For years, Western casual mobile F2P developers operated under the assumption that frictionless, streamlined experiences were the ultimate key to retention and monetization. While this continues to hold true in many ways, it has also resulted in developers actively avoiding content overload and complex systems in casual mobile genres.

Today, Eastern publishers are systematically dismantling that paradigm. By deploying entirely different product and marketing playbooks (ones that embrace increased system complexity, massive content volume, and “pragmatic” UA tactics), certain Eastern developers are now consistently out-monetizing their Western counterparts while competing for the same Western casual audience pools.

Although we currently see this dynamic playing out in specific casual mobile F2P subgenres, there are learnings to be gained genre-wide. Therefore, in this digest, we conduct a focused case study within the highly competitive Merge-2 subgenre. 

The Merge-2 Battleground

When comparing established Western Merge-2 heavyweights like Merge Mansion (Metacore) and Travel Town (Moon Active) to their Eastern counterparts like Gossip Harbor (Microfun), the business trajectories are starkly different. Gossip Harbor is currently outperforming both titles through a combination of massive UA and incredibly strong ARPDAU.

The top market for all three games is the U.S., and in each case, it drives outsized revenue relative to the region’s player volume. Merge Mansion is the most reliant on the U.S. market, Gossip Harbor is the most efficient while Travel Town sits in the middle. The rest of the top 10-revenue generating regions across the games are generally similar (Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe).

It’s important to note that each of these products is “successful” in their own right, and there is definitely an element of “standing on the shoulders of giants” between them. But Gossip Harbor’s revenue trajectory showcases how Microfun was able to unlock large swaths of latent demand within Merge-2 in a way that Merge Mansion and Travel Town didn’t. 

Recent comments from Supercell’s and Metacore’s leadership around Supercell acquiring Metacore and converting Merge Mansion into a portfolio title tend to suggest a similar understanding:

“I believe Merge Mansion’s best days are still ahead – with Supercell’s experience in turning around and scaling global live games, alongside our capabilities in live operations and user acquisition, we can scale it back into a leading position in its category.” — Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell.

“We have built an organization with growth ambitions that have not materialized as expected. The competition has become tougher every yearsince we launched Merge Mansion and created the Merge-2 category as a pioneer. We need to make changes to remain competitiveand to give Merge Mansion the best possible chance to succeed going forward.” — Mika Tammenkoski, CEO of Metacore.

Editor’s Note: The goal of this analysis is neither to praise nor criticize any of these products or companies — some of them have been our clients. We acknowledge the lack of internal context that played a key role in moment-to-moment decision-making while the broader  market shift was unfolding. Through this analysis, and using the advantage of hindsight, our goal is to analyze this divergence across four critical vectors and draw out applicable learnings that global and casual genre-focused mobile F2P developers can put to use.

Let’s jump in.

#1: UA Strategy

Download trends across the titles reveal a clear succession in marketing leadership: Merge Mansion capitalized on early market presence, Travel Town successfully captured the audience as the former faded, and Gossip Harbor recently executed an incredibly successful (and likely very expensive) UA strategy to dominate the U.S. charts in 2025. When looking at the intersection of where these games spend their UA budgets and what creatives they use, three entirely different growth engines emerge.

Gossip Harbor demonstrates a heavily concentrated ad network strategy. AdMob dominates its distribution, capturing a ~41% impression share — the highest single-network dependency among the three games. When combined with AppLovin, these top two networks account for almost 64% of its overall share, illustrating a distinct, top-heavy approach. 

This is supported by a dual-pronged creative approach. "Shocking / Fake Ads" make up for 44% of their top 25 creatives, which likely maximizes the top-of-funnel. At the same time, and quite uniquely, 24% of the same top creatives are "Gameplay / Content / Live-ops" related. This creates a strong synergy with Gossip Harbor's aggressive product pipeline, allowing the marketing team to leverage a constant stream of fresh, actual in-game events to balance lower-intent traffic with highly engaged players. At the same time, the reliance on “Shocking / Fake Ads” is probably hurting early retention (~44% D1 retention) and damaging long-term IP building.

