Finding Genre Success: the Case of Gossip Harbor
Written by Jesper Gustavsson, Director of Product at SYBO Games and a games industry veteran with 10 years of experience in building and operating mobile games as a product manager. Opinions shared are personal and do not reflect those of the employers.
Special thanks to Ahmetcan Demirel andMishka Katkoff for feedback during the research process.
Executive Summary
If you follow the mobile gaming market, you’re probably aware of the “shark-fin” phenomenon—games that skyrocket in popularity only to plummet just as quickly. Gossip Harbor by Microfun defies this trend.. Since its release in 2022, Gossip Harbor has enjoyed remarkably stable and close to linear growth, which is especially impressive in a post ATT-world. Gossip Harbor has managed to cement a strong position in the merge-two space and the game currently reaches gross in-app purchase revenue levels above $500.000 on certain days according to Sensor Tower. The game makes use of rewarded video ads, which most likely contribute around 15-20% on top of IAP, which then puts us around a daily average of $535.000 (using July 2024 revenue as a base). This success translates to an astounding $195 million annual run rate, making Gossip Harbor a clear standout case worth studying.
Image above showcases daily IAP revenue for the game on a global basis
But before we jump into Gossip Harbor, let us take a quick look at the company behind the game: Microfun.
Company and Background
History
Microfun was founded in 2008 in Beijing, China and initially focused on social platforming applications. In 2012, Microfun transitioned into the mobile gaming industry with the release of “Super Model” (an RPG fashion game). This was followed by a collaboration with Disney on the title “Gnome Town” (a competitive adventure game). The company established a significant presence in the casual gaming market with the success of “Frozen: Free Fall” and “Jellipop Match” in 2014. In 2015, Microfun secured $44 million in investments followed by another funding round in 2017, which valued the company at 200 million USD. [Link]
In 2021, Microfun officially announced a strategic shift towards focusing on overseas markets [Link]. This strategic shift was effectively realised with the launch of Gossip Harbor in July 2022 and their title Seaside Escape was released in October 2022 which both have found tremendous success outside of China. Microfun has clearly cemented its success in the Western casual merge space, and subsequent launches showcases that Micofun is continuously refining both core gameplay and meta systems, as evidenced by the development of "Seaside Escape" and "Skyline Secrets."
In January 2024, Appannie recognized Microfun as the 16th leading Chinese game makers by overseas revenue, an improvement from their debut in the top 30 in January 2023.
The strategic focus on the overseas market has proven highly successful for Microfun, as “Gossip Harbor” currently holds the second position in the United States and globally within the merge genre as illustrated in the image below (global revenue position).
Image above showcases sub-genre position for May 19 to the 17 of June, 2024
The fact that Microfun has managed to climb to the second position in the US is incredibly impressive, given that the merge game space is highly competitive and already features a range of titles that is developed in the West. The space itself was defined by games that focused on core audiences which had a narrower total addressable market, while the later entrances have broadened the genre's appeal to a more casual audience. Prominent examples in this space include "Love & Pies," "Merge Mansion," and "Travel Town"—the genre leader, which will be used for a comparative analysis later in this study.
Image above showcases monthly revenue levels since launch of the six titles outlined above
Further, it can be argued that Gossip Harbor leaned heavily on the core design of Love & Pies (A game that is made by Trailmix which has backing from Supercell) but improved the game and systems which propelled it to the top grossing charts. In the picture below we have outlined a few of the titles that are prominent in the merge space for comparisons.
Image above showcases the merge space of the six titles outlined earlier
By mapping these games against each other, we can get a sense of their strategic market positioning. Keep in mind, the mapping below includes some subjective judgement and should thus be seen as directional (by playing the games for longer, one might come to another mapping). “Gossip Harbor” excels in framing the merge experience within a robust and well-managed live operations framework within a very casual looking game. The game and mechanics themselves skew much more casual than the core titles in this comparison, but arguably the game is also slightly more casual than Travel Town and Merge Mansion. The visual look of the game is very similar to Love and Pies in terms of art style and saturated colour scheme, making the game most likely appealing to a wider audience in this space.
Image above maps the titles against audience appeal of casual versus core and how heavy the games are operated as liveOps titles.
Gossip Harbor successfully incorporates established best practices of the genre, while also adding some incremental innovations to the space. Microfun focused heavily on crafting a compelling story (similar to Love & Pies), which also serves as a cornerstone for the user acquisition strategies (discussed later in this piece), while also developing a robust live-ops framework with events that are reskinned to ensure enough novelty to keep the players engaged.
