The merge genre is heating up again, and there’s a new winner in the market. At the tail end of 2024, Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story outpaced established merge leaders such as Merge Mansion and Travel Town to become the top-grossing merge game. Throughout the first half of 2025, Gossip Harbor has only cemented its lead through an almost exponential improvement in performance. The game made over $100M in worldwide revenue by the end of May 2025 and has been downloaded over 5.3M times. 

So, what is driving its success? In this article, we will demystify the winning formula in the merge genre today through a critical analysis of Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story.

Contenders in Merge

Before we get into the secret sauce to Gossip Harbor’s success, let’s recap what’s been happening in the merge genre. 

For a long time, the category leader was Merge Mansion, which, to its credit, has maintained a steady monetization level since 2023 despite headwinds and stiff competition. But newer, younger merge titles have dethroned Merge Mansion over time. We have written about challengers such as Love & Pies and the erstwhile market leader Travel Town before. 

Gossip Harbor by Microfun is the newest king of the merge hill, and it is dominating the genre with its sister title from Microfun — Seaside Escape: Merge & Story. A quick look at recent performance of these competitors paints a clear picture.

Revenue for Gossip Harbor increased almost exponentially because the number of active users for the title also grew exponentially when compared to its closest competitors. The downloads trajectory also shows the gradual increase in players for Gossip Harbor, culminating in a sharp spike during the 2024 holiday season. The cause of this startling effect is also very straightforward: UA, UA, and more UA. As we can see from the data below, Gossip Harbor has a disproportionately large share of downloads, over 78%, attributed to paid ads, in comparison to its competitors.

About the Developer

Gossip Harbor was developed and published by Microfun. The company is a mobile game developer and publisher based out of China and has developed a slate of casual titles: Gossip Harbor, Seaside Escape, Merge Fables, Merge County, Jellipop Match, Munchkin Match, and Dream Cake Shop. The company has now become the No. 1 mobile game publisher in the merge category, buoyed by the success of titles like Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape. 

The publisher currently has five live merge titles, which cumulatively made $167M in revenue and have been downloaded 8.5M times just in the first half of 2025. Clearly, the company has both the expertise and strategic focus required to win in the merge genre. Microfun has its eye on the global market and will be influential in driving the genre forward.

What Makes Gossip Harbor Stand Out

From the revenue and downloads charts, it is easy to conclude Gossip Harbor is spending its way to the top. But is there another lesson here?

Digging a little deeper at the game’s fundamentals unearths interesting insights. Compared to the former champ Travel Town, Gossip Harbor has a 25% lower ARPDAU. Gossip Harbor’s ARPDAU is $0.26 while Travel Town’s is $0.35. However, Gossip Harbor has a higher revenue per download with respect to Travel Town, even though its RPD is lower than the merge giant Merge Mansion as well as Gossip Harbor’s sister title Seaside Escape.

Gossip Harbor’s revenue per download (RPD) performance suggests a healthier return on ad spend than its closest competitor. It appears Microfun is doing some things right when it comes to its user acquisition strategy. According to Sensor Tower’s Pathmatics ad spend data, Microfun’s brands in the U.S. as a whole spent less than half on ad spend than Travel Town since 2024. In light of this, Gossip Harbor’s market success appears even more impressive.

Additionally, Gossip Harbor wins in engagement and retention. Compared to Travel Town, Gossip Harbor players on average play 27% more sessions (41 sessions versus 32) and 45% more minutes per week (186 minutes versus 128). Gossip Harbor players also return more days in a month than its competitor.

This is also evident in Gossip Harbor’s above average retention metrics. According to Sensor Tower, in Q1 2025, Gossip Harbor’s retention was higher than Travel Town’s and only rivaled by Merge Mansion. An efficient user acquisition program coupled with high engagement and retention has surely contributed to Gossip Harbor’s market success.

Winning Formula

While Gossip Harbor’s user acquisition strategy is clearly a key component in its winning formula, UA is a given condition for a casual title to succeed in the mobile market today. So, for the scope of this article, we will focus on product lessons from Gossip Harbor that are enabling it to engage, retain, and monetize players after they enter the UA funnel.  

