In this episode of the Naavik Gaming Podcast, host Niko Vuori interviews Antti Hattara, co-founder and CEO of StarBerry Games, about their successful mobile game, Merge Mayor. 

As the game surpasses the $25 million revenue milestone, the conversation covers the game's journey from an idle game that pivoted into a merge-2 (along the lines of Metacore’s Merge Mansion), the challenges of the merge category, and the importance of community engagement through platforms like Discord. 

Antti shares insights into the development processes of Merge Mayor with just a 22-person team, key moments that contributed to its success, and strategies for balancing feedback from hardcore players with the needs of new users. The discussion also touches on the innovative social features of the game, the “pyramid” framework for player engagement, and their evolving approach to storytelling.

We’d also like to thank nSure.ai for making this episode possible! As a proven industry leader, nSure.ai provides scalable payment fraud prevention that’s not just effective but tailored specifically to your needs. To learn more, visit https://www.nsure.ai/contact

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Niko: Hello and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Niko Vuori. In today's episode, we're exploring one of mobile gaming's most compelling recent success stories, Merge Mayor, a casual puzzle game that surpassed a 25 million milestone in lifetime gross revenue.

Just recently developed by StarBerry games, Merge Mayor has not only captured the hearts of players globally, but also built an active community with over 50,000 members on Discord, a rare feat for a casual puzzle game in a category that's generally regarded as a single player experience. This milestone milestone comes at a time when community driven gameplay Is reshaping the mobile gaming landscape in many ways, even in categories where it has traditionally not played a major role with features like live events, storytelling, and this growing emphasis on social play.

Merge Mayor has positioned itself as a standout in a crowded market and has been able to grow into a daily social hub for many of its players. So to talk about the journey of Merge Mayor is Antti Hattara, fellow Finn and co-founder and CEO of StarBerry Games. He has deep experience in game design and a vision for creating accessible yet innovative gaming experiences.

Antti has played a key role in this game's rise. Antti, welcome to the pod. Thank you,

Antti: Thank you, Niko. Happy to be here.

Niko: Perfect. Well, we always start, with the background of our guest, just to get a sense of who they are and where they come from. Could you share your journey into gaming and what led you to co found StarBerry games?

Antti: Sure. Yeah. No, I think I'll, I'll try to be brief on, on that one, but I studied programming and business at, at the university. So I ended up coding games, as, as classwork. So I had my hands on Nokia early phone on Symbian S60, a 3650, a funny phone and, and ended up. Looking into programming a game on it.

It led for me to get hired at Digital Chocolate in Helsinki back in the day, 20 years ago. And, and ever since it's been Digital Chocolate, then a stint at Wooga. That's why I moved to Berlin. And then kind of the Dijkhoek alumni is such an inspiration to set up a games company, be a founder.

They kind of demystify the idea that it's, it's something unattainable. So it kind of. grows into you that, hey, this is something I, I definitely want to check the box and try and learn. So hence in, at the time when Nebua had some restructures, then I was ready and, and was then jumping into Facebook instant games at first. And that was 2017.

Niko: Fantastic. And then StarBerry games emerged from there, I presume.

Antti: Yeah, we actually just renamed the company, pivoted away. We, we spent a year after the kind of the funding on instant games and then, then kind of needed to figure that it's kind of a burning platform wasn't going to be successful in 2018 and, and mobile games were still on the rise.

Niko: Yeah, I was actually a fun little side story advisor to a company called Volley, which also got started out in instant games. You may or may not be familiar with them. Max and James, fellow folks in San Francisco, and they pivoted to voice games and recently raised a very large round from, I believe, bit craft to combine voice games with AI to create voice games.

These compelling experiences. So if their trajectory is anything like your trajectory, then it seems like start out in instant games, Facebook, instant games, and then pivot into something else. And hey, the rest is history. Success is sure to follow and of course your, your story, you know, Symbian and starting with early Nokia is very similar to many of the Finnish, game developers.

Of course, Finland is a hub of game development. Digital chocolate was a pathway for many, of course. And that kind of alumni has, has spread not just in Finland, but around the world. With major hubs in Berlin, of course, Singapore, San Francisco, various other countries and capitals and cities around the world.

So, a well trodden path and a very successful path for many, so great, great to have you. Let's talk a little bit now about, we'll get to StarBerry games and Merge Mayor, of course, in a second here, but let's talk about the merge category, you know, mobile gaming, of course, in every category these days, very challenging, very much red ocean.

We've got, of course, the changes that Apple made not that long ago, that makes it even harder for, for many categories, not all, some are winners, but you know, most, most have, have struggled. Merge is obviously in the casual puzzle games are one of the toughest. Why did you decide to go after the merge category and maybe just a tiny little history of, of where merges come from and where it's now?

Antti: Yeah, no, we've actually paid a bit of attention to merge from the early days. I think, is it Triple Town, is a very old Facebook game that I actually used.

Niko: Triple Town. Yeah. I was gonna ask about Triple Town if you, if that was an inspiration.

Antti: Yeah, so yeah, I definitely played a lot, a lot in back in the day but there was kind of a re-emergence of, of merge games with, merge planes.

Got a lot of traction, a lot of installs. That was kind of a hype, hyper casuals game at the time. Before I would say even, even hyper casual, we were making idle games. So I would say kind of in the hybrid casuals. Space before the the term was coined and we wanted to combine these two things with our next game So we were looking in the building and idle village and and so the merge I two component on a grid existed, but it was very different.

It was more like a hyper casual. I think the, the kind of a merge two with the full puzzle board existence, the credit goes to the Mika at MetaCore. I think he, he definitely did probably all the groundwork. I remember seeing a prototype of Merge Mansion, and I was thinking there's no losing condition, this is not a puzzle, it will never work, but yeah, happy to be mistaken on, on that one.

I think before that there was the Merge-3, with EverMerge, Merge Gardens, a lot of things that already were a little bit different gameplay, but, but now, later on, Merge 2, of course, I would say MetaCore and Merge Mansion started it. We followed fairly quickly because we, we tested our Idle Village game, and with the idle kind of systems and some merge components on top, the metrics weren't really impressive. We're lucky to test early and then we just tanked the idea of idle game and pivoted into, into kind of the full merge board game and tested it. The metrics were completely opposite and our journey got, got started early before the kind of category was big, but maybe to speak to your point about kind of the red ocean part, which the category definitely is a current moment.

We're still thinking of staying and then our next game will be a merge to two games. So now, of course, it needs a little bit more thinking of how will you be able to compete in the category? So clones won't do or being early kind of with, with something small in scope is not going to be the way you, you need to.

Have an edge in some way, either. You're very good at marketing and your edges to figure out kind of how to win in that part of the game, or you are bringing on IP and out executing on Polish or big budgets. And, or then you just kind of need to find a outsmart. That's how I would say it for a small team that we need to find a twist.

