After eight years of self-funded growth, Turkish mobile game developer Good Job Games has secured a $23M seed investment, led by Menlo Ventures and Arcadia Gaming Partners.

This investment will power the company's expansion within the highly competitive casual puzzle market, particularly with its new match-3 title Match Villains. But it’s important to remember that Good Job was mostly a hypercasual games outfit until recently.

While the funding is news, Good Job’s evolution is the story. Their move from hyper/hybrid-casual to casual puzzle makes the hypercasual-to-casual transition more real, and also signals that it won’t take long for other similar studios to follow. Let’s take a closer look at this evolution that almost every major traditional hypercasual publisher has been vying to achieve.

Good Job, Games!

Founded in 2017, Good Job achieved hypercasual success in just two years, amassing over 3B downloads with games like Pimp My Car, Color Balls 3D and Fun Race 3D. However, things were about to get complicated for the hypercasual market.

Changes brought about by IDFA, specifically higher CPIs and lower CPMs, severely impacted the business model through severe margin contraction — and hypercasual games already operated on pretty thin margins. Most hypercasual publishers were pretty much forced to shift to hybridcasual, prioritizing building higher long-term LTV through hybrid monetization and improving medium- to long-term player retention. Good Job followed suit with hybridcasual games like Hyperball Legends.

However, coincidentally, or perhaps strategically, Good Job also began scaling Zen Match, a casual "tile match" puzzle game in mid-2021, just as the hypercasual market faced IDFA-related challenges. This early foray into casual puzzle proved forward-thinking: The late 2022 acquisition of Zen Match by Moon Active for an estimated $100M-$150M provided Good Job with substantial capital, fuelling further casual game development.

Subsequently, the 2023 sale of its hypercasual portfolio to AI Games FZ (an Azur Games subsidiary) was likely a smaller deal, but it offered another financial boost. Concluding its strategic shift, Good Job secured the aforementioned $23M seed round, likely earmarked for scaling UA for Match Villains.

The asset sales and seed round position Good Job well to invest in casual puzzle product talent, production quality, and technology. This perhaps solidified its focus on the casual puzzle market, as part of the company's next chapter.

One could argue the company essentially skipped transitioning to hybridcasual and went straight to casual, unlike other notable hypercasual publishers like Voodoo. While Good Job’s success with Zen Match probably had a lot to do with this, it is now doubling down on casual puzzle, with the stated ambition of becoming a "legacy entertainment company — one that creates genre-defining games with global appeal."

However, creating a second casual puzzle market hit isn’t so easy.

Enter: Match Villains!

Match Villains is a casual match-3 puzzle game where players join a family of aristocratic thieves on a quest to collect valuable artefacts. See the gameplay here. Its key strengths are:

• A snappy match-3 engine with lucky x2 boosters.
• A broadly appealing theme, with the "steal and become rich!" narrative reinforced through heist levels.
• High-frequency live ops, with events run multiple times daily but resetting at the start of each new day.

This high-frequency, daily reset event framework provides quick daily wins for players to enjoy while an event queue facilitates access to "mini" and "XL" versions of completed events for more engaged players. As such, Match Villains appears to adopt a metagame lite, live ops-heavy structure, similar to market leader Royal Match. We covered this particular casual puzzle market shift here.

Good Job’s investors have expressed confidence in Match Villains, with Amy Wu of Menlo Ventures (investor in Epic Games, 1047 Games, and Tripledot) praising Match Villains as "the best match-3 game on the market". Meanwhile, Akin Babayigit of Arcadia (solo GP and Tripledot Co-founder) highlighted the game’s “incredible long-term retention metrics” and expressed confidence in Good Job’s staying power.

While investors can look behind the curtain at proprietary and future-facing numbers / roadmaps to justify their investments, our look at the game’s metrics using Sensor Tower data suggests Good Job has its work cut out to realise the full potential of its recent investment round.

Since its U.S. launch in November 2024, Match Villains has generated about $2.6M over approximately 840K downloads, reaching a D120 U.S. RPD of $3.05. While exceeding Zen Match's $2.75, it significantly trails Royal Match's $6.83 and Royal Kingdom's $4.80 D120 U.S. RPDs.

Based on the game’s retention profile, this doesn’t seem like an early retention issue. As can be seen below, Match Villains’ initial U.S. retention is impressive, but whether this holds at scale is yet to be determined.

Furthermore, while Match Villains’ 10% D30 retention is robust, it is behind Royal Match’s 15% and is also lower than Zen Match’s 14%. The game’s very long-term (D30+) retention is also quite weak compared to its competitors.

There are clearly areas for refinement. One such area is social: Though the game has a Teams feature, it lacks any live ops-like team competition or team collaboration events to drive longer-term retention. This was present in both Royal Match and Royal Kingdom’s U.S. releases and served them well.

Another area is an expanded live ops strategy. The Royal Match playbook is high-frequency, heavy live ops that reward players for engaging several times daily as well as many days in a row, but Match Villains currently only employs a high-frequency strategy that satisfies players engaging in multiple rounds daily. What’s missing is live ops that set weekly and monthly goals.

Comparing U.S. ARPDAU reveals Match Villains' $0.50 as considerably weaker than Royal Match's $2.92 and Royal Kingdom's $0.84, and only marginally better than Zen Match's $0.44. Match Villains' weaker ARPDAU likely stems from a lack of genre-standard monetization live ops, specifically missing targeted sales, offers, and a season pass — all of which will probably be integrated in time.

In its current state, Match Villains is projected to be a less profitable venture than Zen Match. It is also important to note Zen Match benefited from unique core gameplay that probably offered a CPI advantage, but Match Villains directly competes with mobile giants like Royal Match — a UA war looms large for Good Job.

However, none of these issues are unsolvable, and there are ample examples of best practices to learn and implement. Good Job has the resources and simply needs time, but it will be critical for them to drastically improve its KPIs to achieve long-term scale and sustainable top-grossing success.

What’s Next for Good Job and Other Hypercasual Studios

Good Job's evolution signals a potential path for hypercasual studios to transition to more complex casual models. It could also influence other industry players, but the company still faces challenges in fully realizing this vision.

In its current state, Match Villains could underperform compared to Zen Match, highlighting that replicating success in the casual puzzle market is more difficult than Good Job’s hypercasual experience might have suggested. It also highlights the potential value in shifting to hybridcasual first, before making the jump to casual.

On the other hand, major hypercasual publishers like Voodoo and Homa have more fully embraced hybridcasual with games like Mob Control and All in Hole, advancing from their hypercasual roots with Helix Jump and Sky Roller.

In 2024, Voodoo published a blogpost celebrating reaching $250M in hybridcasual revenue in the past three years. Following that, early this year, Voodoo revealed it is working on a match-3 puzzle game, indicating its next evolution into the casual market.

Comparing Voodoo’s trajectory to Good Job’s puts hybridcasual’s significance and longevity into question: Is it really a required middle step in the hypercasual to casual transition?

Time will tell, and the answer is probably not black and white. While hybridcasual will continue to maintain its position in the short term, Good Job’s approach offers a viable alternative. Hybridcasual might not be an essential step for all hypercasual publishers moving into the casual market, but it might be for some.

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