Haven’t you heard? PeopleFun, creators of Wordscapes, are working on something other than a word game (Worldscapes)! We’ll dig into the new game further on, but let’s first take the opportunity to see how PeopleFun’s core word-games-focused business is faring and how that’s leading to broader change.

Word games have never been the most mainstream subgenre in the puzzle category. As it stands, not everyone enjoys going over all possible entries of the dictionary with every move they make, but a select number of people do. Let’s look at some numbers.

In 2021, the Words subgenre made up 3.4% of the Puzzle genre’s total revenue while accounting for 10% of total puzzle genre downloads.

Over the years, we’ve seen a pretty competitive onslaught in the Words subgenre, with quite a few games rising and falling over time. From the beginning of 2017, when word games became popular, the first big hit was Word Connect by Zenlife. The game has been around ever since, but it’s seen more and more competitors trickle in. First, Zynga’s Words with Friends 2 and PeopleFun’s Wordscapes were released, after which CodyCross and Words of Wonders came along. These five games accounted for most of the downloads in the subgenre — even in the huge slump caused by the pandemic in 2020 — until only recently, when Applovin’s implementation of viral hit Wordle started raking in a ton of players.

Games like CodyCross, Words with Friends 2, and Word Connect have all exceeded Wordscapes in terms of downloads at some point during these years. Words of Wonders even bested PeopleFun’s game in absolute numbers. However, even though most of these games rely quite heavily on ad monetization, what makes a big difference in the end is what players are willing to invest into a game — especially an audience as loyal as Word puzzlers. And one thing is quite clear: Wordscapes is the absolute best word game at monetizing its audience. It took until October of 2020 for the next closest competitor, Zynga‘s Words with Friends 2, to start bringing home more than half of Wordscapes’ revenue each month. And even though Words with Friends 2 has been steadily climbing ever since, Wordscapes is still number one.

The devil is in the details when it comes to profitability, especially when looking at Wordscapes’ monetization strategy, which builds on its demanding live-ops cadence. The game initially isn’t much more than a series of levels that can actually be played without being gated. Eventually, when playing daily, two additional time-limited progression systems start popping up:

1. A collection event in which players can earn unique avatars for their player profiles. These collection events can sometimes be pretty short (only a couple of hours), to keep players on their toes about when the events are actually happening.
2. A new room every month, which the player has to fill with butterflies before the time is up. They can do this by completing the daily puzzle or by collecting cocoons in regular levels that sometimes pop up for a limited time.

The game’s clear, sawtooth-shaped revenue graph shows that Wordscapes has the art of creating scarcity by time pressure very much down to a t. Even though its competitor, Words of Wonders, has the exact same core mechanic, the events in Wordscapes make a 10x difference in comparison.

In interviews, employees of PeopleFun have confirmed that the audience of Wordscapes is diverse and comprised of all ages. This might be true, but the game’s biggest issue at this point is that its addressable market is capped. A whopping 88% of its $216M lifetime revenue comes from the US. The UK, Canada, and Australia contribute 5%, 4%, and 3% respectively.

So what do you do when you’ve reached the majority of your audience with your best-in-class cash cow? You diversify. This is what PeopleFun is attempting with its newest game in soft-launch — Worldscapes — a block puzzler!

“What’s a block puzzler?” one might ask. It’s a relatively new game mechanic that has recently been growing in popularity through hypercasual games like TripleDot’s Woodoku, EasyBrain’s Blockudoku, and Beetles Studio’s Wood Block Puzzle. The first game that made a visible splash in September 2017 was a different app with the same name but coming from Russia. 

There’s not much to be said for this genre as there has been almost no evolution. While there are some subtle differences in core mechanics in the aforementioned games, all of them feature just one level and offer no variation on the mechanic when progressing throughout each game. PeopleFun’s take on this genre is wildly more extensive and a lot more elaborate.

