significant changes to the progress and monetization system, optimizing the loop and tuning mechanics allowed the game, which until recently was among the outsiders of the genre, to become one of its locomotives.

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