Coin Master developer Moon Active had its best ever revenue quarter in Q1 2024. Of the $355M in Q1 store revenue (as estimated by data.ai), 73% ($258M) was from its flagship game, Coin Master, with the rest from its broader portfolio of acquired casual games.

So let’s take a look at Moon Active’s game portfolio, its casual gaming mastery, and where the company is going next.

The Many Games of Moon Active

Coin Master is a phenomenon, consistently ranking among the top five highest-grossing games globally since the year 2020, with lifetime earnings exceeding $4.17B. The game single-handedly created the "casual casino" genre by going beyond slot mechanics to introduce captivating meta aspects like building and card collection, while also heavily relying on social features, industry leading sales, and offer systems that are echoed across many titles in the casual F2P gaming space.

Recent hits Royal Match and Monopoly Go owe a great deal of their success to Coin Master’s trailblazing path, which has set a high standard for meta, social, offers, and live ops for casual games.

In recent years, Moon Active acquired three casual games (and their teams) to attempt to replicate Coin Master’s success across other genres, and to reduce the risk of relying on a single tentpole title. They are:

• Travel Town, a merge-2 game created by Magmatic Games (co-founded by ex-Wooga product lead Florian Steinhoff, who’s known for this GDC talk on puzzle games).
• Family Island, a farming simulator game by Melsoft Games.
• Zen Match, a tile match puzzle game by GoodJob Games (in this case, Moon Active acquired the game and its core team, not GoodJob Games itself).

Moon Active’s strategic bets appear to have paid off. 

Travel Town has risen to become the top-grossing merge game, surpassing well-established rivals like Metacore’s Merge Mansion and Zynga’s Merge Dragons. The merge-2 mechanic at Travel Town's core, which was started by Merge Mansion, surpasses its inspiration in the backend layer of balancing drop rates and progression, making the game board more engaging and casual player-friendly. This core gameplay is then elevated with the addition of Coin Master’s social album collection and trading.

Family Island is the second highest-earning farming simulation game, nestled between the front-runner, Playrix’s Township, and Supercell’s Hay Day. The success of Family Island is largely attributed to the game having the same monetization depth as Klondike Adventures (both are energy-based resource collection and crafting games), while remaining accessible to the wider casual audience. Family Island’s RPD development reached about $6.5 as of Q1 2024, which is nearly twice that of Township and Hay Day’s $3.5.

Zen Match, whose success single-handedly created the tile match subgenre, has been battling its decline due to fierce competition from Spyke’s Tile Busters and Code Dish’s Tile Match. Though Zen Match remains the third-highest earning title in the tile match subgenre, the genre itself seems to have moved on to match-3D games like Triple Match 3D (by Boombox/Miniclip) and the recent Match Factory! (by Peak/Zynga).

The Future Bets of Moon Active

Moon Active is not done with the casual genre yet. After operating and learning from all of these subgenres, the company now has its eyes set on two of the most lucrative casual puzzle subgenres: swipe match-3 and match-3D (which we covered in a previous digest).

Enter two new soft-launched games from Moon Active’s stealth label, Clever Duck: 

• Travel Duck, a Royal Match-like swipe match-3 game.
• Match Party, a Match Factory-like match-3D game.

Unlike Moon Active’s previous titles, which were obtained by acquiring studios or teams, these new games seem to have been built internally by the parent company. While games like Travel Town took almost three years of internal development post-acquisition to adapt Coin Master’s best practices and become the successes they are today, the team may have realized it could be more time and capital efficient to shift focus to developing new games in-house.

Travel Duck is the swipe match-3 iteration of Blast Master, a tap-2 blast puzzler that has been in soft launch since December 2021. Moon Active seems to have killed its blast project in lieu of the match-3 game but kept the meta, events, offers, and live ops structure from puzzle game to puzzle game. Travel Duck appears to be a promising contender, as the game has been soft launched primarily in the UK since August 2023, and the team has now extended testing to the US as of February 2024.

Match Party, on the other hand, just started testing recently. It will be interesting to follow its development as the data starts coming in.

With mastery over several casual titles, the foundation is strong for these new bets to pay off in the near future. Moon Active has experienced steady growth since Coin Master exploded in 2020, even growing 18% in 2023 while the market overall declined. As Moon Active enjoys its current success, its potential for future growth remains even more promising.

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