Audience-Focused Game Design

As per Sensor Tower’s audience demographics insights, 79% of Gossip Harbor players are female, and the players’ average age is 32. What is very refreshing about Gossip Harbor is that it unapologetically caters to its core audience in three ways.

Firstly, the story of Gossip Harbor is aligned to its audience of older millennial women. The protagonist is Quinn, a single mother navigating her life after a divorce from her husband. Gossip Harbor’s premise centers around an RPG-like story meta where Quinn, a self-proclaimed amateur detective, is trying to solve the mystery of a food poisoning disaster at her restaurant, while rebuilding it and decorating it. 

The metagame is powered by a linear story structure complete with lively characters, dramatic reveals, mystery, intrigue, and sabotage. This hook is effective in attracting and retaining the game’s target demographic, which loves consuming content related to true crime, drama, and romance. 

In Gossip Harbor, there are complex relationships, drama, romance, and even LGBTQ+ representation, all adding to an entertaining gameplay experience for its core audience that keeps players coming back for more.

Secondly, the storyline is set in the backdrop of a restaurant renovation and decoration meta where players actually get to choose what each upgrade looks like, and can even go back and modify the decorations if they happen to change their minds — another way it caters to its core audience. 

The decoration meta engages players motivated by self-expression, allowing them to customize and change decor options. This is different from typical map expansion or builder mechanics existing in merge competitors like Travel Town, which has specific building upgrades like a city builder, or Merge Mansion, where map upgrades have fixed decor. 

And lastly, the core gameplay of Gossip Harbor is very simple and enables gameplay tailored to casual players looking for some relaxation. The merge 2 board is the kitchen of Quinn’s restaurant. Players serve customers by merging and creating the items required to fulfill customer orders. Comparatively, competitors Travel Town and Merge Mansion are less intuitive as item progression in those titles often require merging unrelated items to create new items. Gossip Harbor’s merge progression is simple and intuitive. 

Every part of Gossip Harbor — its design, gameplay, core loop, and meta — are all optimized to appeal to its core demographic. 

Loaded Live Ops

A loaded live ops slate sets Gossip Harbor apart from its competitors. While in terms of volume of events, the top titles in the genre all demonstrate an active live ops pipeline, on closer observation, we see some key differences. 

For example, even though Gossip Harbor and Travel Town ran a similar number of live ops events in May 2025, the type and cadence of these events were very different. Travel Town focused on shorter events such as daily challenges and short duration competitive PvP events; Gossip Harbor ran longer duration events focusing on seasonal PvP, PvE, and decoration events. Additionally, the daily events Gossip Harbor ran were mostly boost events that encouraged short bursts of frenzied gameplay, creating an urgent motivation to play and spend. This is in stark contrast to Travel Town’s approach of getting players to complete routine daily tasks. 

Another result of Gossip Harbor’s focus on longer duration events is the number of events that are live in-game. Despite having a similar volume of live ops, Gossip Harbor players had, at a minimum, four to five concurrent events and eight to 10 concurrent events at most, nearly double that of Travel Town. This provided Gossip Harbor players more opportunities and incentives to play.

The live ops events include coin events, decoration events, merging events, and order events that create a sense of urgency for players and encourage more play. The game heavily borrows structures and templates from other genres to create gamified and competitive live ops events that can be reskinned and reused over and over again. This includes live ops events that unlock permanent décor, have collection mechanics, or involve minigames based on slots or roulette. 

Economy Activation

Gossip Harbor has an active and deep economy that can rapidly scale. It incentivizes players to engage with every part of the economy naturally. 

For example, coins are used to progress in the story and decoration meta. Because its story is engaging and the decorations are attractive, it motivates the largely female target audience to naturally engage and progress through the meta. In contrast, Travel Town’s coin economy progresses the metagame through building upgrades and expansions, which is more aligned with city-builder mechanics targeted to more gender neutral gaming audiences and is not tailored to its core audience. Perhaps because of this, Travel Town has to force its players to interact with the meta. Travel Town players are restricted from playing the core game if they do not upgrade buildings. 

Gossip Harbor also has a more active diamonds economy. Prices of this hard currency in Gossip Harbor are higher than in Travel Town, especially at higher price points; however, they are more affordable at lower price points. Gossip Harbor incentivizes players to convert and engage with the economy, even at lower price points, as opposed to Travel Town, which incentivizes higher spend, making their IAPs unaffordable for low spenders. This strategy is likely helping Gossip Harbor monetize a larger section of their player base.

