Zen Match: Hypercasual Made Casual

Executive Summary

In H1 2022, Zen Match (which released in June 2021) grew downloads 117% to 21M (#13, Puzzle) and revenue 130% to $36M (#19, Puzzle) — all compared to H2 2021.
Zen Match is a casual puzzle game from the Turkey-based hypercasual studio Good Job Games. Remember, Turkey is also the home to other casual puzzle studios like Peak (Toon Blast) and Dream Games (Royal Match).
The game’s success is attributed to simplifying mahjong-like tile matching gameplay to fit bite-sized puzzle levels that monetize primarily on running out of moves.
Zen Match uses dynamic systems to adjust its difficulty to appeal to a broad puzzle audience and manages to scale by acquiring players primarily using its core gameplay in creatives.
Zen Match is held back by its hypercasual roots, which focus on intrusive and excessive interstitial advertisements and simplistic core gameplay that lacks evolution over time. However, this is all fixable.

Hypercasual Beginnings

“Nothing is Forever Except Change”

Zen Match is a tile-matching F2P puzzle game developed and published by Good Job Games, a primarily hypercasual studio from Turkey established in 2017. Categorized under the “Other Match-3” subgenre of puzzle games with its distinct mahjong-like tile-match-3 puzzles, Zen Match is an alternate puzzle game released in June of last year (2021). Based on the first half of 2022, the game has broken into the top 20 grossing puzzle games in the world — a remarkable feat for the hypercasual studio’s first casual title!

With Zen Match, Good Job Games becomes the third largest games company in Turkey based on revenue — after Dream Games (with Royal Match, which we deconstructed previously) and Peak Games (with Toy / Toon Blast), which was acquired by Zynga. All three companies compete in the popular matching puzzle games genre, and Turkey is clearly a hotbed of talent for this highly lucrative genre. (Not to mention, in the first half of 2022, Turkey led the way in Europe for gaming startup investments with $333M of capital pouring in.)

Based on downloads, Good Job Games is primarily a hypercasual studio; in the first half of the year, the company captured 223M downloads across its (mostly) hypercasual portfolio. However, based on revenue, Good Job Games can be considered a casual studio. After all, Zen Match only represented 9.7% of the studio’s overall downloads (21M), but it brought in $36M in revenue — or 96.3% of the studio’s entire revenue. (It should be noted that this revenue tracking only considers IAPs and excludes any revenue generated outside of the stores like advertising. This puts primarily ad revenue monetized hypercasual games with one-time “No-ads” IAPs at a disadvantage.)

Hypercasual games are based on a single mechanic with a straightforward repeatable structure, with notable examples like Flappy Bird in the past to the more recent Fill the Fridge (by Rollic Games/Zynga) and Pull the Pin (by Popcore). These games are characterized by their broad appeal, a high number of installs, and low ARPU, with advertising revenue driving the majority of the monetization. Good Job Games has several successful hypercasual titles like Paper Fold and Sponge Art.

In a post-IDFA landscape, the hypercasual genre has become more challenging (although far from impossible) to succeed in. Much of the market relied on targeted ads, but due to platform privacy changes, targeting has become harder causing revenue per ad to drop. With Zen Match, Good Job Games succeeded in creating a puzzle game that evolved from its hypercasual roots and leaned more into the casual genre. The game keeps the simple, single mechanic tile-matching gameplay as well as heavy ad monetization, but it expands on content, features, and live ops to overcome the weaknesses of unreliable ad revenue with repeatable, desirable IAP monetization.

Although there continue to be Zen Match-like games attempting to replicate its success, none have managed to scale to meet its record performance. At its core, Zen Match is a hypercasual puzzle-game-with-a-twist that by utilizing a bunch of adopted best practices now competes in the cutthroat but higher margin red ocean of the F2P puzzle genre. In this deconstruction, let’s look into what made this transition possible and so successful:

How does Zen Match scale its hypercasual core to operate as a near casual puzzle game?
How does it adopt and implement best practices from the casual puzzle genre?
What elements of its hypercasual origins are holding it back?
What changes can make Zen Match (and others like it) scale to the top of the casual puzzle charts?