But will PeopleFun be able to penetrate the block puzzle market after working almost exclusively on their word games portfolio over the years? Does the company have enough experience and leverage to pull off releasing other puzzle games? To answer this question, we’ll first have a look at who these Austin-based developers actually are.

PeopleFun’s DNA

PeopleFun was co-founded in 2012 by games industry veteran Tony Goodman (co-creator of Age of Empires) together with four trusted key members from Ensemble Studios. At the time, Tony mentioned PeopleFun would grow to about 10 people, but he also mentioned the company was “experimenting with Mobile RTS prototypes” in his Reddit AMA. Some things didn’t pan out exactly as planned, but with regards to both of these facts, it’s most likely for the better.

From the get-go, the company has been involved in making word games — a niche that turned out to be highly lucrative for PeopleFun. A timeline:

• In September 2012, PeopleFun released its first title, Word Chums, on iPhone, Android, and iPad. By 2014, the game had 300K active players, and the PeopleFun team was kept small (under 10 people) for a few years.
• In 2015 and 2016, the company tried releasing smaller games like MixTwo, Adventure Smash, Spell Blitz, and Race Time. Although none of these titles were particularly successful, they allowed the company to keep searching for that much-needed innovative success. On top of that, Adventure Smash was an important title in PeopleFun’s portfolio as it provided much-needed experience with match-3 puzzle games.
• In June 2017, the company released Wordscapes, which turned out to be the catalyst game the company needed to grow. Today it’s “the number one word game” on the market with about 1M downloads every month, raking in an impressively steady $5M of monthly revenue since the end of 2018.
• In October 2018, Word Stacks was released. It saw success, even though it has never grossed more than a quarter of Wordscapes’ revenue in any given month. Even though it’s the studio’s second-biggest success, the game has been in decline since a year after its release.
• At the end of 2019, PeopleFun took another stab at a non-word game and achieved some success. They release Blockscapes, which uses the age-old block puzzle mechanic and turns it into a high-score-based experience. It never surpassed its biggest competitor, Tripledot studio’s Woodoku, and after seeing acceptable downloads numbers yet very low monetization, the company stopped user acquisition in September 2021.
• At the end of March this year, PeopleFun soft-launched its new and confusingly named title, Worldscapes, in Australia and the Philippines. The game’s UX is heavily inspired by match-3 wunderkind Royal Match but features a highly innovative puzzle mechanic. Two months into soft launch, the game has been downloaded ~90K times.

Why is the soft launch of Worldscapes such a big deal? PeopleFun has released games before that didn’t catch on, like Magic Bricks in 2020, so why do we think Worldscapes is likely to succeed? In short, PeopleFun knows the Blockscapes mechanic and the player base’s demographics, which also means the team knows how to market a game like that. But more importantly, we’re deconstructing Worldscapes because we think — despite the risks we’ll be laying out later — it has a chance to not only innovate on the block puzzle subgenre but be a case study in how a studio can successfully enter a new genre. By this time next year the game could be the Royal Match of block puzzlers, and you heard it here first!

Worldscapes looks like a game with a very different scope and level of polish than the previous PeopleFun games. This is why we will dive deep into what opportunities arise by utilizing their familiar Blockscapes mechanic and the risks PeopleFun is taking by releasing their most ambitious game as of yet.

Another sign that this is not just a quirky experiment is that the company currently has a Lead Game Designer (Match-3) opening on its job board, which clearly signals further ambitions to expand into more proven, non-word puzzle games. The company hasn’t shied away from handcrafted level design (since Wordscapes also features set levels played by millions), but designing consistently fun levels for a grid-based puzzle game is a different exercise than coming up with the crossword shapes in which the Wordscapes levels are laid out.

Throughout the rest of this essay, to fully analyze the potential of this mechanic, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Breaking down the core mechanic and its inspiration
• A full analysis of every level objective in the game as it stands right now
• Strategy: which choices does the player need to make when playing the puzzles?
• Speculation about Worldscapes’ metagame
• Our analysis of pros and cons that stem from using this mechanic instead of a more proven one
• Recommendations with regards to the risks this game’s development encompasses

So how does it work?

