In 2019, former Playtika employees Gilad Almog and Eyal Netzer, along with industry veteran Elad Drory, started SuperPlay with a mission to create lasting, chart-topping games that set the gold standard in gaming.

With the launch of Dice Dreams, a fast-growing coin looter game, and Domino Dreams, a popular board game, SuperPlay generated over $300M from around 27M downloads in just over three years.

Last year, Playtika acquired SuperPlay for $700M upfront, with a potential $1.25B more based on future financial goals. The acquisition aimed to further grow SuperPlay’s two live titles and support the release of two unannounced projects in development.

One of those games was Disney Solitaire, which launched in mid-April and became the second top-grossing solitaire game within two weeks. The solitaire subgenre is seeing increased competition, with recent releases like King’s Candy Crush Solitaire and upcoming titles such as Wooga’s Claire's Chronicles: Solitaire and Metacore’s Grandma’s Solitaire Secrets in soft launch.

Despite the growing hype around solitaire games, numerous titles have entered the market only to underperform and struggle for sustained relevance. Disney Solitaire's promising start and the recent flood of entrants offers a compelling reason to take a closer look at a subgenre defined by simplicity, strategy, and spending!

The Solitaire Subgenre

This subgenre’s history is marked by a few key players, and many more who couldn't sustain long-term success. The first standout title was Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks (from Scopely), launched in 2014. It established a strong foundation with its engaging Tri Peaks gameplay, island theme, and social features, achieving significant revenue and a lasting presence in the market.

However, the landscape shifted with the arrival of Solitaire Grand Harvest(Supertreat, later acquired by Playtika) in 2017. It blended the core tripeaks mechanic with a compelling farm-building metagame and a casino-inspired betting economy. This combination proved incredibly successful, propelling the game into the top grossing charts and establishing it as the dominant force in the subgenre, generating over $1B in lifetime revenue. Its success redefined the potential of mobile solitaire (which we’ve also previously covered in depth here).

Following Solitaire Grand Harvest's breakthrough, a wave of new entrants attempted to capture a piece of the burgeoning market, including Solitaire Cruise Tripeaks (Samfinaco) and Fishdom Solitaire (Playrix), which incorporated metagame elements like home renovation or exploration. While some of these games garnered decent downloads, they largely failed to get a significant foothold, or dethrone Grand Harvest.

More recently, the subgenre has seen new competition emerge. Disney Solitaire, launched in April 2025, has shown strong early performance, while another notable recent release was Candy Crush Solitaire (King), also launched in early 2025. It utilizes King’s flagship IP and suggests renewed interest and investment in this space from major players.

The Key to the Magic Kingdom: A Betting Economy

Playtika's new title Disney Solitaire leverages a globally powerful and beloved brand — as SuperPlay's CEO Gilad Almog put it: “Solitaire is a game for adults and there's a huge audience of adults who love Disney for the nostalgic element of it.”

As with Solitaire Grand Harvest, in Disney Solitaire, each level presents a unique card layout with some cards faced down. Players have a draw pile and a discard pile, and tap playable cards from the layout that are one rank above or below the discard pile's top card. Revealing face-down cards adds a strategic element alongside the luck of card sequences (gameplay video here).

The game ends in victory when all cards are cleared, or a loss when there are no moves left in the draw deck. There’s a chance to continue by buying five cards for coins or retrying. Every level also costs coins to play, and players can bet more coins to boost coin and event token rewards. This nudges players toward high risk, high reward behaviour, similar to casino games.

Coin costs for level entry, bet multipliers, and their in-game purchases scale as players progress, subtly encouraging higher bets for better value. This betting and scaling economy was innovative when Solitaire Grand Harvest was released, replacing the traditional lives system in King’s Pyramid Solitaire Saga and is one step further from the non-betting coin system in Scopely’s Solitaire TriPeaks. Most newer games, like Playrix’s Fishdom Solitaire, have since adopted this betting model.

This betting economy is where the core of the monetization lies. While the potential rewards for higher bets appear substantial, the cost to play and win at higher bet levels also increases proportionally. Furthermore, the actual net gain for the player, even on a successful high-stakes level, is often relatively small when factoring in the initial bet.

The table above highlights this by comparing the level entry costs for x1 and x2 bet multipliers, the reward as shown to the player, and their "actual" rewards after accounting for the entry cost. The ROI of x1 with 350 coins after investing 2,100 on entry (350/2100 = 0.17) and x2 with 700 coins after investing 4,200 on entry (700/4200 = 0.17) is the same.