Let’s dig into all of that but first begin by better understanding the key metrics at play.

Zen Match in Numbers

“Wherever You Are, Be There Totally”

Looking at the casual puzzle genre in H1 2022, Zen Match’s 21M downloads is on par with Playrix’s Gardenscapes (20M downloads), which uses a similar nature theme, and beats Royal Match’s 18M downloads. Even though Zen Match’s $36M in revenue pales in comparison to the puzzle titan Candy Crush Saga ($415M in revenue), as you can see below not only is Zen Match the second largest “Other Match-3” title based on both downloads and revenue, but it’s also only one of two to make it into the broader puzzle genre’s top 20 list. (Higgs Studio’s Tile Master 3D slightly beat Zen Match out on downloads with 24M, and LINE: Disney Tsum Tsum is still clearly #1 based on revenue with $79M.)

Most other tile matching games fall under 5M downloads and $8M in revenue, highlighting just how much of an outlier Zen Match is amongst its match-3-with-a-twist peers. Let’s take a closer look at Zen Match’s core gameplay to further break down how it successfully manages to run its hypercasual core at the scale of a casual puzzle game.

A Single-Mechanic Puzzle Game

“Obstacles Don’t Block the Path, They Are the Path”

To win a level in Zen Match, players need to collect all the tiles by matching 3 of the same. Tiles can be tapped and collected from the board and onto the tray at the bottom in any order. When three of the same are collected in the tray they are matched and removed. Players can only keep a maximum of 7 tiles in the tray, and once the tray is full with no matches it triggers an out of space pop-up. Players can then spend coins to continue (which puts the last 3 tiles in the tray back onto the board) or quit to lose a life and retry the level.

These two mechanics of 1) losing a life on failing a level, and 2) triggering an out-of-moves pop-up with options to continue with coins or quit to retry… are universal in F2P casual puzzle games.

Players have access to 3 boosters while playing levels that can aid in completing levels more easily:

A Super-Undo that removes the last 3 tiles from the tray and places them back on the board forming a new stack
An Undo that rewinds the last move and returns the last tile collected back to its original position on the board
A Shuffle that mixes all the positions of the remaining tiles on the board

The Undo and Super-Undo boosters have specific uses to manage the tiles filling up the tray, while the Shuffle is a more general booster to be used when at a pause on how to proceed.

Scanning the board, recognizing patterns, and making matches works very well with the clean, minimal presentation, and it is accentuated by calming sounds and the use of haptics. Level attempts are short, usually needing 20-30 tile matches to complete them, and are bookended by ads which give the game a hypercasual identity. The challenge for Good Job Games lies in operating these levels as a casual game for a broad audience, optimizing for out-of-moves conversion to continue with coins (without the level difficulty overly frustrating players), and keeping players engaged long-term. Let’s first look at all the levers the game uses to manage the difficulty of its levels.

For a game like Zen Match, there are certain static characteristics that are altered from level to level but do not change over multiple attempts of the same level, like:

The total number of tiles to be collected (always a multiple of 3 since all tiles need to be match-3 and collected to win the level).
The number of boards (mostly 2, with the first board being super easy and requiring only 5-10 matches to complete).
The pattern in which tiles are laid out; this is what primarily informs the level design layout and unraveling journey for the player.
The tray size is a constant 7 across all levels.

As a general rule for these static characteristics, difficulty is raised by having levels with:

Spreading matching tiles far apart in the distribution, which when picked create blocked spaces on the player tray early in the level.
More types of tiles, usually ranging from 6-9, with more variants adding to the difficulty.
Fewer face-up tiles to choose from, reducing the pool for player choice and visible patterns.
Reducing the number of partially visible tiles and increasing the hidden, invisible pool of tiles which further reduces visible patterns and information while taking turns.

