Executive Summary

• Magic Tavern’s two-year-old game, Project Makeover, was off to a great start until months after its launch. Its growth was stunted by the release of wunderkind Royal Match and the unexpected revival of Candy Crush Saga (CCS).
• While Project Makeover’s match-3 feels laborious and a little dated, its meta is highly rewarding and surprisingly deep. Unfortunately, this results in a chocolate-covered broccoli scenario where a good amount of players are only extrinsically motivated to play the game’s levels.
• The game’s live operations are mostly focused on adding loss aversion, with engagement coming in second place, which has the potential to turn the experience even more sour.
• With AppLovin’s clear focus on growth software and its game development business stagnating, a potential sale of some studios, e.g., Magic Tavern, is an increasingly likely scenario.

Market Insights

Project Makeover is the second match-3 game of Beijing-based studio Magic Tavern. As most games in this genre, it combines the well-known puzzle levels with a decoration meta, but this time that meta is much more unique than usual. It was released exactly two years ago at what seemed to be perfect timing — Candy Crush Saga’s revenue had been slowly declining, and all bets seemed to be off. And, throughout the months that followed, Project Makeover actually seemed to be on schedule to potentially surpass the big three match-3 leaders: Gardenscapes, Homescapes, and Candy Crush Saga.

However, in March 2021, things took an unexpected turn — Candy Crush Saga revenues started picking up while its competitors suffered declines (a story Naavik Pro will break down further in December!). This seems to be the case to this day, and as the newest competitor with arguably the least loyal fanbase, Project Makeover has been dropping in the ranks quite heavily since early 2021.

While all of the games in the graph above are multi-million-dollar success stories, it’s clear that over the last year, Candy Crush Saga has been slowly eating most of its competitors' revenues. The only clear exception is Royal Match. It remains the only game that seems unaffected by the tightening noose that is King’s monopolization of the match-3 segment. In terms of downloads, it’s largely the same story.

When looking at the top-grossing match-3 games above, the plot twist becomes quite clear. From February 2021 onwards, during the lead-up to Apple’s notorious iOS 14.5 patch (deprecating the IDFA) and the following months, download metrics of all match-3 games except Candy Crush Saga declined drastically. YoY change metrics over the last two years show the result of these heavy casualties on the match-3 battlefield in this post-IDFA era.

Regardless of its currently declining KPIs, with approximately half a billion dollars of revenue in just two years, Project Makeover has been a huge success for AppLovin subsidiary Magic Tavern. It has double the lifetime revenue of the company’s first and preceding hit, Matchington Mansion, which disrupted the casual market after it was sneakily released under a company alias called Firecraft Studios. Matchington Mansion revolutionized Homescapes with clever additions like its less puzzly core gameplay, cheekier narrative, and decoratable collection.

Project Makeover is an equally impressive product, as its metagame is by far the most innovative one in the top grossing-match-3 games since Gardenscapes. Instead of the incredibly chewed-out mansion renovation, Magic Tavern decided to take a different approach by choosing a modern theme and glamorous art style. Additionally, the player for once does not take the role of a hovering entity that’s being waved at or clapped for by a butler. In Project Makeover, players have access to elaborate character customization features, so they can freely customize the look of their “remodeling expert” alter ego.

Logically, with such an extravagant and radically different theme comes a different audience fit. As expected, the target audience for Project Makeover skews quite a bit younger than average. While millennials are generally the biggest demographic for almost any casual title, for Project Makeover, almost 30% of players are Gen Z. This is very high in comparison to competitors Royal Match and Candy Crush Saga, which cater more prominently to millennials and Gen X respectively.

For a game like Project Makeover with its glamorous and dramatic theme, a high amount of younger players is not surprising, as this is mostly the generation that also watches shows like Queer Eye, America’s Next Top Model, and Dream Home Makeover. This can be confirmed when looking at the game’s ads, which are clearly focused on younger generation players.

