However, after playing Matchington Mansion for about 120 levels, the Game Designer in me is relieved. Which parts of the game's design make it such a lucrative product?Īs a creative, it's safe to say I'm not a fan of clones. Word on the streets is their ARPDAU indicates to be roughly double that of Homescapes. What's easier to analyse is the game itself and see why the game performs the way it does. HomescapesĪfter talking and speculating about Matchington Mansion's marketing successes, there are still quite some unknowns, especially given the cloudiness of Firecraft studios it's hard have a detailed account of what happened in that aspect. Newcomer Lily’s Garden (Tactile Games, Jan 2019) even uses a different core-game (tile-blast instead of match-3) with the same visual progression and narrative driven progression.
Matchington Mansion isn't the only game trying to take a bite out of Playrix' apple Family Zoo (Plarium, Aug 2017), Home Design Makeover (Storm8, Feb 2018) and My Home - Design Dreams (Zentertain, Aug 2018) have been making attempts, but have all reached nothing but a fraction of what Firecraft Studios has accomplished. Nick Earl, Glu Mobile Inc (GLUU) Q1 2019 Earnings Call Transcript We believe it is in the companies and shareholders' best interests to not drive short-term bookings growth via unprofitable UA campaigns.” We expect Design Home and Covet Fashion to collectively be flat from the first quarter to the second quarter. As a result, we've dialed back our UA spend for our female-centric titles, and this has impacted bookings for these titles in the first half of 2019. This had the effect of driving up CPI costs for Design Home, Covet Fashion and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. “Starting in early February, we saw a significant uptick in aggressive UA campaigns from two casual game publishers. In other words, there was a war for the same female player base that ended causing collateral damage: To stop MM from scaling, Playrix pushed their installs at all time high and thus flooded the market with increased in CPIs in defense of their market position. We can also see from the graph Playrix defending their position. After the first push it took almost a year before they started scaling up MM again. Firecraft one the other hand made a first push to scale in late 2017, few months after MM was launched. Clearly they felt confident about scaling up so fast due to all their learnings from Fishdom and more importantly, Gardenscapes. Homescapes came out of the gate guns blazing racking up tens of millions of installs in a couple month. Matchington Mansion was launched at approximately the same time as Playrix’ Homescapes The address points the location of the studio at Patio Coffee Shop.
On Linkedin there are only three people who have worked or are working at Firecraft Studios.įirecraft Studios is located in San Mateo, a few miles South from San Francisco. Ever.įirecraft describes itself as “a small team with a big crush on puzzle games and huge passion to create them!”. Matchington Mansion was created by Firecraft Studios, an Ltd located on the Cayman Islandsįirecraft Studios has no other shipped titles. LTV driven by level optimisation and social mechanicsĬPIs reduced with familiar art style (Toon Blast / Looney Tunes) and use of celebritiesĪnd then there’s Firecraft Studios approach… Firecraft Studios - WTH? Small, agile and extremely hard working teams Ruthless focus on a single type of puzzle mechanic of tile-blasting Negated laborious content treadmill demanded by a visual progression through a cheap cost location of their studiosĪimed, much like King, to saturate the visual progress based match-3 category by releasing follow-up titles with female first themes (gardening, decoration/renovation and zoo-keeper) Innovated by implementing visual progression and storytelling to replace outdated saga-progression When analysing the top Match & Blast developers, we can identify (and significantly simplify) three distinctive approaches to grab a piece of the $3Bn market:įirst mover advantage in the form of a massive playerbase and defacto puzzle saga franchisesĬonquered and saturated the market initially relying on the design frameworks to build, cross-promotion power to scale and the analytics to operate multiple similar type of games aimed at a similar audience.
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