What makes Worldscapes’ core so enticing is that it’ll be a very new mechanic for most seasoned puzzle players, lots of whom might be a little bored of the old match-3, or tile blast, gameplay. This of course also poses a big risk and challenge, but the PeopleFun people know exactly how fun (oh no) this mechanic can be. They have been gaining a lot of experience in polishing their previous game, Blockscapes, on which the game’s mechanic is based. The big difference was that in Blockscapes players play the same empty level over and over, trying to beat their own (and other’s) high scores. Worldscapes has taken this mechanic and turned it into a full-fledged, level-based puzzle game!

The main mechanic in a match-3 puzzle is to have three of the same pieces lined up either horizontally or vertically in order to remove them. The main mechanic in Worldscapes is the same as in Blockscapes: fill all cells in a row or column from edge to edge to remove them. To do this, the player has three shape candidates at the bottom of the screen, which they can choose to place wherever they want.

The most popular game using this jigsaw/tetris-like mechanic is Woodoku, although in that game, sets of 3×3 blocks also count as shapes to be removed. Compared to Blockscapes, the innovation that Worldscapes brings is the linear sequence of puzzle levels in which this mechanic needs to be used to complete objectives. In most cases, this means removing obstacles just like in other puzzle games. 

One of the most interesting parts of the edge-to-edge mechanic in Worldscapes is that the various levels now have wildly varying shapes, widths, and heights, making the possibilities to design fun and diverse levels almost infinite. Narrow or low parts of the game board allow for quick “bursting” of all blocks in tighter rows or columns.

As the puzzle boards now contain objectives, these objectives themselves can be part of the full lines the player needs to make. When the player understands these obstacles as additions to the board, they perform the same exact thinking as they would in Blockscapes.

The only systematic difference from its predecessor is that in Worldscapes the three shape candidates players can choose to drag from the bottom of the screen are continuously refilled, whereas Blockscapes only shows three new placeable shape candidates after all three previous shapes have been placed. This forces players to use all blocks before continuing to the next set. In Worldscapes, the mechanic is more forgiving as players can simply delay placing that inconveniently shaped block until they have made space for it using the other two options.

Power-ups

Explosives are what makes or breaks a puzzle game, and with Worldscapes it’s no different. The standard operation a player performs is removing one full line. It’s the equivalent of a standard match-3 in a switcher puzzle in the sense that the player earns no power-ups for this. Extra rewards in terms of explosives are earned when performing more elaborate moves. In Worldscapes, this means removing more than one full line at once. The incremental increase in power-up strength depends on the amount of full lines removed at once:

• When filling two lines at once, the player earns a bomb
• When filling three lines at once, the player earns a single rocket
• When filling four lines at once or more, the player earns a triple rocket

Creating these power-ups can be easy or difficult, depending on the situation. Some level grids have holes in them, creating more edges within the board. This increases the possibility to create (multitudes of short) lines. The game doesn’t care how long a line is, even if that part of the board is just 1 tile wide; if it’s filled from edge to edge, it counts as a full line.

The explosives earned when filling multiple lines are put into the player’s bottom bar that holds the placeable candidate shapes. Explosives can be saved, but take up one slot in the bar, reducing the amount of normal block options the player can consider placing.

In terms of functionality, the three kinds of explosives get increasingly more powerful, as the shape of their explosions increases in size.

The player can choose to place the explosives wherever they want, whenever they want. This allows for an interesting strategic decision each time the player gets their hands on one of these bad boys.

All principles that are part of this mechanic are well introduced in the game’s FTUE. This happens while the player learns to use their stars to decorate the cities everyone wants to visit, Paris for starters.

Is this a good idea? Taking such an “alien” core mechanic requires a tremendous amount of trust in its engagement potential. Let’s dive a little deeper.