Merge Mansion occupies the middle ground in terms of network concentration. Although its top three networks represent the lowest combined share of the cohort at ~64%, the distribution remains distinctly top-heavy. The game prioritizes its primary network, AppLovin (~34%), maintaining a significant lead over its secondary network, AdMob (~16%).

This channel concentration is driven by a brand-focused creative strategy, where a massive 72% of their top 25 creatives are "Cinematic / Brand / Narrative" focused with hints of gameplay in between. It is entirely possible that Merge Mansion’s creative strategy is working well on AppLovin, but this strategy hasn’t driven scale either. That said, the game’s creative mix could benefit a long-term IP and trust-building strategy — Merge Mansion showcases the highest D1 retention of the lot (~52%).

Travel Town seems to operate with a highly agile and conversion-focused acquisition strategy, actively rotating budgets across a balanced mix of networks. Their creative mix is the most aggressive of the cohort, completely eschewing brand narratives in favor of "Shocking / Fake Ads" (60%). While this approach indicates a strategy designed to acquire users at the lowest possible cost (through high-conversion, attention-grabbing creatives), it is likely hurting D1 retention (~37%) quite significantly. The strategy is not the best to start an LTV curve that is supposed to drive scalable UA profits.

Overall, and keeping in mind that all three games are successful in their own right, there doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all UA strategy. Each of these growth engines comes with its own tradeoffs — some measurable, others harder to quantify. However, the next factor is likely what ultimately determines how much revenue these games can reinvest back into their UA strategies.

#2: Content Velocity

Operationally, top-grossing Merge-2 games differ in terms of their development velocity and pipeline efficiency. This becomes clear when comparing the three games side-by-side:

This comparison highlights a clear trend in the Merge-2 market: live-ops velocity is increasingly tied to revenue growth, but scaling that velocity comes with significant operational cost. 

Gossip Harbor delivers ~4 updates per month (once every week) with a team size that likely takes up somewhere between 50-75% of Microfun’s 400+ employees. Its high-frequency update model is producing exceptional results, driving roughly $54M in monthly revenue alongside strong +9% MoM growth. This aggressive production strategy has created a powerful “content treadmill” for the game. It keeps players continuously engaged through constantly supplying new goals, events, and currency sinks that directly support retention and monetization at scale (which we previously covered in depth here).

At the opposite end, Merge Mansion illustrates the downside of slower live-ops execution in an increasingly competitive category. Metacore dedicates a majority of their 280-person team to their tentpole title, but the game averages just one major update per month. Revenue has plateaued at ~$10M monthly, with growth slipping slightly negative at -0.5% MoM. In other words, the title’s operational scale is not translating efficiently into business performance.

Travel Town delivers two updates per month and has seen +13% YoY revenue growth. But comparing this performance to the game’s team size is difficult. While Magmatic Games notes 11-50 employees on LinkedIn, the game’s content velocity should be viewed in the context of Moon Active’s acquisition and broader infrastructure support (which we covered here). Shared technology, centralized operations, and publisher-scale resources likely play a significant role in enabling the game’s content velocity.

#3: Systems Design and Live-ops

How do these games structure their content to absorb that weekly velocity without breaking? To answer this, we will use Gossip Harbor as the baseline to analyze the games across three distinct layers: core loop mechanics, player-facing live-ops density, and balancing system complexity.

On core loop mechanics, the key tenet of Gossip Harbor’s success lies in its commitment to building an incredibly strong foundation first. When compared to titles like Merge Mansion or Travel Town, the core gameplay loop of Gossip Harbor is fundamentally exceptional. By tightly tuning drop rates, mission requirements, and item generation logic, the game ensures that players consistently return to uncluttered boards — typically engineered to have 20% to 25% empty space (something Merge Mansion still struggles to do). This core game design eliminates friction, allowing players to jump straight into gameplay within seconds of opening the app.