Taking all of the above into account begs the question: Why did Project Makeover experience such a strong start but ultimately declined so quickly? In this article, we shed light on how this game did exceptionally well where practically all other competitors failed, how Magic Tavern seemed to comfortably sail this red ocean, and what went awry during the last 1.5 years. To deconstruct this case, we’ll be addressing:

• A short take on its core gameplay and the different nuances compared to its competitors
• The game loop and its very interesting feature synergies
• The game’s live-ops and how they tie into the meta and monetization
• What the future might hold for Magic Tavern

Match-3, But Not as Royal

While levels in Project Makeover are well-designed, when looking at its core gameplay, it quickly becomes clear that Magic Tavern did not focus on innovation in this area. As the game came out just a few months prior to Royal Match (which likely made match-3 feel as good as it can ever feel), it lacks the smooth and forgiving nature of its kingly competitor. To name a few elements, Project Makeover does not feature:

• Simultaneous matches
• Line rockets that change direction when hit by other line rockets
• Intelligent, homing airplanes/propellers resulting from square matches
• Almost any short levels with relatively few colors

The result of these design choices is a more puzzle-focused variant in the match-3 space. Where Royal Match levels can generally be solved by repeatedly blasting them with power-ups, Project Makeover levels more often require targeting specific cells or areas to succeed. This way, Project Makeover’s core gameplay offers much more friction compared to Royal Match, and after playing for some time, a seemingly generic, catch-all system to influence level difficulty can arguably be felt. When reaching a new level and attempting it for the first time, solving the level often seems arduous, while a few attempts later this feeling is gone. While this is nothing new in the match-3 genre, where most companies have their own behind-the-scenes systems to provide dynamic difficulty, Project Makeover seems to force the projected attempts per level a little too transparently and consistently. The game lacks that “most levels are doable” feeling from Royal Match.

When doing a little research by counting the number of colors in the board throughout five attempts to win the same level, it becomes clear that individual color balances can change per attempt, but the balance overall seems relatively similar. This could mean the game has some other sort of system in place that influences the amount of auto-matches on the board after every match.

In Project Makeover, the chance of losing a win streak with each level seems more common than in Royal Match, where a streak often allows players to blast through most levels with relative ease. This does not mean levels in Royal Match are easier; it just means that explosion power-ups in that game have a stronger influence on the player’s ability to win. As a result of the puzzly nature of Project Makeover’s levels and the relatively high chance of losing on first attempts, the pressure to keep a streak is less high. This hurts the game’s monetization as it directly influences the player’s willingness to spend.

What doesn’t help either is the fact that many of the game’s live-ops award extra power-ups on level start, which also diminishes the pressure on maintaining a winning streak (more on this later).

The irony is that, at this point, in many levels it doesn’t matter anymore how many power-ups are provided. Fire one, and the whole thing explodes, but level objectives can only be hit once per move; multiple explosions don’t mean multiple hits. This sets the player up for disappointment. Now, to see where all these explosives on level start come from, let’s take a look at the game’s meta systems.

Meta

Project Makeover’s meta is where its innovation lies. Look at the depth of the game’s systems, and you’ll quickly realize why a whole lot of the world’s casual players have been so eager to drop by and start playing. It’s difficult to find reliable data on this, but Project Makeover CPIs are expected to be a tad lower than the majority of its direct competitors due to its relatable and unique theme.

On the design side, the same theme offers a highly gratifying setting of self-expression and unequaled agency. Players are tasked to change three aspects of fictional characters who all seem to have one thing in common: it is their own, and not their environment’s appearance, that has been their main focus in life. The three aspects players are tasked to improve are looks, clothes, and space.

While a little illogical at first glance, the inclusion of room decoration into the meta seems like a wise move, as it allows players who didn’t get enough home improvement in the competitors to have fun with Project Makeover. The question here is, does this triple-sized scope allow for enough scalability?