The Game’s Objectives

Worldscapes starts out with levels that simply require a number of specifically colored blocks to be removed. Within a few levels the first objective is introduced, making the player aware there is much more variation in terms of puzzle elements to be explored. The game currently contains 10 different objectives, which are detailed below. For objectives that require adjacent hits, it’s important to note that only adjacent colored blocks that are bursted result in the element to be hit.

At the time of writing, the game only has 200 levels, featuring a decent number of different objectives. Similar objectives are grouped together and deconstructed below.

Crates

Crates are the staple blockers in many puzzle games. Most puzzle players already know that adjacent matches remove a layer. In Worldscapes this means any adjacent colored blocks removed hit it. In the example to the right, only the two marked crates will be hit.

Metal Crates

The game later also introduces metal crates. These can only be removed when hit by explosions.

Both kinds of crate can have up to 3 layers.

Apple Cabinets

The standard cabinets are 2×2 objects filled with apples that require any blocks to be placed next to them.

Flask Cabinets

These act entirely similar to apple cabinets, except they hold up to 10 flasks of different colors in any combination. Flasks only get removed when a block matching its color is placed next to the cabinet.

Both apple & flask cabinets can have up to 10 hit points.

Lion Statues

These are 2×2 bulky busts that require blocks to be removed next to them. The statues start out as vine-y overgrown rocks and are slowly sculpted to become more and more polished to eventually be removed from the board. Statues can have up to 8 hit points. All 2×2 elements adhere to the rule that only one of their layers can be removed at once by adjacent matches. Multiple adjacent blocks being placed or matched does not remove multiple layers.

Beach Balls

Colored beach balls are the most obnoxious modifier this game has to offer. They are removed when a colored block matching its own is placed next to it. Nothing too bad, you might think?

Wrong! Seeing a good amount of beach balls placed together will undoubtedly get the player in trouble, as they immediately create a 1×1 hole right next to carefully placed blocks. Having too many 1×1 holes in the grid is not great when trying to solve puzzles like this.

Hats / Carrots

What comes out of a magic hat? Of course, carrots! Wait… Something got mixed up here, but let’s not think too long about it. Carrots are collected by simply placing any adjacent block next to it. Players don’t have to make full rows or columns to get carrots.

Flowers

Flower pots work the same way as magic hats, except that flower pots provide flowers with colors matching the colored blocks that are placed next to it. This way, the level objectives can be to collect e.g. green flowers specifically, which can’t be done when placing blocks with different colors. Triggering explosives next to the pots always provides flowers of a color that’s useful for the objective.

Gift Boxes & Teddy Bears

This metaphor is more logical. Collecting teddy bears coming from gift boxes is a pretty clear objective. The only difference from the carrots and magic hats is that the gift boxes disappear from the board after collecting their contents.

Gift boxes currently can only have one layer, not multiple. This is something the level designers could consider requesting to increase the potential difficulty of levels with this objective.

Ice

This is the dreaded chocolate in Candy Crush and the last objective that’s introduced in the soft-launch level set. It’s particularly annoying as the ice expands every time it isn’t removed anywhere. It’s removed by bursting adjacent blocks, not placement.

A nice addition: the tile that’s going to be frozen next is marked with a snow crystal icon.

Next to these objectives, Worldscapes also features a couple of board modifiers to make its level design even more interesting. These elements are never part of the level objectives but influence the levels in positive or negative ways.

Shrubs

These hide other objects and require adjacent blocks to be removed. Shrubs can be placed onto other objectives, colored blocks, or empty tiles to count as an extra layer and to mask what’s underneath.

Backpacks

Backpacks act the same as shrubs, with the added complexity they require adjacent blocks of a specific color to be bursted.

Pre-placed explosives

These jellied bombs are lots of fun, as they require an adjacent match to be triggered. Like in many puzzle games, being able to pre-place the game’s explosives allows level designers to create exciting and elaborate blast sequences the player will be eager to set off.