With the above static characteristics remaining constant for a level, Zen Match’s dynamic systems manipulate the distribution of tiles across attempts. The same level with the same layout and total number of tiles differs in the distribution of those tiles across attempts, usually starting with a higher difficulty and then going down as the player makes multiple attempts to pass the level. A skewed, unequal distribution with tiles ranging from having fewer or higher instances increases the chances of filling the tray with tiles that don’t match, making the level more challenging with little room for error. A near equal distribution, on the other hand, increases the chances of finding matches, making the level less challenging with more room for error.

Managing the rise and fall in the difficulty of player attempts on a level and across levels is key to delivering an enjoyable puzzle gameplay experience. Winning levels provides resources to players at a rate that they feel incentivized to continue attempting levels indefinitely. Running out of moves provides enough ‘pinch’ that encourages players to explore alternate methods of sinking resources to alleviate that pinch. Achieving a balance between running out of moves and winning is an exercise in balancing short-term monetization with long-term progress and engagement.

The casual puzzle genre also attracts a wide audience of players with a large variance in skill, engagement, and monetization potential. The dynamic systems altering the difficulty of levels needs to adapt to this variance in ways to make the game feel fun, fair, and challenging for everyone — with the goal of optimizing for the LTV of each individual player. There are several features that supplement the core gameplay in widening the appeal of Zen Match.

Meta Content and LiveOps

“With Our Thoughts We Make the World”

Winning levels rewards players with Lotuses that can be used to design zen rooms. This light meta-layer uses a progression system similar to puzzle games with star systems and tasks to renovate and complete areas. It is more one-dimensional when compared to other puzzle games since objects in the room are already pre-placed, they don’t transform or change shape, there is no visual cleaning, expanding, or renovating as well as no characters or written narrative driving a story alongside it.

In Zen Match, rooms are presented as 3D coloring scenes with players choosing from a predefined palette to color individual objects. The rooms always begin with a hint of color flooding in through a window or an ascent plant being colored in. This is really effective in nudging players to color-in rooms when seemingly starting with a bit of a head start. This is the primary vector of progress outside of completing levels – designing and completing all the rooms.

A second vector of progress is in the form of collections. As players win levels, they advance through a saga-like progression unlocking different areas and scenes as backgrounds for the levels as well as tiles of varying objects. These are only cosmetic and players have no influence in customizing their experience; instead, the game picks from them for variety of tiles and backdrops while playing levels. Players can track their previous accomplishments and future steps in their journey through these collections.

The game also features timed events of various types that encourage players to return to the game frequently and max out on winning levels for parallel progress across all active events. The events cover a mix of player motivations ranging from single player completion to social competition, and their framework is expanded on in the following section.

Zen Match’s live ops events can be categorized into:

Completion Events – single player events with goal-setting milestones:

Golden Progress — an event that requires players to collect golden tiles from levels. These are special tiles that need to be collected in 4 moves or less before they go away. Players don’t need to collect them for passing levels. The Golden Progress is a time-limited event that rewards players for collecting golden tiles, which scale with every successive milestone before resetting.
Fortune Path — a win streak event that challenges players to pass levels in a row without failing for increasing rewards. Players lose their streak when they fail a level.
Zen Pass — an event that lasts for one week with a free and premium track for rewards. Players collect cups by winning levels: 3 cups for winning on the first try, 2 cups for the second try, or 3 cups otherwise. By completing all the stages, players can accumulate coins in a premium chest that can be unlocked by purchasing the pass. If players buy the pass 4 times, the 5th one is free.