In terms of live-ops density, the comparative breakdown below highlights how Gossip Harbor employs a denser strategy of simultaneous in-game events and monetization offers. Because Gossip Harbor consistently updates with two new events per month, it maintains a much greater catalog of fresh-feeling events queued up for highly engaged players. This aggressive content pipeline ensures that as veteran players burn through available events, the game can continuously serve up new ones, effectively pushing the progression ceiling higher and guaranteeing there is always a new, within-reach objective to complete.

On balancing system complexity — the "Generator Booster" feature is one of the key drivers, while also being a masterclass in monetization design. By introducing energy multipliers (x2, x4, and x8), Merge-2 games fundamentally change the pace at which players interact with the game's energy economy. While it adds a significant layer of mathematical complexity under the hood, it is an incredibly effective tool for driving up product performance — provided the core game can handle the increased “merge possibility space” complexity. Much like the Super Feature we previously analyzed, the "Generator Booster" has become ubiquitous across the Merge-2 genre.

Travel Town pioneered the permanent integration of the generator booster in early 2023, kicking off a steady and consistent revenue climb that eventually leveled out at ~$10M/month. Gossip Harbor adopted that mechanic in early 2024, an integration that coincided with an explosive, exponential surge in earnings, ultimately catapulting the game to a towering peak of ~$35M/month by early 2026. Merge Mansion, on the other hand, implemented the feature in early 2025, but failed to capture the same financial momentum; its revenue remained completely unaffected at a flat $5M/month. We believe the key difference lies in Gossip Harbor’s exceptionally tuned core foundation, which allows it to leverage this multiplier far more effectively, extracting more value from the mechanic than its competitors.

Ultimately, this feature showcases that Gossip Harbor's foundational math is likely bulletproof. It seems to have created an energy economy so stable that they can confidently let players consume it at eight times the normal speed, while knowing the Live-ops framework and progression ceilings are deep enough to absorb the impact (even for their top 1% players). To convert this hyper content consumption rate into increased LTV, Gossip Harbor rounds things out by enabling "near-infinite" spend depth. It deploys complex, multi-tiered battle passes and micro-battle passes, gacha-driven side events, and aggressive energy monetization mechanics — similar to those seen in 4X Strategy titles’ bottomless offer systems that Western casual developers usually shy away from.

Gossip Harbor’s success cannot be replicated by sheer volume alone. Even if competing titles managed to match Gossip Harbor's exhausting  live-ops cadence, without that same perfectly tuned foundational math supporting the core loop and balancing the increased system complexity, they would likely fail to drive the same outsized value. Further, without that stable bedrock, piling on aggressive monetization events risks cannibalizing the game's economy (lower ARPDAU) or triggering player burnout (lower long-term retention).

#4: Community Sentiment

Western developers have long hypothesized that bombarding Western casual audiences with Gossip Harbor’s level of content velocity, system complexity, and Live-ops density, would lead to severe player burnout. Player sentiment surrounding Gossip Harbor, however, proves otherwise. 

Despite its aggressiveness in all regards, Gossip Harbor maintains a stellar 4.58 average global rating across nearly 600,000 reviews, and a 4.6 rating in the U.S. across 175,000 reviews. Players are not only tolerating the intensity — the broader audience is quite satisfied with it.

For instance, long-term player sentiment reveals that veteran users consistently praise the dense live-ops calendar, specifically appreciating the continuous stream of side events running concurrently with the core gameplay. By framing these deep, complex systems through approachable narratives and constant, rewarding feedback loops, the audience remains firmly anchored.