Having these placed in your game’s levels requires modifiers with enough hit layers, as they accelerate the amount of hits that will be done to those elements throughout the level.

Boosts

The game contains the standard boosts players can use to give them an edge in case a level is difficult to beat. These boosts are awarded when the player finishes an area in the meta game and will cover the bulk of rewards when more live-ops features are added to the game. The game currently just features the cookie cutter assortment of boosts that can be seen in most grid-based puzzle games.

As pre-game boosts, players are able to add up to 3 explosives to their bottom bar, allowing them to be triggered wherever the player prefers after starting the level.

During the level, the player can select three additional boosts to their hearts’ desires, given they have enough of them available.

Current in-game boosts include a hammer to hit or remove the contents of one cell of choice, a grappling hook to remove an entire row, and an anchor to remove an entire column. Nothing more, nothing less. This doesn’t (yet) provide a whole lot of possible rewards for the game’s meta. Speaking of which, how does that part of the game hold up currently?

Meta Features

As Worldscapes just released in Australia only, the game doesn’t have almost any meta game features yet. There is a primitive daily reward feature that makes the player pick one out of nine cards to get the reward shown on the back, but currently it only awards 50 coins a day and practically never any of the rewards on the other cards. Nevertheless, here’s the loop diagram:

What must be nice for PeopleFun is that Royal Match has perfectly laid out an amazing live-ops cadence that can be replicated — at least for the most part — which is most probably the plan. No big innovations on metagame are needed as the path to success is pretty clear. They can simply get a Naavik Pro subscription and read last month’s analysis!

As it stands currently, there is nothing else going on in Worldscapes’ meta yet, except for a linear progression through seven different cities. The game phrases the actions taken when decorating the cities as “traveling,” but effectively players build them up as they enter empty scenes at first. The game will have a task to “visit the Eiffel Tower,” which is followed by an animation of the landmark being added to the scene. Currently, (spoiler alert) players will visit Paris, Bora Bora, Egypt, New York, Versailles, Bavaria, and San Francisco.

On one hand, the theming choice is smart since it’s broad enough to continue essentially forever. However, on the other hand, it misses the potential to come up with a — more or less logical — hook that Royal Match is able to bank on in terms of User Acquisition. There’s no boobytrapped castle that can be used to set the stage for funny gameplay predicaments when featuring the nameless travel girl and her lemur.

Gameplay Strategy

Puzzle gameplay is king, so to be able to grasp the depth of this mechanic, let’s have a more thorough look into the strategic choices the player should be making when playing Worldscapes.

Sequence Matters

First of all, one of the most important things to note is that, since the player has three shape candidates to choose from at all times, they have a lot of influence on when to place a shape. To optimize the explosives they get, players need to delay removing single lines so they can be removed together with others. The more lines removed at once, the better the rewarded explosive is. This means that the sequence of placement matters a lot.

Take a look at the following example in which two exactly the same blocks are placed in different order. In the left example, the row removal is delayed to the second move, while on the right, the first placement removes one row prematurely.

The left strategy results in a different, stronger explosive acquired, which can make a big difference.

Placing explosives

This might sound very familiar to seasoned match-3 or tile blast players, but it can be very rewarding to delay firing an explosive for a move or two in Worldscapes as well. In match-3 games, players would probably want to open up a level more before firing that rainbow bomb. In Worldscapes, a similar decision can be made by keeping one of the three shape candidate slots occupied with a previously acquired explosive until the right spot opens up.

What makes Worldscapes different from the aforementioned classics is that players can place the explosives wherever they want! This is a crucial difference from classic puzzle games where explosives are more or less stuck where they were made (or potentially a little below) which allows for a delicious amount of agency that increases the utility of the Worldscapes explosives by a whole lot.

Horizontal or Vertical?