Koi Fish Race — compete with 5 other players to beat 10 levels faster than your opponents. The first 3 players to finish win a prize, and players can compete in multiple races while the event is active.
Tournament — compete with 50 other players on a leaderboard to collect the most golden tiles by beating levels. The top 10 players at the end of the event earn a prize.
Treasure Hunt — an hourly competition with 5 other players to collect the most tiles. Once a player wins, they claim the treasure of the island and move on to the next island, with each new island having progressively better rewards.
Zen Masters — a two-week competition event that takes place at the end of level content to engage the top players between new level releases. Players compete with 50 others to beat a curated funnel of old levels to earn crowns, with the top 10 players winning rewards.

Offers – events that are primarily for monetization:

No Ads — a one time purchase that removes all advertisement from the game (more on this including pricing comparisons in a later section that covers IAPs).
Gold Reserve — a piggy bank that collects 10 coins for passing levels. Players can purchase and claim these coins for a discount.
Lucky Bonus — a fixed sequence of free and paid rewards that slowly ramp up in price. Players can claim free rewards till they encounter a prize gate that requires payment to proceed claiming the next set of free rewards.

Zen Match features a compelling Daily Puzzle system in the form of a calendar that encourages players to play special timed levels daily. Every day there is a new unique challenge waiting for players, with the same rules and gameplay except with the added pressure of a timer. Running out of moves on such a level monetizes on extra time. If players miss a daily puzzle they can be accessed by watching an ad. Every time players complete the daily puzzle, they progress on a month-long progression of growing a plant. Finishing all the puzzles of a month adds the grown plant to the player’s collection. These levels that generally spike in difficulty can be played in parallel with the saga levels, sharing the Lives needed for attempts.

The Price of Averting Losses

“You Only Lose What You Cling To”

Loss Aversion is the tendency of players to avoid losses in any way possible. After all, people tend to feel the pain of a loss twice as intensely as an equal gain that brings pleasure. Simply put, winning $100 feels good, but losing $100 feels twice as bad as winning $100 feels good. People are more likely to put in double the effort to avoid the loss of $100 compared to half the effort required to win $100.

Zen Match’s event framework is built around the primary goal of increasing purchases that trigger when players run out of moves. This purchase continues to drive the major portion of the game’s revenue and is directed by players who power through levels on their first attempts. Events like the Zen Pass, which rewards players with 3x progress when winning on the first attempt, double down on this loss aversion. The game prompts multiple smart notifications when quitting a level to effectively nudge players to continue. It takes up to 3 taps to quit an “Out of Moves” pop-up and restart a level.

Looking at the price to “Play On” with the lowest coin pack, Zen Match is on the same level as other top puzzle games. Casual puzzle games have transitioned over recent years to reprice the cost to continue from $1 to now nearing $2. As covered in our Royal Match deconstruction, the game ran with this high pricing from the get go and most puzzle games have slowly followed suit, with Toon Blast increasing its prices earlier this year. This enables Zen Match to attempt to operate at the level of the top grossing puzzle games in the market.

Alternatively, Lives that are required to play the game have a significantly higher pricing in Zen Match, costing 5x when compared to other casual puzzle games. Most games keep the similar $2 to refill 5 lives, but Zen Match charges over $10 to refill 5 lives. This pinch is further aggravated by the inability to gain any free lives by requesting from friends in Zen Match, a common feature across benchmarking games. Lives refill at the standard 30 minutes per Life, and without a free or timed inflow of them, players are more likely to have shorter sessions in Zen Match. Of course, this might be intended since Zen Match lacks variety in its core gameplay, which may start feeling dull if spread across continuous longer sessions.

Levels in Zen Match vary in two ways: 1) the layout of the tiles, which alters from level to level, and 2) the presentation in terms of tiles and backgrounds used. Since the latter only affects visual aesthetics, levels start feeling familiar and monotonous very fast, especially for highly engaged players who attempt to win 100s of levels every week. This is in stark contrast to casual puzzle games’ level evolution in terms of layouts, blockers, and mechanics. The content cadence of level-based puzzle games is rooted in adding a variety of new gameplay experiences with every level pack update.