Content Scaling

Because the game has been live for two years now, potential lack of scalability doesn’t seem to be a huge issue for new players anymore. But we all know that a sizable chunk of structural monetization comes from the highly engaged players at the end of content. Let’s have a look at the game’s content release cadence.

What’s very smart about the meta of Project Makeover is that it’s progressing episodically. As a result, players get a stronger sense of closure when they are done finalizing each project. The theme also allows for a natural point of reflection where the before & after are clearly and glamorously unveiled in quick succession — a must-have for every makeover.

But how long does it take Project Makeover to release one of these episodes? Not too long, it turns out! At the time of writing, the game offers 64 episodes, 40 of which have been added to the game in the last 16 months. That’s roughly one episode every 1.5 weeks.

The content updates with new episodes contain levels that provide players with coins used to complete tasks. For example, the 5th episode takes roughly 20K coins to complete, which is the result of winning 67 levels. This means players have years of content to play through if they want to reach the end.

Real Customization

As mentioned before, the expansion of decorations from a purely customizable utility, like in Homescapes, to a more collection-based system, like the one Magic Tavern pioneered in Matchington Mansion, offers the agency to create something truly unique. Project Makeover continues this trend. Along with the three standard options that the game provides, there are also optional tasks that allow players to place collected items like decorative plants, jewelry, and decorations in dedicated slots throughout the makeover projects. To sensationalize this, the game even assigns rarity levels to its decorations, which are usually only reserved for more midcore audiences.

With such amount of depth and customization options — but with the added ‘gone-when-done’ nature of the episodes — comes the lack of visibility of past achievements. Therefore, it was necessary for Project Makeover to provide a way for players to look back at their completed creations. In Gardenscapes, Homescapes, or Magic Tavern’s own Matchington Mansion, this was easy, as all of the fruits of the player’s decorative labor could be seen in one scene. In Project Makeover, this has been achieved by adding the episode browser, which allows players to actually go back and keep changing the looks of past makeover subjects if they want to. Next to this, it provides a fun foreshadowing of all future makeovers to look forward to.

Player Fantasy

Most home decoration games suffer from a natural lack of player inclusion, and players are mostly acting as some kind of detached deity in the sky. Since the release of The Sims on PC, fourth wall breaks (like game characters suddenly waving at the camera to catch the player’s attention) have become more or less accepted, but this doesn’t mean it’s an ideal scenario. In terms of immersion, it’s better to allow the player to fulfill a clear role that feeds into some kind of fantasy. This is where Project Makeover really shines.

While the earlier scope estimation just covered assets required for the episodic progression, there is more content to be found next to the makeover guests. When players win levels, they not only earn coins for the makeover projects but also some cash (bills, a different currency!). This cash feeds into a (initially hidden) personalization and collection system with a much more permanent and long-term presence: the players themselves are represented in the game by their personal avatar. This is the character that the makeover coaches in the game talk to, making the whole thing much less awkward. These avatars have a player-defined name, their own looks, and an entire makeover studio that can be customized to the player’s liking!

A later update even expanded this with a longer-term progression where players (for huge sums of cash) can purchase increasingly luxurious properties as studios for their avatar to work from. Besides the basic studio the player starts at, there’s also a Beach House, a Penthouse, a Mountaintop Villa, a Safari Escape, a Posh Patio, and finally a Desert Cave House.

Obviously, systems like these will only be engaging if players are actually able to show off their highly customized personalities and studio, which they are! Magic Tavern even took this further by adding a slightly competitive twist. For every 10 cash the player spends on their own avatar, they earn a crown point. These crowns are tallied in a global leaderboard which can be used by anyone to visit the most engaged players in the world.

Narrative

Project Makeover is not a narrative-driven game, but to support the fantasy of being a professional makeover expert, the game features many dialogues. Most dialogues are served to the player as fun exchanges between in-game characters after performing makeover tasks on the episode guests, but to be able to add some more drama, the developer added… well, exactly that, Drama!