We need to evolve the category in a meaningful way so that it increases engagement and then kind of the KPIs would come. From being able to figure where the category is going, what the players want next and what's new for them. So the combination of incremental innovation, something existing that's definitely there to work, but kind of pushing it forward with something new and meaningful.

Niko: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think we're going to talk a lot about social life, but that's the part I'm most curious about, with Merge Mayor in particular, but obviously we'll touch on some of these other things. And I did have a question planned about what next. And so you've already obviously given us a preview of what next.

Okay. So, you put out a medium post. The reason I reached out to you is you put out a really thoughtful and a detailed medium post about, merge mayor, some of the key moments, some of the key insights that you've had over your three year journey, three Three plus your journey getting here. You mentioned that you surpassed 25 million in lifetime revenue, obviously compared to supercell.

That's peanuts. But in the merge category, that that's a big deal. And obviously as you alluded to, it's a very, very red ocean category right now. It's very hard to, to break through and to grow. And certainly no new entrants that I know of have been able to. To get anywhere near those numbers. It's just really just you and and merge mention, of course, your fellow fins at MediCorps that you mentioned there.

So my question to you really is what are the kind of the pivotal moments or decisions that you you talked about the kind of idle game start and then pivot into match to merge to, of course, what are the other things that you identify over the last three years? It's kind of the key moments that showed you like, Okay, here are the step function changes.

Here are the things that show us like, Yeah, we can actually do this. We can grow this. We can market this. Successfully have a positive LTV CAC, you know, calculation.

Antti: Yeah, I guess our starting point is with the company as well. This is our first self published title. So actually learning the ropes and, and it kind of, evolving even more impressive in that case, evolving the company skill sets as, as we go and run.

So from an early launch and then kind of leading into learning. a little bit of predicting LTV or, or UA channels. So at that time, of course, I was lucky to learn from the marketing director director at the time, Yuri, who was, who was doing a fantastic job helping us scale. The kind of pivotal moments raising 5 million in 2025, one.

So UA is a key, key part of, being able to get to, to 25 million milestone. So of course, kind of being able to push a little bit, take risk on UA and push it, push the paybacks a bit further at the time, but then also kind of, we needed to learn and, and set the, the right levels for profitability and, and all of that.

And on the other hand, I think then it's more about the LTV, so. Engagement and monetization. We launched really early, the game really didn't have all the features or the content and so the first year was kind of, I guess, running and trying to catch where we were. where we were and, and got to a global launch, but with a kind of fairly small scope game.

But after that, there was kind of the vision laid out for the social part and, and those features definitely help with the engagement LTV parts. But I think overall merge as a category and then merge as a, as a system, like there's pretty decent spend depth. If you're able to kind of balance the game, right.

And find, find that, that kind of set up.

Niko: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's dive right into the kind of social engagement piece, which I find really fascinating, especially in this category where it's not typically seen as anything more than just a single player game, , with maybe some mini games or, you know, side quests or something like that, that might have like some light social element, but not really kind of a deeper social engagement piece.

I mentioned 50, 000 members on discord, which to me is a very large number for this category. How, why did you do this? Why did you go down this kind of discord community path? And then how has, what have you learned along the way? How has it influenced the games development to notice that you've got this?

And maybe I'm asking it the wrong way. Maybe you design the features first and that's how you got the community. So tell us more about how this community has grown. 50, 000 members on discord. What are they talking about? What are they engaging with? Why, why are they talking to each other about merge my hair?

Antti: Good. Yeah, no, no, I think there's a bit of both. I think what you mentioned. So first, I think it's, we, we had some luck to end up in discord. It was at the COVID time when we set up, set up our company remote office in discord. So we were already operating in discord and. Happy accident, in that case.

Yeah, exactly. And for the game, of course. Then we thought, well, we want, do you want to have a community? Facebook pages, and Facebook was kind of trending out in some way that it wasn't very usable, or we didn't think that audience was necessarily there. Reddit was big for an idle game, but maybe that, we thought, wouldn't resonate with a casual game.

And, and with Discord, we kind of still didn't We like the feature sets of Discord. It's a, it's a easy for community. We were anyways there. So, so we, we kind of went with that, but what it kind of proved as it evolved, even with a single player game at the time, people would join and, and they were like more active than on Reddit.

And I think it was just easier to communicate. They I think in the early years of, Discord, Of the game, they even came up with a community game. So now there's a channel that where the, the, the community members actually started posting turn by turn screenshot of the game where they evolved or merged up items and they took turns and just kind of went through a bunch of, kind of turns in fairly quickly.

So they entertain themselves in other ways than just being in the game, so that was interesting. We also, I think, discord. To me, that's a really nice change in casual free to play development, where your player voices aren't only data, but you actually Here and see what they, what they discuss about in more detail.

That's more like qualitative data that you get with discord and not just like a player test video, but more like what the engaged players care. Of course, there is a little bit of the loudest voices might matter a little bit too much if you only listen to them. But in addition to data, the kind of qualitative, quantitative side, the, the Discord adds a lot of the, the quality and the, the detail into it.

It does make us more responsible and, and like own what we ship. So we definitely need to be up to date because we will instantly hear feedback. We will be kind of Yeah, responsible for, for anything so I think it kind of makes you think and of the player experience more and be maybe more careful, but at least attention to detail and we really kind of then hear if, if anything goes a little bit off, so it, it, it's a good thing to be vulnerable in that sense to, to your, hardcore audience. Probably it makes us play our own game way more, which is also a very good foundation for operating something like this. And we did, I think, halfway the game life cycle, we started pushing for. incentives to be on discord. So if you join, there's going to be at every release, there's a gift link.

You get a special, special vehicle for your town if you're, if you join discord at early stage and so on. So I think there is still a mismatch, I think, from our total user base. It's not a lot of people that have joint discord, because I do believe that the game that's targeted at 25 to 60 year old women, mostly they're not really the discord audience.

And if they don't have the account already, and you kind of land on, on discord signup page, which is a black website with a joystick logo, doesn't, and none of your friends are there. It probably doesn't invite them to sign up and go through the trouble, but, but when they do, it's amazing. Currently the discussions.

It's on, pretty much, it's a great place for any type of tutorial of the game, so, and then there's spreadsheets of the balance of all kinds of tips on what to do and how to play, but also then very kind of light hearted conversation between people, the players about the game and we promoted some of our own players into two moderators.

And so, so far, I'm super impressed how it kind of runs, it's stayed very healthy and friendly and, and they've, thanks to all the moderators, we've done really well. Nice work in keeping and calling out if there's anything that kind of gets out of hand, because, yeah, being responsible for for a large community also kind of, it's a bit of a bag in your shoulders that you feel.

Niko: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I was going to say, I think, excuse me, I think you've alluded to this already, which is, it's kind of a double edged sword, having a really engaged community, because it can be very easy. Absolutely. And I know this from personal experience, it'd be very easy to hear those loud voices and like, Oh, we need this feature.

