In Part 1 I dished out some theories about retention in these two games. I shall now take a look at how these games monetize. Additionally, one cannot talk about these games without mentioning how much of a viral sensation their advertising has become! So we shall take a look at that as well.
Monetization
Almost all casual puzzle games with a repair meta run on this loop:
Playing levels involves the usual life mechanic — you lose a life every time you fail, as opposed to an energy mechanic where you lose energy every time you play. Successfully completing a level gives you the following:
- a currency you can use for repairing things (typically a star)
- a general purpose currency (typically coins)
Only coins are monetized in the game — so if you want to progress faster by repairing more of the garden, you cannot buy stars to do it. You will have to pay coins to get more lives (or wait), and use those lives to actually complete a level.
Given the lack of anything else, the drive to play more and complete more levels is the only thing being monetized in both games. Of course there are boosters, but boosters too are an add-on to playing more — they help you complete more levels.
That said, there are exactly three points at which the player is urged to monetize:
1. avoid loss at the current level: at the end of a game, where the player has run out of moves but hasn’t managed to finish the level
2. avoid loss at the upcoming level: the at the beginning of a game, where the player is urged to get a booster rocket or bomb to increase their chances of completing the level
3. continue playing: when the player has zero lives left, convince the player to get more lives to play more
You get the drift — all the monetization in these games directly or indirectly is geared towards either getting more lives or to avoid losing more lives. Both games are consistent in having their events and engagement features drive the same thing — play and win as many games as possible.
Having such simplistic motivation works because the gameplay meta is so linear — both the story and repair sequence are predefined. Allowing players to directly purchase (say) buildings won’t work because there are only 1 to 3 buildings to repair at any given time, unlike Fishdom which has an entire store.
These games can technically ask players to pay for auto completing a task, but that would launch them into pay-to-win infamy. It would also interfere with the behavioural motivators they have going for monetization: loss aversion and negative framing (“if you don’t spend coins now you will lose!”).
This can be represented by how many dimensions there are to progression. Read this blog for more. Since the repairing of buildings has no impact on the future likeliness of clearing levels, the meta is just a fun thing to do on the side and not absolutely vital for progression, which is why it isn’t monetized. Compare this with, say, Clash Royale — where you have to engage with the meta game of upgrading your cards in order to progress further.
Points of sale
Lily’s garden has been fairly run-of-the-mill when it comes to monetization features and currency sale points. Apart from the store and the occassional sale, not much exists as far as point of sale goes. However, judging by how well they’re doing on revenue, this does not seem to be a shortcoming.
Gardenscapes, on the other hand, has been far more adventurous when it comes to fancy monetization features. A Piggy Bank feature (common in casino games) exists, but their most adventurous attempt thus far has been the Gardenscapes version of the Battle Pass, called the “Golden Ticket”.
The season had 30 reward stages to open, and each stage needed 30 tickets to unlock the reward. Tickets were earned by passing levels — with bonus tickets awarded if you cleared the level on attempt #1 and #2.
Playrix experimented with this in December 2019, and while there were a lot of players who did complete the entire season and got the cat profile picture and everything, I personally found it very hard to complete:
- total tickets needed = 30*30 = 900
- in the best case scenario (every level cleared on the first attempt), you would need to clear 900/3 = 300 levels in 30 days, which is kinda doable.
- in the worst case scenario, you would need to clear 900 levels in 30 days, or clear 30 levels per day.
30 levels per day for 30 days in a row is a little too much for an engaged player who isn’t that engaged, and does not want to make more IAPs just to make use of a previous purchase! I am certain that the season completion rates on Gardenscapes are much lower than the completion rates on Clash Royale, and my prediction is that any new Golden Ticket season (if any) will have a rebalancing.
User Acquisition
Any mention of these two games cannot not mention their claim to fame (or infamy) on the interwebs : their ads.
Gardenscapes’ and Homescapes’ numerous out-of-context ads have spawned their own hate subreddit (r/F*ckHomescapes), and Lily’s fake pregnancy test video have prompted various reaction videos on youtube.
Some peeved targets of said advertising even try to vent on Playrix’s Play Store reviews, although whether they are genuine victims of hoodwinking or merely people annoyed by the ads is questionable:
All match-3 ads were pretty run-of-the-mill as far as mobile game ads went. Clips of gameplay with some text of how amazing the game is and stuff. Why then did these games have to go so far out to the left field? Two reasons:
- The rise of Matchington Mansion
- The rise of hypercasual games and their associated UA techniques
Advertising backstory, as I imagine it.
Matchington Mansion came out as identical to Homescapes , with some extra social features added. Homescapes initially got a lot of installs riding on cross promotion and retargeting of Gardenscapes and Fishdom players (I presume, because I kept seeing a cross promo popup in Gardenscapes and ads on my facebook feed).
Matchington needed to catch up on installs, and they innovated by copying the ads of another category of games whose ads were getting a lot of traction and high IPMs — hypercasual games. The ads are formatted like a meme, contain some salacious text like “If you clear level 50 you have high IQ” and the likes.
In Hypercasual games, this text is accompanied by a video clip of the core action in the game, which is typically unique and somewhat outlandish:
These game premises get installs, because they’re so different, and therefore succeed brilliantly in a key KPI of all ads — they grab your attention. A match-3 game isn’t different, hence showing gameplay snippets elicit nothing more than a yawn. Matchington got around this by showing attention-grabbing videos that had nothing to do with the game at all:
This worked, it got Matchington a lot of installs — I assume without significant impact on retention and monetization, because they continued to do it. And because it worked, Homescapes made such ads too. And since the ads worked for Homescapes, Playrix made those ads for Gardenscapes as well, and a subreddit was born.
As I said in Part 1, the casual puzzle genre is crowded and games must differentiate on theme. A new game cannot be just another match-3 game, and that is true for its ads as well.
Lily’s Garden, on the other hand, has not gotten as much flak as Gardenscapes for its ads, even if the fake pregnancy tests and *ahem* alternative use of washing machines has nothing to do with the story in the game.
Differentiating on ads this extremely unique way worked extremely well for Lily’s Garden. Outrageous as they are, the topics resonate very well with the target demographic — mid 30s women. They do what they were designed to do, grab eyeballs of potential players.
In summary, both Gardenscapes and Lily’s Garden had to innovate on advertising techniques in a very crowded and competitive games segment, and both did them in ways that are unique and creative.
What’s next?
Where do these games go from here?
Both games have a sizeable base of engaged elder players, who (in all probability) generate most of their revenue. I foresee both games adding more features to cater to them.
Gardenscapes launched a rudimentary guild system in 2019, and shall probably build on that, as well as add more social features. And continue to churn out more levels, of course.
Lily’s Garden has a lot of scope in terms of game features it is yet to integrate — events with parallel levels, guilds, limited time events with event-specific currency — all not there and all good to have. Most of all, they shall probably focus on the speed at which they churn out new stories and levels, given that story is the main selling point as well as a major complaint:
It will be fun to see where this genre goes next!