This is the most telling question any Worldscapes player will ask themselves constantly, and it’s a very interesting internal struggle, as both are almost impossible. When completing and clearing a row, the player always removes part of a column they were also anticipating to clear. Can you fill up that row’s new gaps easily, or would removing the column first make more sense? Only time will tell, but for the minority of players who like to think ahead, this will become an eternal struggle.

Worldscapes’ Potential

Now that we know what the gameplay has to offer, we arrive at the most critical question of all: Can this core mechanic live among the other, very proven ones like its inspiration and current favorite: Royal Match?

Match-3 games did not become the most lucrative puzzle mechanic by accident. It perfectly masks the amount of agency the player actually has over the puzzles they are served. The vertical supply of gems, candies, or whatever objects can be tweaked by the level designers or even on-the-fly by the game itself to help the player, or not — all while providing a great excuse for losing in case the stars don’t align. When the player wins, they feel like they had enough agency to feel good about themselves, but when they lose, it’s simply because “the right colors didn’t drop.”

Does the Worldscapes mechanic also provide a similar experience? Not exactly. The game features a random factor, which are the three shape candidates the player can choose to place next. The game feels fair in a sense that sometimes a shape that fits into the board perfectly is provided, while other times this doesn’t happen. The issue is that there is a lot of emphasis on this part of the gameplay as it’s a very finite amount of options that is presented. In a match-3 game like Royal Match, the player can’t possibly keep up with all permutations of what would have happened if a yellow gem was spawned instead of a green one. When playing Worldscapes, this is a very real possibility. Players can easily “wish for” getting the ideal shape. The anticipation this creates is higher, which is a double-edged sword in itself, but it’s not ideal in a sense that the game can more easily feel rigged against them in case things don’t work out.

What this mechanic does provide is a much higher sense of agency as the player can literally place any shape on any position in the grid. It’s to be seen if the pros outweigh the cons, but it’s safe to say that this mechanic is much brainier than match-3. This most likely means the audience that will enjoy this mechanic is less broad. The flip-side is that the part of the audience that does enjoy this mechanic is most likely much stickier, especially now this mechanic is still very much unique to this game.

The Sunny Side

Before getting into some aspects of this game that might be detrimental to its success, it’s important to highlight the positive traits of the gameplay in Worldscapes.

In terms of gratification, we can be pretty optimistic about this game’s tactility and feedback. Where Royal Match and other match-3 games offer those slot machine-like chain reactions that have proven to keep players coming back, Worldscapes doesn’t have these. As an alternative though, Worldscapes does have “the tetris effect” generating potential for some form of ASMR. As with jigsaw puzzles, it’s very gratifying to fit a specifically shaped piece right where it belongs. It’s not comparable and it doesn’t offer that same surprise jolt of dopamine, but it definitely offers that different kind of gratification.

This brings us to the next aspect of the puzzle gameplay, which is how moves are foreshadowed. The team clearly has iterated a lot on the visual feedback all elements in the grid provide when they are part of a move that’s being foreshadowed by the player hovering their shape around.

The next difference with most other puzzle games is the gameplay cadence. In Worldscapes, there is no movement after a match, the board doesn’t have to be refilled, and players can immediately continue placing the next shape. While we’re very much used to waiting by now, we have seen that falling objects only got faster and more fluid over the years, with Royal Match as the most recent benchmark. Developers have actively tried to reduce the time players are forced to watch their boards settle down again. One could make the argument that the only thing better than finding the exact right gameplay speed is to simply not have any breaks in between moves at all, if gameplay allows.

Another thing that’s beneficial to this core gameplay’s implementation is that any element that is shown in the grid can be an objective, and if it is, it’s always the goal to remove all of them from the board. Some levels contain additional objects that are there just as a distraction or complication but this doesn’t happen very often. This unambiguity is very welcome as it significantly reduces cognitive load. Simply having to “remove all of X” is enough of a challenge. There’s no requirement to bring down certain objects or recolor specific elements; the gameplay itself is strategic enough already.