And it's your power users, right? And they're probably your biggest spenders. At least some of them are. And certainly some of them, we used to call them social whales back in the day at Zynga. Like they're the ones who are inviting their friends and talking, you know, like, Oh, this is such a cool game, you know, in real life.

And you want them to be happy. Of course you do. And you certainly don't want to alienate them. And so the risk, of course, the double edged sword part of this is that you are, uh, potentially shipping features just for your power uses. Your road map becomes highly whale driven or, you know, whether it be spend whales or social whales.

And that can be very challenging in then bringing in new users. Who are not on discord, who don't care about discord, who actually do just like that, you know, relatively casual single player experience. And I actually have some questions, a line of questions on some of your, you know, you've got some really impressive aged cohorts who have been playing the game for two plus years, and I'm going to get into that in a second.

But as a prelude to that, I want to understand your perspective and your team's perspective on how do you not become. Overly like a horse, you know, the blinkers. How do you not become overly blinkered to a road map that is heavily skewed towards keeping this this cohort? That's probably disproportionately responsible for your revenues for for your success to date at the risk of alienating new users who are perhaps more casual.

Antti: Yeah, no, then you need the data part of looking into to how how that how the actual numbers run for the full. community. So, or the full player base, yeah, I think we've had, haven't had kind of, I guess too many, , things outrageous or outbreaks of, of, uh, of, uh, yeah, enraged a community with, with that. So, of course, so far we haven't done segmented balancing too much.

There's some segmentation in the game with offers and things, and these definitely bring Another twist into managing our community when different people, players see different things. But of course, I think as long as like the core gameplay and everything is fair, that's kind of what you need to make, make sure is, is all good.

But yeah, for, for, for the audience, that's, yeah, the, the, the kind of loudest voices you kind of just need to be aware and take it into account, but we've had. We always look at data in, in a way that what's the full player base than saying. So I, I think the normal typical example for us is that, that they, they, that hardcore players see balancing of any live operations or so as way too easy or, or, or they've ran through it in, in no time.

And then we're looking at the full player base where that's not. 2 percent of players have reached the end and it's, you kind of want to, for a casual game, you kind of want to have more like, okay, how do, how do half of the players get to some meaningful point then maybe 10 percent to the end. But so, so I think, yeah, you need to combine the numbers.

Niko: Yeah. And I remember from early Zynga days, we used to actually have new, we would bucket, you know, the features in a way where it's like, okay, this is, uh, and we'd literally on Frontierville in particular, we'd literally have it at like, it's level capped, right? So this feature is only available at. X levels, right?

And then we would have road map meetings where we'll talk about, okay, we need this mix of new user features. We need this mix of kind of elder of player features. We need this mix of features that are really for free to play players. And we have these features that are more geared towards payers, and it needed to be a balance at all times.

And of course, as the game grows older and you're relying more and more on your, we call them golden cohorts from the early days, disproportionate number of your players are the players have been there for years, and you're getting fewer and fewer new players that that mix changed. Is that something you guys are employing?

Or are you still at that growth phase where it's like, No, we just want to keep growing, broaden the funnel at the top of the funnel and bring in more new users?

Antti: Yeah, I think what we for the last 12 months, I think there was more on the. Like, let's figure out how there's entertainment for, for the rest of the game.

So we don't, we're not stuck in content thread mill in a way. So, so the social features definitely were aimed at, because it takes a while to get into a club and sucked into that system and, and all of the other things. So that was the last 12 months. But I think for the growth of the game and the future, we're really looking into more of the early parts.

So a little bit of a. Repositioning exercise to unlock UA. So now we've shifted focus almost completely into the figuring, okay, the game needs to grow. , we've done a lot of work on LTV and longevity. Now it's all about the funnel and how to figure out how to grow the game on, on, on that side. And we got inspired by future place merge gardens and, and what they did with a little bit of the repositioning rebranding.

And that's something we've been working on and we'll be testing now in the upcoming first quarter for sure.

Niko: Perfect. Oh, okay. Interesting. So you've essentially built a game already, you feel that has good longevity. So you've got that other gameplay figured. Now you're like, okay, how do we open it up to enough people who will then go on that journey and spend the next two, three years, hopefully with you.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. All right. Well, it's a nice way to position actually. Okay. Well, we'll get into new, new game, uh, Blake. Excuse me, new gameplay, new features, some of the things that are kind of more accessible in a second. But I do want to touch on this, the stat that you had in your in your piece that you wrote on medium recently.

You've got players who've been playing this for, you know, two plus years. And that percentage seems to be going up. Growing as an overall. Now, I know you just said you literally said you're going to thank you when you're going to hope to kind of maybe shrink that again. But up until this point, you have really had a very strong, solid kind of age cohort, uh, player mix in there.

What have you done specifically? With that in mind, you know, now that you're shifting gears, what was the mentality previously to really keeping that that cohort engaged? It can't all be discord. As you mentioned, it's only a small percentage of 65 year old women who have have discord. What's been the key to keeping those players really engaged?

Antti: Yeah, I guess when we ship and the game was kind of very bare bones in, in like there was limited amount of content, not really a lot of systems or even features like bandwidth of things that you can do in a game. , so I think in first year it was kind of catching up with that and features that we always kind of wanted to think that, okay, how does this entertain for extended time and, and sometimes.

We kind of skipped then a easy, faster monetization route. For example, our inventory in the game, there's these extra slots that are more like milestone challenges. They're like extremely hard missions to unlock inventory space versus just buying them with gems or premium currency. So, So we added a lot of like artificial content to some extent, but still kind of nicely ties in with the gameplay and is rewarding and valuable.

So that was kind of the first year, but we did come up with the vision for the social parts fairly quickly. It was all credit goes to my co founder Samir on his design team on, on working with the bigger picture of, okay, let's first think what's the ultimate experience social wise in Merge Mayor. It involves, you know, It's just clubs and clubs competing together and then breaking it down into, okay, well, then what's valuable individual representation, like your, your social currency is your avatar.

And then, then we started implementing it. So the first one avatar shipped March 23. And then within the kind of. Following 12 month period, we, we shipped each of the different parts, tournaments for individuals to compete in avatar prizes from these things, then clubs chat and ultimately the wonders where clubs compete globally.

So, so I think those. have been shipped gradually since 23. And I think this year they've been in full, full effect. So that's helped with the entertaining these end of content players. Cause the, that group is still, still kind of a growing where we've got limited bandwidth with the company. So we kind of need to check features versus content and how to manage it.

But with the social systems, it's kind of trying to fight that only single player content, treadmill part, and then. Finding ways that it's, it's then, the wonder seasons at the moment kind of are pretty much the end of content. And yeah, end of content system where they run for 90 days and, and keep, I would say a lot of fairly, fairly good amount of those old, players engaged.