This lack of variation goes hand-in-hand with the target audience for hypercasual games – players with lower attention spans who don’t expect the core gameplay to evolve much from the start, looking for nothing more beyond a quick, short term time-kill. In contrast, the audience for casual games look for an evolving challenge and ways to progress and show deeper, long term investment.

The audience for level-based puzzle games is motivated by completion and challenge to unlock new level content that feels fresh and fun to play, adding to the urge of winning levels with as few attempts as possible. The lack of variation can make playing levels in Zen Match feel less rewarding and satisfying when compared to other puzzle games, resulting in lower engagement and drive to chase reward milestones when the core gameplay feels stale. This is particularly troubling when looking at Zen Match’s approach to User Acquisition which focuses exclusively on this core gameplay.

Generating Installs and Meeting Expectations

“All You Need is Less”

F2P games across the mobile ecosystem employ UA creatives today that are high in intensity — rampant fires, heartbreaking scandals, and survival mini-games are universal to acquiring players for all genres of games. For puzzle games, a significant section of the UA creatives focuses on solving puzzles to get characters out of high intensity, near-death situations. This ensures that ads capture the attention of viewers in a few seconds but keeps the expectation of solving puzzles as the core gameplay experience. The best UA campaigns are optimized around targeting a broad audience of players who show interest in playing the core puzzle levels, so when players do download the game they are not immediately put off by the prospect of playing match-3 puzzles, the only monetization driver in the game.

Whether it’s room renovations, vivid storytelling, or amusing mini-games that attract players to a puzzle game, an intrinsic interest in solving puzzles is key to getting the right players (those interested in playing thousands of levels). This kind of high intensity, gameplay-first approach is most common with hypercasual games, supported by the simplistic core gameplay exaggerated in the ads. Zen Match developer Good Job Games has been successful in growing its hypercasual suite of games, and now the learnings are being applied to its UA approach for Zen Match.

UA creatives for Zen Match highlight the mahjong-like nature of its tile matching core gameplay but intensify it to show hundreds of tiles on screen. These creatives succeed in explaining the core gameplay in a few seconds, while making it look extremely challenging and satisfying. When players try the game for themselves, they are treated to puzzles with much lower intensity — simple, bite-sized levels that still affirm the tile matching gameplay aligning with their expectations from the creatives. This has resulted in Zen Match growing over 100% in downloads in H1 2022 (compared to H2 2021), when most casual puzzle games showed single digit growth or decline.

Begin Your Zen Journey

“Let the Calmness Take Over”

One key differentiator from competitors is Zen Match’s promise of self-improvement: “Playing Zen Match for 10 minutes a day sharpens your mind and prepares you for your daily life and challenges!” When starting a session, the game greets players with a zen quote of the day written in assertive and powerful I-statements like “I’ll release the things that are out of my control” and “I dare to be present.” The levels are presented as a Zen Journey with beautiful, calming backgrounds and rooms to design and relax in creativity. Once players get into the initial rhythm of winning levels, they soon interact with the monetization avenues of the game.

Zen Match IAPs run with similar puzzle genre practices of coin packs, bundles of coins and boosters, and a season pass — ranging in the standard pricing from $1.99 to $99.99. Since Lives are expensive and hard to come by as discussed earlier, only the higher value bundles of $39.99, $79.99, and $99.99 come with 6h, 12h and 18h of free lives respectively.

An additional IAP available in Zen Match comes from its hypercasual roots — as a game monetized by showing frequent interstitial video ads and on-screen banners, there exists a one-time purchase of removing ads for $5.99. Good Job Games’ hypercasual portfolio of games all sport a similar IAP, but they’re priced at $3.99, which is common for that genre. The difference in genre from hypercasual to casual accounts for the increase in price for Zen Match’s ad-free offering. This IAP is missing from top ranking puzzle games since they usually avoid unprompted ads that interrupt players’ gameplay, opting instead for avenues of rewarded video ad placements. Another reason for this is to separate casual puzzle games as more premium than their cheaper, crude hypercasual counterparts.