Essentially, players are acutely aware of the game's aggressive monetization mechanics and deliberate energy pinches. They readily acknowledge spending real money to bypass the friction caused by slow progression and restricted energy economies. Yet, rather than churning in frustration, these spenders maintain high satisfaction levels and demonstrate strong long-term retention. This indicates that the "burnout" threshold for Western casual audiences is significantly higher than historically assumed, provided the underlying experience remains engaging and rewarding.

Key Takeaways

While this case study focuses deeply on Merge-2, the structural realities apply across mobile F2P’s most important casual genres. Here are our top 5 takeaways:

1. No Single UA Engine Wins Universally: While all three games are highly successful, their growth trajectories demonstrate that there is no universally optimal user acquisition strategy. Different UA engines create different tradeoffs across IP building, retention, monetization efficiency, audience quality, scalability, and long-term profitability — some easily measurable, others far harder to quantify. Ultimately, however, the true ceiling of any UA strategy is determined by how effectively a game can monetize and reinvest revenue back into sustained acquisition at scale.
   
2. Content Velocity is Becoming a Competitive Moat: Higher live-ops and content release velocity increasingly correlates with stronger revenue growth and player retention. However, sustaining that velocity requires massive operational infrastructure — whether through large internal teams, publisher-scale support systems, or highly optimized production pipelines. As the market matures, the ability to continuously ship larger volumes of content at scale is becoming as much of an organizational and operational challenge, as it is a creative one.
   
3. Treat the Core Game as a Live-ops Platform: Building a frictionless, high-quality core game is merely the baseline. Developers must architect their games as scalable platforms explicitly designed to host a relentless, high-velocity cadence of events, meta-layers, and deep monetization systems without breaking the game's economy.

2. Embrace System Complexity: The long-held Western assumption that casual or mid-core players will automatically churn when faced with complex, dense economies is demonstrably false. Player sentiment and app store ratings prove that, as long as the underlying core loop is exceptionally smooth and rewarding, Western audiences will actively engage with — and even praise — highly complex, concurrent live-ops systems.

3. Engineer for(near)Infinite Spend Depth: Because UA is increasingly expensive, growth strategies cannot rely solely on driving massive volumes of low-spending players. Instead, game economies must be mathematically structured from inception to safely absorb massive financial investment from top spenders. Utilizing complex battle passes, gacha systems, and bottomless energy offers ensures these highly invested players never hit a "content wall".

To compete with the massive revenue growth currently being driven by Eastern mobile F2P casual studios in Western markets, Western developers must move beyond a simple focus on broad appeal and long-term retention. For Western developers, becoming more comfortable building games around depth, density, complexity, and aggressive live-ops is likely no longer optional — it’s becoming a competitive necessity.

A Word from Our Sponsor: Neon

Take Control of Your Commerce

Neon is a global payments and e-commerce platform designed to help game publishers earn more revenue and gain independence from app stores. Our DTC platform handles everything from webshops and checkout to global payments, tax, and compliance – with full transparency and all-in pricing. No black boxes. No restrictions. No surprises. 

Built by payments, fintech, and gaming veterans, we work hands-on with publishers to optimize revenue and simplify operations. If you're serious about DTC, we're serious about helping you grow.

In Other News

💸 Funding & Acquisitions:

• Grand Games raises $70M Series B to scale hybridcasual games.
• eBay rejects GameStop’s $56B acquisition bid.
• Origin Lab, a technology platform turning licensed game worlds into structured training data for world models and multimodal AI, has announced an $8M seed round.
• Indika dev Odd Meter raises $5M to fund next project.
• NCSoft subsidiary Veroplay acquires Moving Eye Games and Swamp Attack franchise.
• Sensor Tower acquires mobile market intelligence rival AppMagic.

📊 Business & Products:

• Crimson Desert increases Pearl Abyss Q1 earnings more than fivefold to $220.6M.
• Nintendo Switch 2 nears 20M unit sales in under a year but shares have tanked 40%.
• Capcom secures ninth consecutive year of profit boosted by Resident Evil Requiem.
• Discord adds a free Xbox Game Pass ‘starter edition’ for Nitro subscribers.
• Sega reports $31.6M net loss during FY26, cancels 'Super Game' project amid strategic pivot.