Niko: Yeah, you're referring, I think, to the pyramid that you've got in your medium piece. And by the way, we'll link to that in the show notes for anybody listening. So you can reference it yourself. I thought I was very impressed by that. That was a very thoughtful way of thinking about building. You know, systems that needed to support each other in order to get to that end point, which was the wonders system.

And we'll talk about each of these pieces. You mentioned clubs and, you know, seasons that go for 90 days and what have you, obviously not rocket science in terms of live ops. Like this is stuff that, you know, many, many, many game companies are doing. , but I think the way you've implemented it in merge mayor is really interesting and very thoughtful in, in order to kind of make sure you, you Build the things that you need first in order to get to something which is at the tip of the pyramid, which is the wonders, which, by the way, a pyramid is a perfect analogy for wonder.

So it felt very, very apropos if you will, So why don't you expand on that just a little bit? How did you come up with this? This framework? When did you come up with this framework? And how did you decide on? What was required? What layers were required? Because you could have gone deeper and deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, building some of these systems out on.

It felt a nice balance between complex enough that these elder players will kind of, you know, go and spend the time. And it extends the life of the product beyond just the content treadmill, but still accessible so that a casual player coming into the game at first glance can understand more or less what that kind of end game is with the clubs and the wonders and what have you.

Antti: Yeah, no, that's that's a good question. And I think that's kind of. There is not too many references of, of the complete picture of, or different ways that it's been implemented in casual games. There's of course kind of the top games with Royal Match has tournaments with clubs and all of these systems, but they're often very competitive.

And I think for us, it was a year into Merge Mayor development and the kind of vision with Samir, my co-founder of Merge Mayor. Where do we go? What are the kind of shots we want to do? Is it like more content or, or are these, features what, what can expand the game and, and help us grow it? So it was kind of then like, do we want to commit to social?

It will require like most of our efforts and, and it's, it's kind of a, a lot of to put in. So then that kind of. It was first sketched. We kind of felt good that, okay, it is something that can be shipped. It's going to take a year. I'm not sure what we estimated at the time in terms of like when, when we'd be ready.

But actually, we were fairly careful and realistic about. Okay. This will, this will take a while, but the kind of vision of how can we push more collaboration and how, how can we have more of the players like, because competition on global level is destined only for, for a very small part. And those of your players, that's for the very kind of hardcore, whereas we thought, okay, there's something more we can do in casual.

We can. It's kind of, have more of the collaborative efforts and the whole kind of wonders what's the, the leading idea that where clubs, is building something together and then they need to reach a certain milestone. So it's a, it's kind of a. It's a milestone for the club without too much of competition.

It's, it's a challenge, but as well, the whole system then nicely linked into the leaderboard. So the same points in the same system is used for the global leaderboard, competition, which is then that's kind of at the top. It's very insane how, how much they play and how engaged, what, what it requires in terms of engagement, but kind of for a lot of clubs, like I just today, actually 60 days into the wonder season with my club, I joined a random club in, in Finland, just to participate and see, and we, we just kind of hit the limit today, the level 10, the milestone, and it's been, it's been good to kind of see, and I think we're on position 400 something in the global competition. So, so I think, uh, already 400 clubs have reached the milestone and there's still a month left for the rest to get it. So for a lot of players that are active in the game, they're still , they're getting a nice experience and the collaboration works.

And so I think that's kind of a, that was ultimately what we went after for, because we thought casual, And collaboration, that's kind of where we want to go. And not too many examples existed. Maybe Supercell had Everdale at one point in soft launch that was very like core social, but it was all about kind of, playing together.

But I think it was also very much geared towards this. This competition that they was all about stacking up in the leaderboard, and not sure if that's the only thing the casual players or how much weight you, you should put for that in casual. And then of course it came down like the kind of steps towards the wonders, it's clubs, it's chat, it's, and then individual representation of, of your avatar to, to find something valuable.

I think we won in Royal Match. It's, it's pretty simple in terms of how they reward the, the kind of clubs or collections, but, but we were fairly happy with, cause we, we didn't have a modifiable CD where you could have statues in terms of like individual things, everyone's still building pretty much the same city, but so we, we kind of then came up with the avatar part and yeah, that's, that's, that's Again, a lot of credit for the design team here and Samir who's who led it.

And, and, and yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it started from, from fairly get go with the, the avatar stuff and then we were then able to prove step by step, okay, do we commit to the next phase? So that was kind of a nice way.

Niko: Yeah. It was kind of a naturally built, milestone system essentially, or, you know, check Mark system or, or.

Green flag meeting system or what have you. And does it, does it, kind of go one to one with the player engagement with those features? So at the bottom of the pyramid, you've got the most base layer, which I'm presuming most players are engaging with. And then as you go towards the top of the pyramid and ultimately clubs building wonders together for 90 days that's a smaller percentage, I presume a much smaller percentage of the overall.

Yeah, it's engaging with, let's say the base avatar system,

Antti: I think the avatar system you unlock on level three. So it's almost like on your first session, you're going to get your avatar and the first cap or whatever you get for the avatar. The tournaments are something we also unlock fairly early and everyone's pushed into a tournament group.

So it kind of like 100 percent participation in a way, but whether you actively collect points and do the missions for the tournament, then that's kind of up to you. A lot of them are, actually in like, they help you with progression and tournaments, of course, segmented in a way that. Newbies compete with other newbies and, and, and the tournament actually isn't a sink.

 It actually enhances, like you produce things and you can use them for your regular progression, but you in addition to get points in the tournament. That's, again, almost like 100 percent participation. Clubs, of course, is something where you need to actively join. And I was just checking, so it's more than half, half the players are in clubs.

And then, of course, Wonder Completion, then you get into a smaller percentage. But, yeah, I'll need to check in this one. I think we, so now we've been, of course, looking at, okay, how do we, How do we make clubs work better? How does the matchmaking of recommended players or searching for a club is, so surprisingly there's a kind of a feature creep in all of these to do like systems to manage your club and all of that.

And suddenly you're like, okay, what's the value of all of these and how can, how much can we do? What's necessary? And all of that, but it's step by step, we think we can try to aim at higher percentage of players in clubs, higher percentage of players in active clubs. So we measure club activity, how much you contribute, because clubs and wonders, that's ultimately then a sink.

There you actually need to consume items and things to, to get points and progress. So, so that's, but it's still, I think we're, we're doing pretty well in terms of what I think in casual games is the participation at the kind of end of content or on these more complex social systems. So the kind of collaborative nature of it, then kind of approachability and all of this, I would think it's, it's doing good for, for our system.

And there's always room to improve and try to push it further.

Niko: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of room again, in this The reason why I want to talk with you is because, you know, collaborative social is something that you don't see a ton of. You see a lot of competitive social, , even in casual games.

I mean, if you look at, you know, Monopoly go, I would argue minutes. The social is very light there, but let's be honest. But but nonetheless, it's, you know, it's kind of competitive social. You're like knocking your friends off and they're stealing from you and what have you, and I think collaborative social is something that there's there's more room to grow, I think, in the market there than on the competitive social side.

