Travel Town first launched in 2020 as ex-Wooga developers’ Magmatic Games’ first entry into the casual puzzle merge 2 space.
After the acquisition by Moon Active in 2022, the game started scaling and is now the biggest merge game on mobile by monthly store revenue in 2024, bringing in $117M year-to-date, +231% year-over-year. (You can read more about Moon Active’s quiet dominance in casual mobile here.)
Travel Town surpasses its biggest competitor, Metacore’s Merge Mansion, in many KPIs like downloads, store revenue, and DAU. A big part of Travel Town’s growth is likely coming from using Moon Active’s UA war chest to scale downloads significantly — 19M downloads year-to-date, +127% year-over-year — through a mix of various performance and brand marketing activities.
However, the product is also stacking revenue over existing cohorts. Its $0.35 ARPDAU is consistently +66% over Merge Mansion’s $0.21 year-to-date, which is both fuelling the profitable UA growth engine and resulting in a stellar DAU increase as Merge Mansion’s DAU declines.
Diving deep into the marketing side of Travel Town’s success is beyond the scope of this article, so I’d like to highlight the top three product takeaways for casual game developers based on this game’s stellar performance.
#1: The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
Travel Town appears to be a by-the-books merge 2 game, just like Merge Mansion and Love & Pies. But comparing Travel Town to Merge Mansion is like equating Royal Match with Candy Crush — to the untrained eye they look similar, but there is so much at work under the hood that makes these newer puzzle games "the next generation" in their respective subgenres.
Similar to Royal Match before it, Travel Town joins a new breed of lean casual puzzlers that are much more about the core gameplay than deep meta systems. In other words, the merge 2 gameplay takes center stage in Travel Town, much like the match 3 levels in Royal Match, and everything outside of it is stripped down. For example, Travel Town’s building metagame not only has no customizations to choose from, but it is also just a means to unlock new item generators for the merge gameplay. There’s also very little dialogue or interactions in the meta, so as to not distract players from the core gameplay.
Meanwhile, Merge Mansion delivers an intriguing mystery, with the merge gameplay a means to complete tasks and unlock more characters and stories. This initial session comparison video between Travel Town and Merge Mansion vividly illustrates the unique promises of each product.
Travel Town arguably has the best merge 2 engine in the market today — the image below captures this "secret sauce" of its merge gameplay well:
The image above shows three game board states at the start of various player sessions over time:
- Session 2 Start — day one
- Session 10 Start — week one
- Session 60 Start — month one
Do you see the pattern yet? Players always return to a game board that has 20%-25% empty board space, enabling them to jump straight into gameplay.
Since players return to the game board with their energy refilled and space to generate new items with that energy, the first merge is made within seconds of returning. There are several systems, like the item generation logic as well as the order board logic, that work in "complex unison" to achieve this simple goal.
Merge action efficiency is also really high in Travel Town because the entire merge board is visible on one screen. Other merge games have sprawling merge areas that a player needs to scroll through to free spaces, creating many inefficiencies. Four of the five top grossing merge games so far this year all have merge boards that are visible in one screen (with the fifth being the legacy title that birthed the genre, Merge Dragons).
#2: Merge Games go SUPER!
In March, we covered how Royal Match’s Super Light Ball increased the game’s baseline revenue by more than 1.5 times and was propagating across other puzzle games like Toon Blast.
Since then, the feature has made it into nearly all the top grossing puzzle games, including all of Playrix’s puzzle portfolio. However, Moon Active introduced SUPER-charging in the early days of Coin Master and its bet multiplier. And since acquiring Travel Town in 2022, Moon Active has introduced a feature with similar operational thinking behind it: the x2 power boost.
Before getting into the SUPER feature, it’s worth noting Travel Town, Coin Master, and Royal Match are three different top grossing games with potentially different audience profiles. The SUPER feature has to adapt to its game's unique product pillars, but with the aim of delivering both enhanced gameplay and business impact.
Travel Town has a power boost toggle, which, when turned on, causes all generators to consume twice the energy for a chance to obtain higher-level items. Why is this a win-win for players and developers?
Players can fulfill orders that require higher tier items with greater efficiency, and complete orders faster and with fewer clicks. Developers can get players to sink double the amount of energy without extending their session time, meaning increased monetization potential since energy is the primary spend vector.
What's more, Travel Town has already been exploring quadruple boosts for a few months now. Of course, all this ultimately helps accelerate its ROAS equation toward profitable UA, and thereby scales the game even more rapidly.
#3: Lean but Effective Narrative
Travel Town cuts out a lot of the meta game fluff of Merge Mansion by focusing solely on the merge gameplay, but it still has an effective narrative.
Mobile games set audience expectations with the first contact from the marketing UA creatives, which then continue and are satisfied in the product. A casual mobile game narrative needs to:
- Have wide appeal to enable UA scale.
- Connect to the audience within seconds to grab attention.
- Be told through the game systems to increase product longevity.
The above image captures Travel Town’s lean narrative: Merge items to help people restore the town. Some of the game’s best performing UA creatives focus on the merge gameplay and helping people with their orders. And the gameplay revolves around repeating the same: merging items and helping people with their orders.
The additional context of restoring the town then completes this narrative beat as you spend resources gained to build and upgrade in the meta. This meta sets up the forever goal, as the town will keep expanding with every update, effectively boosting LTV.
This meta is doubly clever, closing the gameplay loop by returning players to the merge game board after restoring the town with new items to play with.
As a macro consumer trend, getting to the point as fast as possible — and repeating the main point over and over — meets the modern user’s short attention span. Games like Travel Town and Royal Match showcase how today’s casual mobile games don’t need Gardenscapes-like sprawling narratives to be successful.
Making the Next Generation of Casual Mobile Games
The image below helps showcase how metagame depth has shifted over the years for the key genre-defining titles. Gardenscapes represents the deepest meta, while Royal Match has a “metagame lite” approach.
With lighter metagames, there is an increasing dependence on live ops to enable long-term gameplay variety. This makes sense, because the puzzle audience can’t realistically play several Gardenscapes fast-follows at the same time. Audience saturation set in, and it created a differentiation opportunity for Royal Match. The merge subgenre is on a similar trajectory.
Travel Town and Royal Match show that streamlined products, exceptional core gameplay, and heavy live ops investment is a proven strategy.
But it all relies upon operational excellence. This is one of the key reasons we see smaller teams with lots of tribal operations knowledge succeed today. Gardenscapes last reported a team size of 300, while the entirety of Dream Games is about 300 employees, and they work on multiple games.
If a development team is actively pursuing this strategy today, it’s a good time to reflect on whether the team is set up for pursuing and achieving similar operational excellence.
A special thank you to Heloisa Yoshioka and Abhimanyu Kumar for helping formulate this piece.
Editor’s note: Mobile F2P analysis like the above are part of Naavik’s monthly competitor analysis reports, fully tailored to your business needs. Check out the service's information deck, and reach out for pricing and sample report inquiries.
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