A quick note on Google’s new rules on interstitial ads (link) and its effect on Zen Match:

All interstitial ads in Zen Match are shown unexpectedly (not opted-in by players) but mostly follow the guidelines of being closable after 15 seconds. They also appear at the end of levels / content segments.
In the case of interstitial ads that play at the start of a level — when players restart a level or move from a level win promptly to play the next level — even though these follow the 15 seconds closable rule, they risk coming under violation when the the new rules come into effect on November 1st, 2022.

The Zen Pass comes with the familiar rewards of increasing base Lives from 5 to 8, a golden frame to stand out in leaderboards, and resources to be won on free and premium tracks. It is also priced at a common $4.99 price point but only runs for a week, making it the shortest pass in puzzle games (which ordinarily have month-long passes). Buying the Zen Pass four times nets a free pass, but this effectively makes owning the pass for a month a $16 investment, making it the costliest pass in puzzle games, with Royal Match coming in second with a month-long $10 pass.

A Casual Hit from a Hypercasual Studio

“To Know and Not to Do is Not Yet to Know“

Zen Match succeeds in making the transition from hypercasual towards casual by expanding on the fun core gameplay with progression and live ops to keep players entertained long-term. Its unique daily challenges and relaxing zen vibe make it pleasurable and rewarding to return to every day. As a new alternate tile-match-3 game, it managed to succeed in the casual puzzle space albeit at a smaller scale. Advertising its core gameplay in its creatives (kind of) and effectively scaling proves there is an audience of puzzle players for it.

However, to compete with the best, Zen Match needs to shed some of its hypercasual roots. There are no games in the top grossing puzzle games list that interrupt gameplay with banner ads and full screen interstitial ads at the frequency of Zen Match. This also makes it vitally important that Zen Match is able to effectively segment players who monetize through IAPs from players who only monetize through ads for optimizing overall LTV. There is a perception to equate this kind of intrusive advertisements to low quality, untrustworthy products. Most games in the genre opt for rewarded ad placements which can be triggered by players to gain in-game resources. This is mostly viewed as a positive, especially among non-spenders. Google’s new advertising standards may prompt accelerated action in this direction as well.

Additionally, the team could expand on the core levels in ways that make playing them for years keep feeling fresh and exciting, continuing the evolution toward being a casual game. With the timely addition of level content, puzzle games bring new mechanics, layouts, and blockers that challenge players in new interesting ways. Even though Zen Match succeeds in delivering an engaging tile matching experience that is well tuned and balanced, the game needs to find new avenues to keep players excited for new level content. Imagining a successful puzzle game that primarily monetizes on additional moves at the scale of Candy Crush and Royal Match is hard without the content cadence of new levels with new blockers that satisfy players’ drive for challenge and strategy, which requires a much larger investment in studio resources.

Casual puzzle games are in the business of monetizing level attempts, usually opting to give players ample avenues to gain free Lives — by requesting from friends, as daily rewards, or even starting weekly competitive events with a short burst of timed infinite-free Lives. These systems are intended to nudge players to play “just-one-more-time,” optimizing for increasing total level attempts. Zen Match’s Lives system is in sharp contrast with the competition, opting to be an expensive, hard to acquire resource that stifles the growth in total level attempts.

Good Job Games has a hit game on its hands, which led to great growth and pushed the hypercasual studio into opening a casual studio. For Zen Match to exponentially increase its revenue from here and become an even larger hit in casual puzzle, it will require an investment in scaling its excellent but repetitive core levels with richer and more diverse level design elements, as well as altering its approach to its limiting energy system and intrusive ad monetization. Zen Match’s surprising performance is hard to ignore, and it’s easy to imagine a game with such accessible gameplay move even higher up the casual puzzle charts. It remains to be seen if Good Job Games can take Zen Match to new heights before the genre leaders or stealth startups inevitably attempt to follow suit, but we’re excited to watch and find out.

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