That, to me, I think is clear in in many genres, not every genre, but I think many genres would benefit from having people collaborate. There's that social pressure off. You know, hanging out with each other and, and, you know, being a part of the process and contributing and not being competitive. I don't view you as somebody who's like, it's me or you.

It's like me and you, I think that's really interesting. And I think that I'm glad to hear that it's working. I'm happy to hear that it's resonating with the players and it's also contributing to success. Yeah, I think the spirit

Antti: in the club that I joined as well, the chat is very casual.

It's not very like about. work in, in terms of getting higher up in the leaderboards. It's like, okay, let's get to this milestone, goal. Then we unlock the avatar item for the wonder season. And it's kind of, it's very nice in a way that it's more like a reminding, Hey, please participate and let's get everyone participating versus kind of, okay, we need to beat someone and we need to gather points and only one team could win or so, but at the moment it's, Multiple clubs win by reaching the milestone and getting the avatar clothed for it.

Niko: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. Okay. Well, shifting gears a little bit, I'll talk about some of the other parts of the game. Another area that I think, again, this is not rocket science. It's been happening in many genres for, for years now, but it's also always worth calling out. I mean, storytelling.

And characters. That's a big part, I think, of your your game as well, not dissimilar to what your fellow friends at MediCorps are doing with Merge Mansion, of course, which really pioneered, I think, the storytelling and the mystery of Grandma and what's going on. And like, you know, their marketing campaigns were just really quite innovative and quite effective, by all accounts, kind of creating this Oh, I wonder what happens.

Like, what is the story that's going on there? What, what are you guys doing on that front? How much are you leaning into storytelling? And what is the story at a high level? Not all of our listeners, of course, have played Merge Mansion, or Merge Mayor or merge man. So they probably haven't played either, but what can they look forward to on the story side and the storytelling side?

Antti: For us, it's, it's very lighthearted, the, like, we had more like a, because, because of the visual style of the game comes, it's kind of inherited from the, , from the idle times and, and the whole journey of twisting and pivoting, , so it's been more kind of comical in, in some way.

And then the whole story got with that as well. Like, it didn't feel right that the. The kind of Roblox y looking dudes are, are into drama that much. So for, for MerchMayor at the moment, it's, it's all about this like jokes and lighthearted things. But we're learning. So I think this is the part where all of the rebranding exercise or the repositioning exercise is actually another version of merge.

Mayor is still it's going to be an A B test. So it still lives in the same game in the same world. But we actually changed the character art style. We had drama. We had the whole storyline into it about the mayor and the mysteries in the city and all of these, which on the other side on the it. The kind of lighthearted version doesn't really exist in that way.

And that kind of leads into what I think about storytelling. To me, it's actually the, the UA angle to actually how to find your audience appeal to the right audience and the demographic or, or interest base. It's matching that then with the hook in the game, that it kind of keeps your interest, what you saw in the ad and, and then what you got in the game built, that it still kind of builds a little bit on it.

But in terms of, how deep you need to go, like in Berlin, we of course have VUGA here, who is like super deep into building narrative and the whole story there. And I think that's almost like a company mission for them. So I think their players are then, that's the hardcore niche who's enjoying this, this kind of super story.

Telling part of games and narrative and characters and, and, and then, then you need to put a lot of time and effort into it. But I think for casual merge and maybe on, on in some match games as well, it's more about the, the early final. And as I mentioned that that's kind of our next core focus. So we're now experimenting with, with that as well and hope to have interesting learnings To share the next year about, of a repositioning the importance of story in the whole marketing funnel and the early kind of retention or early hook into the games.

Niko: Yeah, now let's talk about marketing then and you a they almost in some companies, they feel like two completely different businesses, in the best companies, they operate together, right? As you mentioned, so the story, the gameplay that all ties into the creative, the channels that you're, you're using some of the most effective marketing driven organizations, you know, they really understand the importance of story.

Even while the game itself doesn't necessarily have a ton of story, right? And you can use the mini games and cut the rope type stuff and move the pen type mini games. We've got questions on many games for coming up for you as well. But let's let's focus for a second on how does your U. A. Operations work in conjunction with the kind of game teams?

Are you One of those very integrated organizations where you are working together deeply, or are you, and both can work by the way, or are you one of those organizations where you've got the game teams or blissfully unaware? They're focusing on their creative craft. They don't care about the crass business side of business.

You know, they're just like, I, I don't care about that , I just wanna make great games. And then the, the UA guys are the ones with the numbers and the spreadsheets and they're crunching it and they're figuring out what the creative should be based on what the game. Teams are creating. How do you guys think about you a marketing and how integrated you feel it needs to be?

Antti: Yeah, no, it's an interesting journey. So I picked up on the distribution or publishing team. I've always worked on the studio side of things at Wooga and at Digital Chocolate. So then out of, kind of, the core talent for my co founder Amir, he's way better at game design, production. He even used the program, games professionally.

So he's kind of running a studio operation. I need to pick up on publishing and and the moment we would kind of went to, well, we even tested a little bit of Idle Coffee back in the day. I did the the video creatives. I did the set up the campaigns in marketing as for help in from ex Wooga colleagues and, and kind of ventured into it.

I look, we got published, so we didn't need to run it, but we of course kind of wanted to learn what that is all about. At then when we went on for self publishing, I was lucky to hire a talented marketing director to help us with that. But from core, from the get go, we were always thinking it needs to be extremely integrated.

So both at Friday, all hand meetings. Marketing data needs to be exposed for the rest of the studio. And so you kind of want to get them educated on how this whole system works because I'm free to play the whole game successes and it's, it's, it's more business and less art in, in a way, but it's kind of a combination of, of, of both.

But to be extremely successful, you kind of need to understand, I think, both sides. And then, of course, also bringing marketing very close to the game team to expose them into understanding, okay, all the effort and love going into attention to details and all of that. So we, we sit very closely together and, and it's kind of a good thing that Me and my co founder, we're kind of the glue.

So he's, Samir is both very keen on marketing and understanding all of the things. He's also involved in a lot of analytics and things. I care about a lot about the product side as well. So then it's kind of a nice co led thing where both of us are involved in both. And it's not kind of a, we're not set against each other.

So very collaborative spirit in that way. I love it. It is tough to get those mark, like to survive in the market and figure what's kind of working in, like with everything around where it's monetization with ads or interstitials or which we don't do and then, or fake ads, mini games, like what do you need to do to win and what's your choices of what you kind of need to implement.

To be successful. So it's yeah, definitely a new twist in, in, in operating in free to play mobile and it, like the skillset required is, is quite a bit, but that keeps the job interesting. You need to be constantly learning. And what I learned back in the day, 10 years ago on free to play. It doesn't really like, that's just basics.