👾 Miscellaneous:

• Atari acquires rights to first five Wizardry RPGs.
• Industry veteran and YouTube musician launch new indie studio, Stupendium Softworks.
• Esports Foundation and JioBLAST launch India Rising pathway to Esports World Cup.
• Spin Master and Supercell partner on global toy line for Clash and Brawl Stars franchises.
• Wordle is becoming a live game show from NBC.

Content Worth Consuming

"The Old School Publishing Model Is Dead" – Silver Lining Interactive Joins the New Wave of Pick and Mix Publishers (gamesindustry.biz): “Silver Lining Interactive wants you to know that everything is going swimmingly. "We couldn’t have hoped for a better first year," is how founder Luke Keighran framed it in a celebratory press statement released this week to coincide with the launch of Outbound, a game which has racked up 1.5 million wishlists on Steam, with over 100,000 more on consoles. "Every title published in our 2025 slate achieved a user rating of 85% or higher on Steam and is testament to our commitment to supporting original voices in the indie sphere," Keighran said.”

A Theory of Fun (Gamecraft): “Blake and Mitch discuss the possibility that games — mainly mobile and live service games — have concentrated on providing fun through progression and engagement mechanics rather than fun in the game experience itself. They point to signs that the market is showing signs of a backlash — and a re-focus on fun game play — and the potential implications of that backlash in the marketplace. They discuss a working "theory of fun" based on three core elements: mechanics that elicit emotions, elegance, and enjoyable experiences at each temporal layer of gameplay.”

Patrick Söderlund and the Raiders of the Arc (The Fourth Curtain): “We kick off Season 4 with Patrick Söderlund, CEO/founder of Embark Studios and maker of the hit Arc Raiders. Former head of DICE and Battlefield at EA, he found faster ways to build. We discuss owing the community, AI, and incredible value.”

PlayStation:“We Have a Responsibility to the Whole Industry” (The Game Business): “Today on The Game Business Show, we speak to PlayStation's Christian Svensson, who oversees all third-party and second-party activity at the platform holder. We discuss getting games on PS5, how to get featured in State of Play and on PlayStation Plus, game funding, the rise of China and South Korea, new markets, and why the future for video games is actually very bright.”

AI and Video Games(withJulian Togelius) (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Julian Togelius, a professor of computer science at NYU and director of the NYU Game Innovation Lab. We delve into how games serve as the perfect sandbox for AI development, the potential for generative tools to revolutionize production workflows, and how the future of play might involve infinite, procedurally generated worlds that adapt to every player's unique style.”

How Mixtape Tells a Coming of Age Story via Music with Johnny Galvatron (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Adam Orth chats with musician and game developer Johnny Galvatron. Together they discuss his newly released coming of age story told through music, Mixtape including the origins of the idea; how they selected the music first and built the story around the soundtrack; building a "horizontal slice" rather than a "vertical slice"; how they selected each track and their significance to the narrative; and creating the cast of characters and their unique mechanics.”

More About Naavik

Naavik's team of experts has helped over 300 companies — publishers, studios, tech companies, and investors — better succeed across the video game industry. We'd love to work with you too! Here's what we offer, spanning all platforms, genres, and regions:

• Strategy Consulting: Projects covering market research, corporate strategy, game & economy design, gamification, live ops strategy, AI strategy, product management, brand & performance marketing, and more.
• M&A and Investment Advisory: Expert commercial due diligence for buyers, fundraising support for sellers, and fractional CFO/CSO services.
• Fractional Talent: The one-stop shop for top-tier fractional talent covering dozens of game industry roles (analytics, design, marketing, art, QA, and more).

Check out the links above for more details. And if you'd like to chat about how Naavik can support your team, click the box below or send us a note at [email protected].