Merge Dragons vs. Merge Magic
or why companies make reskins
Starting off with a disclaimer — I played Merge Dragons for a while, and didn’t like it at all. I thought that the game was quite ugly and the levels too easy. However, players in the first world think otherwise — they love to spend good money on this game. Merge Dragons consistently ranks among the top 20 grossing games in countries that mobile game companies care about, and that makes it special.
Merge Magic is an out-and-out reskin of Merge dragons, with everything except the art assets and text being almost exactly the same.
If Merge Dragons was doing so well, why did Zynga / Gram Games launch Merge Magic?
Why clone your own game
Developers launching clones of their existing games is not uncommon. There are two main motivations (I think) behind why a companies release a 2.0 that’s a clone / reskin of their existing game.
1. Reaching new audiences
One way to do this is to reskin a game with visually different art — and maybe slightly different mechanics or metas to match the new theme — but the underlying game remains the same. Different thematic elements might attract different users to the game.
An example of this is Rovio’s Sugar Blast, which is a non-Angry Birds reskin of Angry Birds: Dream Blast .
Another would be Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, which was basically a reskin of the game Stardom.
3. Keeping users within the developer’s ecosystem
The idea is that if players like your game, give them another game which is similar to this one. That way, if they really have to leave, they had better be playing one of your games instead of someone else’s game.
This reskin is characterized by being almost undifferentiated from the original game— the same game, but 2.0 either looks different or has some minor extra mechanic to make it different from 1.0. Examples are Candy Crush Saga vs Candy Crush Soda Saga, My Talking Tom vs My Talking Angela, Gardenscapes vs Homescapes, and yes, Merge Dragons vs Merge Magic.
A Player’s Perspective
I think undifferentiated 2.0s in the vein of Merge Magic can be explained by how highly engaged players ( *cough cough that’s me cough cough* ) of these games interact with them.
Most of the games where the “keep all users” reskins happen are characterized by mechanics that limit playtime.
- in a game like Candy Crush or Gardenscapes, lives are lost when you fail to clear a level. When you lose all your lives, you are forced to be inactive.
- in My Talking Tom / My Talking Angela, you are forced into inactivity when the cats are cleaned, fed, entertained, and have now gone to sleep.
- in Merge Dragons, lives are lost when you attempt a level. When you lose all your lives, you can’t play the campaign any more. In the camp, you put your dragons to work. When they’re tired and go off to sleep, you are forced to be inactive.
As an active player of the above games, this is what I generally do when I want to play a game but I can’t — I play something else. I was recently playing Gardenscapes, Lily’s Garden and Angry Birds: Dream Blast at the same time. I’d start with one game, run out of lives there, move on to the other.
In the F2P world, captive audience is money. The longer my session time, the higher is my interaction with the game and the higher the likelihood of monetizing — whether through ads or IAP.
Artfully impeding player progress and stopping them from progressing too fast is a necessity in games that are level based, especially those that are content heavy. (You have to ensure that players play the game slower than the rate at which you create new levels or write new stories). Faster consumption of content implies lesser revenue per level played, reducing the ROI on your content delivery process.
Conclusion
Merge Magic wasn’t launched to conquer new markets and bring in a new set of users for Gram. It is highly likely that the players of both these games are similar, and there would be a lot of engaged Merge Dragons players who’re playing Merge Magic too.
Of course, I may be wildly wrong.