And, and where we are today, you're kind of, you know, I've learned a lot about marketing in the last three years that I've kind of operated as part of publishing.

Niko: Yeah. Yeah. I want to have a, I haven't had them on the show yet, but I really want to have triple dot studios on the show. Cause I mean, they are masters of the marketing side of things and they've really got that down to a science and have built an unbelievable business.

Um, and I don't want to. Cast aspersions on this strategy and nor do I want to second guess what their strategy actually was. I'm sure they wanted to make great games. Of course, of course, they're making great and they are making great games. Players are enjoying their games. But boy, is their marketing operations slick.

So that's an example, I think, of a company and a game developer that really gets, like, they're almost marketing led. Sometimes you're creative led and like I said, both can work from both perspectives. You can create great games with a marketing like organization and you can have great business results with a creative led organization.

It's about blending the two together. Of course, exactly. That's the key. Meet in the middle.

Antti: Hyper casual was very marketing led casual games from five years ago was very product led and I think To be successful. You kind of need to meet in the middle. You gotta have both. You gotta have both.

Niko: Okay and one thing we didn't actually talk about is, StarBerry Games.

How are you guys structured in terms of, you know, team size, geographic location? I know you're you're in Berlin, your entire team in Berlin split between kind of product and design and then marketing you a business publishing.

Antti: Yeah, we're, everyone's in Berlin except two freelancers that we work, but all full time employees of StarBerry are in Berlin.

We're 22, we're fairly like equally split into four parts. Art, engineering, design, and publishing. Like, like five person teams in each of these or so. So it's, it's a very. Yeah. Everyone needs to wear multiple hats, and building merch mayor, but, but we've been also prototyping this year and another game.

So trying to figure how can this team build, also work on two games with, that's definitely one of the challenges. But, but yeah, we've been always fans of, working together in, in, , in the same space and, and I think it's kind of a, a choice that then we stick with and, and, , everyone's at the office on Monday and Friday and in between you could choose, but the week gets started here and, and on Friday it's more like all hands meeting also.

And, and a happy hour and a little bit more of the. The good old, yeah, things of, of meeting other people and, and knowing other things than their git commits.

Niko: Yes. Well, I, I miss those days where our, our operations are entirely remote. We do get together once a quarter, but that's not the same as, as having that.

I used to love the two to three days in the office, two to three days focus work from home, which worked very well for us. So, I envy you on the, on your return back to office with the nice hybrid mix of, of having that focus time available wherever you want to do that. Okay. Let's talk about some of the other features and then we're going to talk about what comes next.

The future. Talk about alluded to the, to the next game, and tease that it is actually in fact, going to be in the merge category as well, which makes sense given your focus, but also you could have gotten in different directions. And, and kind of broaden your portfolio, both, both can work. I'm going to, I want to talk a little bit about mini games, and then kind of live ops and they kind of go hand in hand, you know, seasonal events. What's, what's driving these mini games, how are you guys thinking about it?

Is it, again, marketing led, you know, you've got the pull the pin kind of creative and, you know, save what's his name? King? King Robert, thank you. I can't believe I blanked on his name there. King, save King Robert from the, from the water and all that. And of course, those, those are not really indicative of the core gameplay, but they work very well in, in the creatives and broadening the effectiveness of the UA creative.

How are you guys thinking about mini games? How deeply are integrating into the core gameplay and what purpose do they serve?

Antti: Yeah, we, we've now, for now, we've got LiveOps events, we've, but we have one mini game kind of in there, Jack's Mine, and that came from, internal game jam we organized on minigames.

So specifically kind of wanting to get ideas and see if something kind of would, would nicely fit them and match it for us. It's not about the UA we didn't go into. We tested, I think the creative, but it was definitely the way that it would kind of work for us. So we were more figuring what's, and what's increasing engagement, what's fun for the players, what's the variety.

So it's more about live ops our thinking on it. And I think we kind of, with the limited bandwidth that there's, there's a lot you could do on, on LiveOps and, and kind of, there's an endless amount of, uh, of roadmap to, to keep up with the, the leading games in the genre for that. So it's more like mini game can provide variety.

It, it goes into the monthly programming that we do. So we look at each month we've got. We've iterated over the, the last years into, okay, what's with like a nice mix and, and, and how much can you have different elements? So at the moment, our standard month in, in merge mayor typically has 16 days of competition, individual competition, two tournaments, five days, two tournaments of three days, there's sales slotted in different types.

There's he LiveOps activities, there's a season pass event duration from anything from 5 to 10 days and a mechanic that like we choose, we only, we have like two mechanics that we can, we can use and always build a bit of a twist or so. We then look at the year and we have four, like, month long activities each year.

There's Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and Summer. We try to kind of then tie in everything as a, into a container of LiveOps, and then all the little events contribute to that larger container. And, and so that's quite a bit of work with the, to keep up with the LiveOps programming, but that's the whole thing.

These, that's part of the whole retention. You need to have a destination. You come back to Merge Mayor. There's something programming wise, if it would be a single player game, that gets you kind of a delight that, okay, this is something new. Here's a new goal. I could engage with this. Of course, the social then brings a whole new component that, okay, what happened when I was away?

Did I lose positions in the tournament? Did my team contribute to something? Did they do something? Was there something in the chat? So of course, kind of a, it's, it's all about that destination of entertainment. You arrived there and, and you should kind of not be, you should be surprised of, of as a player that, Hey, Oh, there's something new, cool.

And, and how it ties and maybe gets you, uh, yeah, more joy out of the game. So more engagement.

Niko: Yeah. I mean, I still play. I love Gardenscapes. It's my kind of guilty pleasure on the casual side. And honestly, the only reason I'm still playing Gardenscapes is because they've just got an unbelievable live ops operation going that it really did surprise every time I go in there, even as frequently as I play, I'm always like, Oh wow. Like, Oh, this is new. This is cool. Like, Oh, okay. There's this cool new mission quest I can go on a lot to do, obviously. And of course their team is, is much larger and has been around for a long time and, and, you know, has made a lot of money for, for, for them but yeah, it's kind of that's the that's part for the course now, isn't it?

Like, that's what you need in order to even for a 22 person team, you kind of need to compete with the big guys in order to have that, like, you know…

Antti: It's a Paris.

Niko: Yeah, exactly. That's what I was getting at. It's player expectation. There's an expectation that there was a sale every now and then. There's an expectation that there's seasonal content.

There's an expectation that there's side missions and quest. There's an expectation that there's many games. There's an expectation that there's something social, right? Whether it be competitive or collaborative, I think. Yeah, exactly. We talked about collaborative becoming a bigger part. I think. So, yeah, when I mean with a 22-person team, how do you do it all?

Antti: So that needs some automation as well. I know, of course, recycling as much as possible. So anything we developed and, of course, kind of, we hope that it works out and then can go into the, like regular programming. So, but I think you can get quite a bit of mileage out of each system. So, like, With different variations.