Drama dialogues offer longer interactions between in-game characters and makeover competitor (and Cruella de Vil’s sister) Greta Von Deta. Magic Tavern kept it occasional by serving one Drama dialogue approximately every 10 levels. As expected, the game’s narrative is more focused on superficial drama rather than more relatable, adult topics like in Love & Pies. Common topics include age, gender, and looks.

Social

Lastly, the game offers a cookie-cutter social system with teams (called Cliques) where lives can be gifted among members. Additionally, there is a weekly recurring cooperative challenge which asks players to perform a task as much as possible, granting three milestones worth of gifts.

Tasks include using specific power-ups or straight up winning levels. As the challenges simply require players to play the game as they usually would without adding any strategic choice, it’s not likely that members of the more casual cliques are actively keeping track of reaching the last milestone on time. The result is gifts and bonuses they don’t expect but still get, which doesn’t sound like the best thing for any game’s economy.

Loop & Retention

All of these features combined make for a pretty complete palette of player motivations that are catered to. In summary, these features can be visualized in the following loop diagram:

For loyal readers who also read our Royal Match deconstruction from May, this next diagram might seem familiar. As mentioned back then, Project Makeover skews all the way to the right of the meta complexity spectrum when compared with other match-3 titles. While the game is definitely no Rise of Kingdoms, it does have quite a few extra features to engage with.

Comparing all these extra base features to competitors could lead one to believe that the game must be retaining players better or at least to the same degree. Then, after researching the metrics, one can only be slightly disappointed.

When comparing Project Makeover with its competitors, there’s a clear gap between its average retention rates over the last 12 months. Data.ai numbers show acceptable D1 retention of 30%, but it’s followed by a severe drop-off on D3 and D7, leaving a staggering difference of 10 percentage points of D7 retention lower than Royal Match. The next step to understanding these numbers better is looking at the game’s live operations, which generally start influencing players from D3 onwards, after they have been hooked with the core game mechanics.

Live-ops

As most of the following features are not implemented in revolutionary new ways and yet still do the trick, we’ll not go too in-depth with analyzing them. For example, almost every self-respecting game in the top-grossing charts has a season pass in this day and age, and Project Makeover is no exception.

One thing that’s a bit of a recurring theme with Project Makeover is its relatively high intolerance of non-payers. An example of this can be seen in the season pass, which is progressed through by completing challenges. For players not taking the scenic route (a monthly premium purchase of €5.99), completing a task is followed by a “Coming Soon!” statement, and it takes multiple hours before a new task shows up. The result is a pretty harsh, discriminatory limit of challenges non-payers can complete per day, resulting in an even lower chance of completing the whole thing. While this might incentivize some players to purchase the pass, it’s far from a positive motivation and therefore not the most enticing purchase that should be a monthly no-brainer.

Triple Loss Aversion

Next up we’ll analyze Project Makeover’s take on something no level-based puzzler could ever do without, and which has been perfected over the last years by many of the genre’s past successes: loss aversion. The game does its best to create a fair amount of it by adding several in-game events, often stacked on top of each other.

First up are loss aversion’s bread and butter: the win streaks we’ve been talking about earlier. The game alternates between two events with different streak lengths. Fashion Show awards streak rewards up to three wins, and Yoga Stretch adds two additional rewards, including an extra move upon achieving five consecutive wins.

Next is the Jet Setter event, which is basically a bingo card that players fill out by completing levels. With every try, a different item is foreshadowed as a reward. The trick here is that some of the items on the card are rarer than others, so when those rare airplanes, trains, and cars show up to be the level rewards, it’s definitely a reason to think twice before ending that level when out of moves.

