Merge Mayor $25M milestone🥂📈 and The Social Wonder 🦸♀️🦹♂️
We’ve had so many occasions to celebrate Merge Mayor milestones this year with the StarBerry team.
- On April 15th 2024 we celebrated Merge Mayor’s 3rd anniversary. We’ve made a lot of exciting changes to the game over the last year with by introducing advanced social features like Clubs and Wonders, which are co-op mission for clubs (more on that a bit further down). On the actual day of the anniversary, our development team hosted an ask-me-anything stream on Discord with intriguing questions from our players and community. We also invited our fellow Berlin-based game developers to celebrate with us at the StarBerry office and toast to many more years in true Merge Mayor fashion.
- In May 2024 we hit huge community milestone by garnering over 50k registered members on our Discord channel. Originally, our Discord server was for an easy way for us to connect with our most engaged players. However, now I’m proud to see our server has grown into an active and engaged community of passionate Merge Mayor players. We’ve nurtured a great safe for players of all levels to gather and exchange tips and hints for optimal play and to just connect with other players. Want to see how we’re doing it? Check it out here: https://discord.gg/5ZkedpTx
- In July 2024 Merge Mayor surpassed $25 million lifetime gross revenue milestone. This is genuinely an incredible achievement for us because we are still a relatively small development team. We’re so proud of how we’ve been able to further develop the game over the years and honoured to entertain millions of players world-wide. So far the game has been downloaded over 6 million times! Of course everyone hopes for a successful game, but seeing our hard work positively impact so many players around the world is something you can only appreciate once you’ve done it. We can’t wait for the milestones that await 💯🚀🎯
Long live Merge Mayor & The Social Wonder
Our active player base for Merge Mayor consists of many different cohorts — we’re most proud of the amount of players who have enjoyed the game for over 2 years. We’ve been able to engage long-time players because of our efforts on
- expanding content and live operations activities
- launching advanced social gameplay features.
A) Content and Live Operations
During the course of Merge Mayor’s lifetime, we’ve released updates on a 3 week cycle and progressed from the initial version 1.00 to the latest 4.14 version. With each release, we’ve expanded Merge Mayor’s scope in multiple dimensions and the game now provides years worth of entertainment.
- Players progress through completing sets of missions, restoring area by area, landmark by landmark and ultimately through districts that contain 10+ areas. The game now packs in a total 36 areas, 16 landmarks and 2 districts which amount to thousands of missions to complete. On that journey players follow developments in the life of the Mayor’s assistant Olivia and multiple characters around her. Over the years we’ve also dedicated special attention to providing more entertainment value through storytelling to create a well-rounded player experience.
- Live operations activities now span nearly every day of the month and in many cases overlap with one another. Players are entertained with varied activity mechanics and season passes with reward lanes. This year we introduced Jack’s Mine, which brings novel gameplay in the form of a mini-game activity. Seasonal and special events like Halloween, Christmas, Easter and summer have special programming with bundled activities to provide extended engagement opportunity.
B) Social: Avatars, Tournaments, Clubs and Wonders
We dedicated most of our time and energy over the last year, working on something unique to Merge Mayor. In contrast to other merge games, Merge Mayor focuses on connecting players with advanced social gameplay features. After observing a high level of player engagement and interaction in the Discord community, we decided to dedicate significant development bandwidth to design and implementation of social features.
The “Grand Vision” for social systems was drafted first and fundamental social gameplay elements were designed and grouped into deliverables. The roadmap for the social features tackled player avatars first, back in March 2023, and later the first wonder season with global club leaderboard in April 2024. In between, there were additional key features including shipping tournaments and clubs.
Avatars with custom name and costume items to wear are the foundation for player representation in the game and across social features. Wearables provide a crucial component for game economy as they serve as high value rewards for most of the in-game activities and competitions. Tournaments add a different dimension to play, as time-limited competitive events where players compete in groups of ~35 players in the game. Tournaments are an essential feature where player avatars are highlighted to other players and thus give the avatar wearables social value. On average each month we run two 5-day tournaments and two 3-day tournaments. Player engagement tends to spike high in the beginning and towards the end of the tournament. During the tournament we notice significant increase in level of activity and booster consumption especially in the top segments.
Clubs launched earlier this year and took social gameplay to a whole new level. It also nicely boosted social activity on our Discord channel with players chatting about how to team up. Clubs can have up to 20 members and thanks to in-game club chat, they can interact with one another. Already on launch day clubs started forming and filling up quickly. Now well over 60% of daily players are part of a club and more than half of those players are a member in a full club.
Wonders give a proper purpose for clubs in the game and represent the topmost social gameplay element — wonder season global club leaderboard. Clubs collaborate as a group in building wonders to their cities by contributing to individual and shared tasks. At the moment each “wonder season” runs for 90 days and during it all clubs are ranked based on progress on a global leaderboard. Wonders feature really expanded social gameplay in Merge Mayor and in addition to sustained rise in our Discord channel activity we’ve seen now clubs even setup their private discord servers. We can’t be happier about the initial results with wonders and are looking forward to find ways to innovate further how social gameplay is introduced to casual mobile games.
Going beyond… More than Games
Mobile games are evolving. We believe games can satisfy needs beyond just entertainment which is why our vision is to make more than games. In practical terms, we aim to craft something that can exist beyond the phone screen:
- Growing from a consumable experience to live services with an abundance of continuously refreshed entertainment programming for the player to enjoy and retain in the game over multiple years or even decades.
- By introducing social features and enabling communities both in and outside the game. Creating these opportunities for connection increases the significance of the game — shared fun is definitely more fun.
- Enabling chat within the game further bringing human interaction into the core game experience and unlocking unlimited potential for meaningful moments between players: enabling them to form and nurture friendships, share experiences, and build meaningful networks.
- Another example is to expand beyond the small screen and serve game related content via different forms of media (videos, streams, wikis, forums) over variety of channels (youtube, twitch, web) for the players to enjoy, which presents additional ways to stay connected with the game.
Looking into 2025
It has been a wild year — to watch Merge Mayor evolve from a predominantly single player merge game to a casual social game experience with regular and fresh live operations programming.
We owe a debt of gratitude to our amazing community and players. Being able to interact with our players directly and have an unfiltered view of community discussions (and feedback) via Discord and Reddit, has enriched our daily work in so many ways. We get to experience the ups and downs alongside the player community and quickly get a sense of how players are feeling about the improvements we make to the game. For that, we are infinitely grateful.
I can’t imagine what kind of exciting developments will happen next year with Merge Mayor and StarBerry Games — there are so many things in the works. I hope to write more about those soon!