And I think for us also, I have always the kind of rewards for competitions. Like I always had, had kind of was thinking that it kind of needs that one component. And for us, luckily the something that can be measured in, in, real dollars is the avatar clothes. They're kind of that social value. So. You kind of also need some of these systems that then, , like some economy for the system, , for the, for the rewards that works well in as a, as a, as a thing for live ops and, and things that, because otherwise just the premium currency that would be, I'm not sure if it, how far you can get with, with only kind of just internal economy prices and things.

Niko: Okay. All right. Well, as I promised, let's switch to the future here. I got a couple of questions around the future. I think first I just want to get a sense from you how you're viewing the casual puzzle games category more broadly, not just looking at merge. And then obviously that's going to tie into, I presume it's going to tie into the fact that you're going after merge with your second title too.

What comes next in this category? What are the challenges you need to overcome and why do you think that's That, you know, merge, the second merge title is, is the way to go. And what's going to be different about that?

Antti: Yeah, no, it's finally happening on mobile casual. So I think having worked on Facebook games back in the day, social was kind of inherent.

And the whole friends automatically there, like it all, like I was listening to trip Hawkins, his presentation, the digital chocolate back in the day. And he's, he's talking about the lost village and the, like the. The need for an excuse to be in contact with your contacts, friends, relatives, anything and games can provide that, that excuse to be talking about it with, with someone, you know, because, oh, they're playing the game as well.

So it kind of, he laid a very good foundation. It was almost like a university of learning some, some things from his presentations back in the day. And of course, Facebook, worked fantastically with that. And these games were a lot of it, like, fun to play with both your friends. Of course, as a game developer, a lot of friends were playing there.

So you probably got like a very premium experience, but also the communities, the add me groups and whatnot that existed. So I think mobile then took multiple steps backwards. Yes. Free to play single player experiences and we kind of lost the social connection for casual games. There's a few things I think, of course, with the casual, social in the core, like with Everdale, what they tried at Supercell or, or kind of the things we build, that's where you still need this very good single player game and you can enhance it with social and it can kind of evolve into that over the long term.

Now, there's other categories that are just directly social, like playing with, , word games with directly with a friend or, or new, new contacts in a way, or from Berlin, there's a team that built a social Tamagotchi, Pengu, and I think they're able to do that with viral hacking and, and so I think glimpses of, of kind of that hope that social will Be there for mobile games.

I think mobile maybe was a device where you kind of did think that it's for your single player experience. But, yeah, trip had a had a word for it. He called it the social computer. So I think, hopefully, mobile phones get back into the idea that games can actually connect people. And and there's, of course, there's technical questions of like, how, where's the graph?

How do you add friends or, or, you know, All of that. And then like maybe some of the. The kind of spam on feeds or spamming virally things kind of get consumers and players a little bit more careful and the whole privacy topics as well are not going to, I don't think there's this crazy spam era anymore coming and that helped definitely Facebook games to succeed and spread virally to huge audiences.

On wall valley. we kind of, we need to work on it a lot to figure out how do we get some of that these different elements, there's community, there's friends or contacts. And so kind of different, different versions of social, you play in a bigger group, you play with kind of a smaller group and, and ultimately getting into those excuses to be in contact with another human being.

Niko: You know, I, I think and other guests have said this as well, so I'm not original in saying this, but I mean, Apple's game center is just a huge missed opportunity. In my opinion. I mean, if Apple actually wanted to invest in games and of course, games is one of the biggest categories, the biggest category in the app store.

Why on earth wouldn't they have built? The graph themselves, they could have owned the graph and developers would have been happy just to plug into it because it would have made our games better. It would have made it easier to connect with friends, find new people who are playing the games that you like to play, find people who are collaborating instead of developers having to do this all from scratch in every single title, like build the, you know, build Rome 1000 times over.

It's ridiculous. And I don't know why Apple hasn't done that, quite frankly. Yes, maybe it's a privacy thing. Maybe it's like, you know, the whole Absolute the huge focus on it's your device. It's your privacy. Like we don't want to expose you in any way, shape or form. Even opt in, perhaps. I mean, that's presumably what it would be an opt in kind of game center thing.

Yeah, that to me, that's a missed opportunity. I mean, Google could have done the same thing, of course, on the play store. But what a missed opportunity because I agree with you. So mobile has gone. Many steps back. I worked at Zynga, you know, like in the early day and as many complaints there was about, you know, the spaminess of Zynga's feeds and what have you, they were social in many ways.

They were social games and you could work together,  you could compete, you could collaborate, you could go and look at each other's farms, see the invest express beauty that you've created. There was, there was joy in the community and it wasn't a casual audience.

Antti: And I think that's kind of where I, that was, maybe that's the proof that like, that's what the casual audience as well.

We'll enjoy it. Did exist. Cause now if I look at my kids play brawl stars, they're, they're already built their graph of friends from real life into the game. They're. playing locally with them, they're, catching up kind of and playing remotely, at times. And I think games in this specific case, Brawl Stars is connecting the 10 to 14 year olds pretty effectively because anytime they meet, like, I think.

Antti: I hear about, brawl rankings and, and brawl points or whatever at all the time. And, and it's, I think there is.

Niko: Next generation is being kind of built. That's right. And I think you're right. I mean, both are kids that we talked about this before the start of the podcast. Both are exactly the same age, 13 and 11. I have a girl 13, boy 11. I don't know what yours are. Two boys. Okay, but my my 11 year old, you know, Sammy, he plays brawl stars, of course, along with, you know, all the games that those kids play.

And yeah, you're exactly right. They are building their own social graph And of course, you know, Supercell and other developers are developing what they're doing. Are developing the tools that allow you to do that fairly easily, but the way that Facebook, I guess what I'm referring to is the way that Facebook opened up the graph to developers.

That is where I think game center could have gone. And I think maybe they didn't because Facebook actually shut that down. Eventually, and maybe there's more ways for Apple to monetize. I don't know. I don't want to be cynical on their behalf. But, but yeah, that's kind of where we

Antti: Don't know if it could be game center 2.0. That's in the meanwhile, building a lot of these things, community, more direct to consumer channels for for a mobile game startup as you kind of create a lot of value by if you're able to set up a CRM and be able to monetize it. Be directly in, in contact with your, , players because that's, of course, then you operate truly like as a, as a consumer company when you're able to.

Niko: Yeah, owning the relationship with your, your players, of course, is, is the big plus.

So, so. Another double edged sword. It would make it easier for developers to experiment with new cool features, new social things. If Game Center 2. 0 was something that actually allow you to tap into a graph, the downside would be you wouldn't own the relationship directly with those, with those players.

Which one’s, which one’s better? I don't know, maybe it could be a bit of both. Maybe a bit of yes.

Antti: So okay. Consumers then kind of building up that demand that I think it's. Yeah. Mobile phone has been a personal thing. Maybe a Facebook on your laptop was more social inherently, and I would expect that mobile phone will get back into the social part with over the years and, and with the casual audience as well.