Then there are the Passion for Fashion and Steal the Spotlight events, which are the usual time-limited competitions. For the former, players have a few days to match as many heart gems as possible while competing in a temporary leaderboard with 99 other players. For the latter, the only difference is the theme and the fact that the player has to trigger power-ups instead. Both of these aren’t events that require the player to do anything more than keep winning levels, so players can easily forget about the additional goals they introduce. When running out of moves, though, players will surely see those hearts or hands again, trying to woo them into watching an ad to get 2 more moves or maybe even purchasing 5 for 300 gems (about $0.90).

None of the aforementioned events are shockingly original, but on rare occasions, when the season allows it, something special does happen in Project Makeover. For example, last month before Halloween, players saw a parallel progression track featuring a seasonal makeover project appear. For eight days, players were tasked to complete a horror house makeover. That’s right, a personal makeover was not included, which technically means Project Makeover simply went with a classic house renovation theme for this event. The house did look very cool, though.

All features above, even the Halloween event (which made players collect green pumpkin tags on specific gems in the board), have rewards that are shown when the player is about to lose a level. Add to this the occasional mystery box possibly containing rare makeover decorations that can be earned (only on the first try!) every couple of levels, and you’ll count about six different items that can be shown in the end-of-round screen to persuade players into continuing, depending on the events that are running.

The game also contains a select few events that are focused more around engagement. The Shopping Spree and Style Exchange events are good examples where returning to the game and winning levels is rewarded with cosmetic gifts, boosts, and extra cash. Other miscellaneous events include the repeatable Locked Box requiring players to log in about twice a day, or the Stylish Stash, which is a posh way to say Piggy Bank.

When we take into account its base features, level balancing, and especially the live operations laid out above, Project Makeover’s engagement and monetization strategy is slightly aggressive. On the surface, the difference with Royal Match’s gameplay might seem small, but when zooming in, it becomes quite clear that Royal Match’s focus on engagement is paying off, particularly in terms of the amount of sessions that players are starting. When aggregating the average number of sessions over a month, Project Makeover clearly performs lower than its competitors and has practically half the sessions Royal Match has.

So, What Went Wrong?

After analyzing all of the above, it now seems pretty clear that Project Makeover’s marketing has definitely not been the issue. In fact, the cleverness of the game’s theme and its UA most likely led to its virally high spike in terms of user acquisition during the first few months. Moreover, its early retention (while not perfect) isn’t the game’s biggest problem either. And looking at its feature set, the amount of variety in its live operations calendar seems to definitely suffice as well.

In the end, it seems that the way Project Makeover treats its players is what makes its graph’s tail less lengthy. While loss aversion can be used sparingly to flirt with players and offer a way out as a last resort, Project Makeover seems to have gone completely overboard by designing practically each of its systems and features around this principle. The developers seem to have underestimated that a good part of match-3 players getting tired of this trick. Most likely, this above all else has resulted in the game’s increasingly meager performance, undoubtedly to Magic Tavern's and its parent company’s disappointment.

“We Need to Talk...”

As briefly mentioned earlier, Magic Tavern is a subsidiary of AppLovin whose portfolio also includes Belka Games, Lion Studios, PeopleFun, and Redemption Games. However, at no point since its inception in 2012 has AppLovin had game development as its core business. Its focus has been mobile advertising and growth software, and earlier this year, even before it stirred the pot by trying to stave off Unity’s recently completed acquisition of IronSource, AppLovin was pretty clear about the future of its ecosystem. Mobile growth software is now responsible for 40% of AppLovin’s revenue compared to the 14% when the company went public in April of last year, and it’s expected to grow beyond this, as more than 80% of the company’s net profit came from software. Big parts of its app business have shown much slower growth or (like in Magic Tavern’s case) even declined.

Of course, Magic Tavern is far from the only game development company in this position, and AppLovin’s strong focus on software will hopefully not jeopardize any of its subsidiaries directly, but it does spark the question of where its priorities are at the end of the day. This is doubly true when, following a difficult year, AppLovin openly stated its intention “not to run games as a cost center” anymore and is considering maybe even selling off some of its studios to be able to reinvest into software development.