Once levels become more difficult and players start losing, using power-ups, and boosters, the ROI degrades even more. The impact of this betting economy can be seen in the strong RPD of Grand Harvest below.

Few top grossing casual games have reached a U.S. RPD greater than $30, with Coin Master at $29. The true success of the betting economy has been this strong lifetime value, with Playtika’s Solitaire Grand Harvest at $31, a few dollars behind the top casual game, Royal Match’s $36. Only Playtika’s Bingo Blitz makes it into this club with a $34 U.S. RPD.

Disney Solitaire vs. the Rest

A strong case can be made that Disney Solitaire is just Solitaire Grand Harvest reskinned with Disney IP. The core levels, economy, and monetization are practically identical, with Disney Solitaire choosing to update Grand Harvest’s saga map meta with the more modern meta-lite star system, where players complete tasks to fill iconic Disney scenes, providing a nostalgic progression loop. This brings years of proven, tuned, and balanced levels combined with a betting economy, and adds the appeal of Disney IP as its differentiator.

It's also worth noting that SuperPlay, the developer of Disney Solitaire, had prior experience in this space with the release of Domino Dreams. This game essentially applies the solitaire formula to domino tiles and incorporates the same betting economy.

Contrasting this approach with the struggles of subgenre newcomers like Candy Crush Solitaire and Fishdom Solitaire highlights their inherent disadvantage. The core audiences of Candy Crush and Fishdom may have different preferences than the more nostalgic demographic attracted to Disney.

Furthermore, even with their experience in casual puzzle design, King and Playrix face the challenge of creating compelling solitaire levels that effectively integrate the social casino betting economy — not an easy feat.

Disney Solitaire currently boasts an RPD of $1.25, significantly higher than Candy Crush Solitaire's $0.56. Despite launching later (April versus February 2025), Disney Solitaire has already generated double the revenue of Candy Crush Solitaire. This weaker monetization can be attributed to Candy Crush Solitaire lacking the betting economy in its core; its levels have a fixed entry cost, and there are no reward multipliers.

Beyond these existing challenges, Candy Crush Solitaire innovated on the core solitaire gameplay with the "hold slot," a feature that added strategic depth by letting players store a card.

This move, however, steered the game away from Grand Harvest's more casual core, making it more puzzle-like and potentially narrowing its target audience. In retrospect, Disney Solitaire's choice to keep the core gameplay consistent with Grand Harvest seems to prioritize the wide audience accessibility crucial for scaling a game in the current landscape.

Solitaire’s Future is in Betting Economies

The subgenre has been dominated by Solitaire Grand Harvest since 2017, making it similar to Coin Master's long reign in the coin looter genre until Monopoly Go's arrival in 2023. This dominance creates a significant opportunity, and we've seen increased activity as companies aim to capitalize on these potential growth areas.

These new entrants often take from the Solitaire Grand Harvest playbook, especially those with betting economies. However, implementation is key. While building a betting economy is potentially powerful, lasting success requires careful tuning of level difficulty, metagame progression, and economy sinks and taps.

Solitaire Home Design, Solitaire Cruise Tripeaks, and Fishdom Solitaire all launched with a betting economy, but ultimately failed because they got the balance wrong.

So far, Disney Solitaire looks to be heading in the right direction, though it still lags behind Solitaire Grand Harvest’s $14.15 RPD. It remains to be seen if the Disney IP and SuperPlay’s experience with a solitaire-like betting game in Domino Dreams can help it pose a serious challenge to Solitaire Grand Harvest.

Regardless of whether Disney Solitaire captures a significant market share, expect the betting economy to become a de facto standard for the subgenre and to spread well beyond the solitaire arena.

Last year, Turkey-based mobile developer Cypher Games secured $10M and started testing Match Squad, a level-based puzzle game with a social casino meta. Royal Kingdom’s initial thesis (which we covered here) was a PvP-focused Royal Match meets Coin Master game plus a social casino economy, with a betting multiplier on levels (based on a support page snapshot).

So, beyond increased interest and competition from casino developers in the solitaire subgenre, we're likely to see the betting economy become a more common monetization strategy in more and more upcoming F2P mobile titles.