Niko: Yep. Yeah. No, I think I just agree with that. And especially with the younger audience that they're just, they're just used to playing with friends on their devices. And so there's gonna be an expectation that your phone is much less social, much less private. You know, I'm, you know, we're both older gentlemen here.

And so, you know, yes, my phone really has been from the very beginning. My very first phone was a laptop. The Nokia brick, the classic Nokia brick and you know, it wasn't very social and couldn't be and all I could play with snake. So, you know, that so I've grown up in an era where the phone has just been my device and it hasn't really had any kind of element other than my address book for making phone calls.

Yeah, messaging was kind of the But that's, that's completely changed now, with the younger generation. They, their phones are essentially shared in many ways. And their phone experiences are definitely shared. Okay. All right. Well, so let's, we're, we're going a little bit over. Hopefully you've got a few minutes extra here, but it's been an interesting conversation.

I definitely want to hear about what's the vision for the next iteration of starboard games next. Version of the game that you're launching, which you've already said is going to be a merge game. What are you going to do differently here? And why do you think that the world is ready for another merge game?

 It's very competitive category.

Antti: Fair point. Yeah, no, I think our 2025 kind of exciting things is, is the, the rebrand repositioning exercise with merge mayor. So we'll see where we can get with that. And can we unlock more growth? And then suddenly it's, it's a lot of ice and, back into to that as well.

The new one is, is we've been prototyping for the full year with only kind of like a one, one, two person combo. And it's, it's all about that old smart. So we had the patience of, we need to deliver something. new, that's going to surprise and delight the user. So there's the world's not, the world doesn't need another merge game.

That's using exactly the same playbook with potentially different theme. So we've, we've explored a lot of like proper, like big variation that, and some of them make the core experience worse. And then we've been kind of judging that, well, that's this feel. Meaningful enough. Is this actually making the game better?

Can we actually make, build a better product with, with this change? So a lot of trashed ideas from the last 12 months. And now we've, we have something that we want to validate on the market. So do more like a validation testing and then green light, go to production, get it into soft launch next year.

It's of course, I like, there is component of social, um, that's very inherent and, and I'm. So it's more like looking into, back into the Facebook playbook of hey, these games work great, how do we get there on, on, on, mobile. But also kind of, a lot of the learnings that we've had from Merge Mayor and Merge 2 category over the years, I think there's kind of a little bit more compared to Match 3 in terms of what you can change and tweak in the core gameplay.

So. We're closer, I think, overall with Merge to Simulation. And that category had kind of nice evolutions, especially the Zynga game. So that's kind of where a lot of this comes from. And then with Hay Day, the twist, how they kind of tweak the loop a little bit and added a nice component of crafting and thinking into it.

And I think with merge, there's still a lot of ways. So meaningful kind of twist that's in the works, and, and kind of the new world of developing. You kind of need to be exposing the ideas early on testing, validating themes, marketing, whatever we've learned and, and trying to figure out the process of, for making future games on casual.

I think that's kind of the playbook for, for building something. How, how do you develop something? When do you test it? What do you expect to see as KPIs? So that's kind of a, I think that's the next set of learnings and hopefully something we. We're able to figure out over the next year.

Niko: Nice. And it must be nice.

Also. I mean, you mentioned that Merge Mayor started out as a pivot and so you inherited the idle village essentially, and you kind of had to use that and you had to make that work must be nice to start from scratch and not have to be in many ways, I'm using air quotes here for our listeners encumbered by the fact that you have this particular art style, this particular kind of stack that you got to start working with.

Antti: Yeah, no, no. There's definitely. A lot of things that we will, we're so delighted to change as a base for the whole economy and things that the games developed nicely in the meanwhile, but customer systems on the top and the few things that we inherited from early choices that are not going to be reversible on May or necessarily.

Niko: Yeah, and how many of the systems is you talked in terms of systems? Of course, you need to when you're 22, People and have as many systems as you've got and as many features if you've got how many of the systems from merge? Mayor, are you thinking about bringing over? Or is it truly a fresh blank piece of paper?

Antti: We're going to quite a bit different direction. So not, not kind of, we won't be able to bring Okay. The exact systems, of course, kind of will be able to figure what's collaborative and what's competitive, but we've got, yeah, it's not based on a, on a like avatar system in that way. So we're going to be, we're going to need to figure something new again, but a lot of the tech actually is then reusable.

That doesn't really necessarily need to change. Yeah. Depend on, on the representation implementation. Perfect.

Niko: Okay. All right. Well, that's all we got time for today. We do have a final question always for all of our guests, cause we are a gaming podcast after all. And that is, what three games are you currently playing or are most excited about?

And you can't name your own.

Antti: Yep. No, there's, there's a few, I'm a huge hockey fan. So there's a game called pocket hockey. I'm the most excited. It's going to come out in 2025. I had a chance to play the game at an indie festival in Berlin. So it's made by gold town games from Northern Sweden. Three versus three arcade hockey with dual joystick.

But the gameplay was awesome, and yeah, finally getting some hockey action on my mobile phone is going to be, I'm going to be so delighted. What I'm playing, Battles of Polytopia, another indie dev from Sweden. It's, it's a classic. It's for especially this Christmas season, so holiday season, it gets you that early sieve one to kind of move optimization thinking going.

So Battles of Polytopia is a great. I'm actually gonna make a note of that because I'm a massive, massive, massive sieve, especially early sieve. Yeah, yeah, where there's not too many things like you've got limited time and then and all of that. So. They actually added some, some new things a year ago. I haven't like properly played those.

And I think it's probably a 10 year old game, but, but they've kept it live and it's just a design masterpiece for, for me. And then the third one is that's kind of the open slots. So that's my job, always market research, trying to find out where's that casual social, where's that new mechanic, what's, what's a twist, where's some innovation.

So. So I'm not really like anything. That's that's a changing slot at the moment. Got it.

Niko: Okay. Fantastic. Well, very much for coming on. Thank you for going over a little bit. This has been a really interesting conversation. We are going to have a link in the show notes to the excellent medium piece that you put out there for game developers and CEOs and founders.

It pays to put out content. It is interesting to read. It's very thoughtful. And I think that thank you for, you know, putting out your thought process, your design process, because we can all learn from it as an industry. And I think we all need to learn from each other what's working, what's not.

And we can all look from the outside and try and do the deconstructs to our heart's content of gameplay and what have you, but there's no substitute for getting it from the inside straight, truly direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak. So, Antti, thank you very much for writing the piece and thank you very much for coming on and talking about that piece.

Awesome. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you, Nikos. Of course. And then, as always, a big thank you to all of our listeners. We'll be back next week with more interviews, more insights, and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of gaming. So, until next time, friends, feel free to send questions, guest recommendations, and comments to me.

My email is [email protected]. See you next time.

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