New Vats of Ale

This brings us back to Magic Tavern’s use case. The company is making enough money to sustain itself, its total revenue is $6M a week, but with revenue graphs pointing downwards, the question remains: how will Magic Tavern try to add revenue streams in the mid- to long-term? Admittedly, it found a great wedge into the match-3 space, twice in a row, but for a company that is part of a growth engine ecosystem, its long-term game performance hasn’t ever been very exemplary, especially when compared to its competitor-to-beat.

Magic Tavern has proven its worth in terms of the ability to create and market hits; there’s no doubt about this. Growing its games to their maximum potentials, on the other hand, has never been the company’s forte. Luckily, this is something that can be learned. It could take just a few key hires to turn things around for the better, but time is of the essence as Project Makeover downloads are down 55% YoY. Combining a new and improved live-ops engine with a new game would be the ideal scenario, but given times have changed quite drastically since Project Makeover’s launch, this doesn’t seem like the easiest challenge to overcome once more.

A Makeover for Project Makeover?

To start with the most complicated problem, when looking at the more modern takes on match-3, Project Makeover’s core gameplay simply isn’t best-in-class, especially because of the lack of simultaneous matches and the puzzly design of its levels. Moreover, when catering to a younger generation, it’s key that gameplay feels seamless without requiring too much patience. It would be more pleasant if players could just blast away in at least half of the levels. Not every level has to be a struggle. On top of that, specifically after Royal Match’s inception, it’s now less acceptable to have levels with too few match possibilities, which happens much too often in this game.

Usually it is ill-advised to make any changes to the workings of a game’s core gameplay when it has been out for a while. Mainly because any small change would most likely require rebalancing all of the game’s levels (Project Makeover now has more than 4K), which is very costly. But when looking at the game’s recent performance, is it possible that desperate times call for desperate measures? Adding fun “relief levels” would most likely not be a bad move.

This brings us to the second point, which is easier to change: end-of-level purchasing of extra moves should be more appealing. The reasons why this is only working suboptimally are:

1. The dynamic difficulty is quite obvious. Making this system less transparent and repetitive would not hurt, as at this point it’s quite obvious that levels get easier after a few tries. Most players won’t know why, but this won’t matter as it’s their feelings that counts.
2. Lower extra moves conversion also stems from the fact that the game’s live-ops often add too many additional boosts on level start temporarily. This diminishes the value that streaks have, because players will receive boosts on level start regardless.
3. We’ve thoroughly addressed this before: the game pressures the player too much on what they would lose if... Toning down the focus on loss aversion while adding more live operations features that focus primarily on engagement should be next on the game’s roadmap.
4. The Cliques’ features are very basic and only reward players extrinsically. Real social interactions are scarce, as players can simply share lives daily and be done with it. The weekly challenge is relatively repetitive and doesn’t require any strategy. Adding more features that incentivize players to think and solve problems together is highly recommended. For example, have a look at the social system listed in last month’s June’s Journey deconstruction or check out the help feature in Lily’s Garden, which lets team members attempt any level at another player’s progression if they’ve been stuck for a while.

All in all, it’s a darn shame that Project Makeover isn’t faring so well these days. The game is pretty unique in terms of its meta, and the developers have delivered an extremely polished product. The theme-audience-fit is spot-on, and all of its metaphors work fine. Unfortunately for Magic Tavern, the goalposts regarding the underlying UX of match-3 gameplay and levels have moved over the last two years, which might have made it more and more essential for game developers to provide players with similarly good feels. The fact that Project Makeover came out about two years after Matchington Mansion might mean that a third Magic Tavern game isn’t far away, but the question remains if the company can achieve a hat-trick in the blood-red ocean that is the match-3 market these days. We certainly wish it the best of luck!

A big thanks to Niek Tuerlings for writing this essay. If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.