The Dark Side

As Worldscapes’ gameplay is different from the classic puzzle games, it’s safe to say that not all of these differences will contribute to the mechanic’s engagement. While it’s unclear how much of a detriment the following differences are, we can presume at least some of these might not be ideal:

The Luck Factor

As mentioned before, the amount of luck a player needs to interact with this mechanic can be differently perceived. The experience of Royal Match’s lottery of gems trickling into the board has been exchanged for a mere trio of options at the bottom of the screen, which might not be the most fair experience for the more skeptical players.

Different Level Cadence

The fact that there is no waiting time between moves should be more of a blessing than a curse, but it’s still a risk because it’s different and therefore less proven. On top of that, the power-up cadence is lower in Worldscapes as well, as it’s much harder to make more elaborate moves. After all, removing multiple lines at once is much harder than matching more than 3 elements in a row. It might make the explosives in Worldscapes more significant, but again it’s far from indisputable that this is a clear advantage.

Lack of Predictability

Oftentimes the outcome of a move isn’t fully predictable. For example, a pre-placed bomb apparently hits another time when exploding.

For some reason the apple and bottle cabinets are hit for 2 (or sometimes even 3) hit points when hit with an explosive.

And then there’s the general duality in terms of layer removal. Some objectives interact when a (specific) block is placed next to it, while others only react when an adjacent block is removed. Remembering which of these two interactions applies to every objective can result in some friction. As the game mixes both kinds of objectives within the same level, it can sometimes be quite difficult to predict what’s going to happen even for attentive and seasoned players.

Level Design Challenges

At the time of writing, the game features 200+ handcrafted levels, serving skilled players with about 10 hours of gameplay. It’s not clear how much effort it took to create these levels and how reusable the puzzles are. Its relatively strategic gameplay most likely also requires more time to handcraft new levels.

Marketability

Puzzle CPIs are at all time highs at this point, especially for games that look like this. It’s unclear if the company has the expertise to compete with the establishment in terms of performance marketing. As we’ve hinted at before: the game lacks a clear conflict that can be used for the game’s marketing, similar to the way Royal Match’s King Robert is being (ab)used.

On top of that, the game has a very confusing name as it only differs one letter with PeopleFun’s biggest success. The advantage this could generate in terms of store optimization might be heavily outweighed by the cannibalization and general confusion these two names create.

So much to do…

In the previous paragraphs, reasons why this mechanic will probably not be as big as match-3 have been laid out, and most of these are in the core gameplay, making them very difficult or even impossible to fully counteract. Personally, we believe the core gameplay is (proven to be) engaging enough by its predecessor Blockscapes, but some external aspects of the game can still be worked on to increase its chances of success.

First and foremost, there’s the topic of the game’s marketability. It’s a big question if the PeopleFun team can wrap their heads around a proper marketing strategy. Seeing the bigwigs resort to all kinds of different mini-game creatives, PeopleFun should be prepared to get their hands dirty in that department as well. It’s simply the reality of puzzle game marketing these days. With the current theme and characters this might prove difficult as both are most likely too generic.

While the company is undoubtedly working on the game’s first live-ops events, they might want to come up with a couple more interesting boosts to increase reward space and player agency. Turning blocks into a specific color or refreshing the candidate shapes in the bottom bar are some suggestions.

Conclusion

Worldscapes is the biggest, most ambitious project PeopleFun has ever undertaken. Its potential is very high because of the engaging core gameplay and the safe strategy in terms of chosen meta game. Nonetheless, there are quite a few risks the company is taking, especially in terms of marketability. Whether they have the ability to tackle these and truly follow the footsteps of Royal Match by implementing a meta game that resembles theirs, only time will tell.

Next, it’ll be a very interesting couple of months in which the game’s download metrics should closely be monitored to see if the game is able to scale successfully. If PeopleFun really is onto something, they will start opening up to more locales soon enough.

A big thanks to Niek Tuerlings for writing this essay. If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.