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In Other News

💸 Funding & Acquisitions:

• TaleMonster Games raises $7M to make casual mobile games
• Layer AI closes $6.5M seed round with generative AI tools geared to mobile devs
• Brightika charts $3M expansion into PC and console space
• Alpaka Games raises $2.2M in seed funding round

📊 Business & Products:

• Royal Kingdom surpasses $100M after record month
• Capcom reports eighth consecutive year of record profits as Monster Hunter Wilds sells 10.1M copies
• Falls in Sega's FY2025 revenue cushioned by "strong" performance in game and entertainment division
• Nexon says it's "delivering on promises" as it posts Q1 2025 results
• Nintendo’s net sales down 30% in the final stretch before Switch 2

👾 Miscellaneous:

• Squad Busters to overhaul victory conditions, progression systems and remove many modes in tomorrow’s update
• The Switch 2 has a handy battery preservation mode
• Almost 50% of players make greener choices playing games addressing climate change
• Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra delayed until 2026
• More Germans are playing video games than ever before, particularly those aged 60+

A Word from Our Sponsor: Heroic Labs

The Heroic Game Stack — Powering the World's Best Games

Heroic Labs builds the Heroic Game Stack, an integrated platform consisting of Nakama, Hiro, Satori, and Heroic Cloud.  

Heroic Labs is always happy to chat to game teams, so don't hesitate to reach out.

Content Worth Consuming

Mobile AppDev Awards (liftoff.io): “We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 Mobile AppDev Awards. These awards celebrate creativity and excellence in mobile game design, spotlighting last year's most impactful innovations. Now in its fourth year, the awards have expanded to include non-gaming apps, honoring their inventive use of engagement, social, and AI-powered features.”

Did Apple Get too Big for Its Own Good? (Decoder with Nilay Patel): “We’re doing something a little different today — I asked my friend John Gruber of Daring Fireball to come on the show and talk about the future of Apple, and, importantly, the App Store. I wanted to talk about the most recent ruling in the Epic v. Apple legal saga. But I also wanted to talk about the big picture at Apple, and why the company seems to have found itself being hammered on all sides: by the developers that feel it’s become too greedy, by federal court judges that no longer trust it, and by regulators now threatening some of its major cash cows. ”

The Scientific Approach to Advertising Measurement(with Andrew Covato) (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Andrew Covato, a veteran of the largest digital advertising platforms – including Meta, Google, and Snap -- and the founder and managing director of Growth by Science, an advertising measurement and technology consultancy. Andrew and I discuss the topic of advertising measurement broadly, including: the misconceptions that advertisers have about how the largest walled garden advertising platforms function; the principal mistakes companies make related to marketing-driven growth; the scientific approach to measurement, etc.”

The Tricky Future of GenAI in Gaming with Alexis Bonte of Stillfront (Game Changers Podcast): “Is your mobile game studio struggling to stand out? Stillfront CEO Alexis Bonte gets real about the brutal competition, why AI is now a survival tool, and how a laser-focused strategy can keep players – and profits – from walking away. This is direct advice for developers navigating today's tough market, from someone who's built and sold a game company and now leads a major group.”

The Sims' Bing Gordon Is Specifically Right (The Fourth Curtain): “Our guest Bing Gordon has had a long successful run in videogames and tech. From marketing lead to Chief Creative Officer at EA, he helped shaped NASCAR,The Sims and other huge titles. We discuss pitching, two beer strategies and Speilberg's smoke test.”

The Billion-User Goldmine: Gaming with AI + Telegram (GameMakers Podcast): “Simon from Goat Gaming shares how his team is leveraging AI and Telegram to build games in just 2-3 weeks, reaching 5.5 million users. Learn why he believes AI will be an "extinction-level event" for studios that don't adapt, and how Telegram offers a billion-user opportunity similar to early Facebook gaming.”

AI as a Platform(Ep. 23) (Gamecraft Podcast): “Last season, Mitch and Blake discussed the implications of new Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence in games. In this episode, they return to the topic, this time focusing on games that are using AI as a platform – meaning, the games are predicated on the use of LLMs to manage gameplay in some way.”

Our Gamification Consulting Services

Today, we’re highlighting our gamification consulting services! Applying game mechanics to all sorts of applications has proven to boost retention, engagement, and revenue — but doing it right can be harder than it seems.

Naavik offers constructive gamification deconstructions, gamification workshops, and ongoing flexible support. Here is what one of our clients had to say.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out here. Also check out our expanded consulting service portfolio here.