In Gossip Harbor, energy is the resource that extends session times and allows players to continue playing. Gossip Harbor controls free energy resources more tightly than its competitors such as Travel Town, making it more expensive for players to continue playing Gossip Harbor. As an example, while hard currency pricing is roughly similar in both games, free energy drip through watching a rewarded ad is 40% lower in Gossip Harbor than Travel Town.

Interestingly, playing Gossip Harbor could get exorbitantly expensive very quickly as players try to buy their way through the game with diamonds. The game pinches players hard on progression levers such as timers. Higher order merged items also get progressively more expensive to buy with diamonds. For example, a diamond is valued at between 1.2 to 1.3 cents. Reducing a 2.5-hour timer on a critical resource could cost up to $1.5 worth of diamonds. An impatient player annoyed with timers may find themselves shelling out several dollars to play only a couple of sessions. This rapid economy scaling allows Gossip Harbor to deepen spend, and drive up monetization and ARPDAU.

Dynamic Hybrid Monetization

However, Gossip Harbor wouldn’t be successful if it only pinched spenders through its deep economy. Successful casual titles such as Candy Crush have proved time and again that IAP monetization alone is not enough. Good casual games also pay careful attention to its free-to-play players. 

Gossip Harbor excels in this through dynamic hybrid monetization tactics. Players can progress in this game by watching rewarded ads. These ad placements are scattered throughout the game and seem to pop up right when players need them. Rewarded ads can provide extra energy, speed up timers, or pop bubbles to unlock items. There are even options to watch rewarded ads to unlock gachas. 

However, rewarded ads are only available in Gossip Harbor for lower value rewards and items. It is hard to progress meaningfully by watching ads in-game, but it can be just enough to help a player through a difficult piece of gameplay, thereby improving player satisfaction. A Google study suggests 50% of users report they would be less satisfied with their app experience if rewarded ads were removed. Gossip Harbor’s player community conversations underscore the importance of rewarded ads in facilitating gameplay.

Gossip Harbor’s ad placements are also dynamic as they are not available to each player all of the time. This adds an element of surprise and delight when players see the free rewarded ads and also creates FOMO that drives players toward logging in more often in the hopes of getting these free rewards. 

Furthermore, rewarded ads in Gossip Harbor provide players with an additional hard currency drip that promotes usage of hard currency and can also drive up purchases. According to Unity research, on average, users who engage with rewarded ads are 4.5 times more likely to make in-app purchases versus those who do not. 

Hybrid monetization also plays a role beyond improving revenue. Opportunities for free rewards extend playtime, improving engagement, retention, and monetization. The same Unity study found that 30-day retention steadily increases with each rewarded video ad view, and is 3.5 to five times greater than the benchmark. Unity also found that the average weighted increase in user sessions across apps that used rewarded videos was 34%.  

Gossip Harbor’s hybrid monetization system is better than its peers such as Travel Town in terms of the number of ad placements, their positioning, and frequency of ad surfacing. As a testament to this, some analysts estimate Gossip Harbor may be generating 15-20% revenue on top of its IAP monetization through rewarded ads. 

Conclusion

Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story is a very refined and well-optimized rendition of a merge game. It has a robust engagement, retention, and monetization fly-wheel amplified by its audience-focused design, loaded live ops slate, active economy, and hybrid monetization strategy. The game’s solid foundational KPIs coupled with its deep investments in user acquisition has made it a force to be reckoned with in the current mobile market. 

But is Gossip Harbor’s performance sustainable? Is it replicable? Are we witnessing the emergence of a long-term leader in the merge genre, or is this just another temporary trend in the mobile market? It would be exciting to see if Microfun can replicate Gossip Harbor’s success in Seaside Escape and its other merge titles. Only then would we be able to acknowledge that there is a new king of the merge hill.

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Lightspeed also hosts the annual CEO Forum at GDC, the annual gathering of gaming, media, and AI CEOs, in partnership with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Together with GamesBeat and Nasdaq, the firm runs Game Changers, an annual list that celebrates and accelerates extraordinary gaming and interactive media startups.

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