Image above outlines the areas where Gossip Harbor is on par with the space, while improving and introducing better and new in certain areas
Microfun has created a game that stands as a best-in-class example of how a casual game can thrive with a robust seasonal and live ops oriented design. We will now go through many aspects of what the game is, but keep in mind that we will be looking at the balancing and pricing for one player account in this piece. It is important to keep in mind that the developer most likely works with a segmented approach to craft the game experience, customising the experience for different players through segmentation, targeting and AB testing, while constantly iterating the setup and balancing. Thus, while our observations in this piece may not reflect the experience of all players and it might not reflect the setup of the game today, examining one player’s game journey can hopefully still provide valuable insights. Final note, we will also leave recommendations out of this article: we are here to learn and dissect the game, not introduce suggestions of what the developer can do better (we leave that for another day). Let’s get to it.
Game Overview
Gameplay
Gossip Harbor is a merge-2 game set in a captivating narrative world where you accompany Quinn on her journey to rebuild her father’s burned-down restaurant in Brimwave Island. As you progress, you unlock more of the story and restore different parts of the restaurant, reminiscent of Playrix style games where you can choose from three different designs for each restored item. In this game there is no penalty cost of changing one's mind and choosing a different look later on, allowing you to freely explore various styles.
Image above shows how Gossip Harbor positions itself on the store
The core gameplay follows the traditional merge-2 mechanics common in the genre (if you know how to play Merge Mansion or Travel Town, then you know how to play Gossip Harbor). The player will unlock generators that produce different items when tapped, spending energy in the process. These items are then merged together to create higher-level items, which are used to complete orders. Completing orders gives the player coins, which more or less serve a single purpose in this game: advancing the story and restoring more of the hotel.
You will spend most of your time merging, while ultimately getting items that the customers are requesting
The player begins the journey with only a few item generators, limiting the available orders that can be served. As the game progresses, more generators are unlocked, producing items of varying quality that also unlock new order types that yield higher coin amount, With more generators available the player naturally will have more choices of what to focus on, and more opportunity to spend energy in their sessions (limiting energy is the key monetization angle of these games). Fulfilling orders in your session is always a good decision as it both ensures progress in the events, but orders also most of the time gives coins as stated before.
The nearly singular purpose of coins is a very clean design solution, as players don’t need to decide what they will spend the currency on. Coins are used almost solely to advance the story and restore the hotel. (Note: While a few items for improving character relationships can be purchased later in the game, these are minor and have little impact on overall gameplay).
If we examine the core game systems, we can see that the clean design feeds from spending energy, obtaining coins, completing chores, and driving player level and story forward
By consistently advancing the story by completing chores, you also earn player experience (and at times other rewards). Once enough player experience has been earned, you will increase your player level, which in turn unlocks more features and new generators. The player level is thus the system that guides the player through the game by unfolding more and more of the game. The game starts out very simple, and over time becomes relatively complex for a casual experience.
Although systems and currencies are multiple in this title, the experience is crafted in a way that all the above comes extremely natural through casual play
A particularly nice UX solution is that each time you start the game, the next narrative piece is always highlighted. If you have enough coins, this highlighted piece prompts you to invest coins, ensuring that players effortlessly advance the story and progress in the game without needing to make any real decision about spending their currency (it is a no-brainer decision to just tap on complete and complete a chore). Completing chores is thus reinforced every session and continuously reminds the player to drive the story forward which increases their player level and exposes the player to more systems in the game.
The pacing of introducing systems is relatively quick, ensuring that a player has seen multiple offers and events within their first hour of play
The game is generous with energy and provides easy orders in the beginning, making it possible to reach player level ten within just two game sessions. This quick progression allows players to already partake in the season pass event, which is the main framework for all other events. Additionally, it exposes players early to various monetization options to convert (the image above shows that the user will see three offers - season pass included - outside of the normal shop within that time frame and the first one comes already 10 minutes into gameplay).
The players will naturally spend most of their session time on the merge board as that is where all the core activities are taking place. Gossip Harbor, like other merge games, features a dedicated area at the top of that merge space that shows how merge activities contribute to progress in active events, while also keeping track of orders in the same space.
The merge space itself has access to most important systems directly (one note is that offers are not directly available through this space).
The game thus surfaces key engagement options within merge space, providing easy access and showcases the progress you are making in the events without leaving the board. When and once you have enough coins to drive the narrative forward, you will also have an icon appearing on top of the merge board. Gossip Harbor has decided to keep this part mainly engagement focused, while in their main competitor Travel Town, you as a player are also able to see a IAP promotion icon in this space.
The top section of the board tracks your event and meta progress while also showcasing the orders you can fulfil. Orders are central to the events as well but once the events are over, the orders are still there waiting to be completed.
The image above showcases a selection of what can be found on the top of the merge board.
For most of the gameplay, the player will want to focus on order completions and try to fulfil as many as possible. A neat feature is that the game has cooldowns on the appearance of new orders, so that the user can play actively in one session and end up with all the hard quests remaining, only to return to a new session later with more and easier quests available. This design ensures consistent order progression in most sessions which creates a very satisfying session experience (although some of the new orders can be low in actual value gained).
The image shows the amount of quests left in one session and the quests available on return to the next session.
As shown in the example above, a session might end with orders that require higher merge items, while the new orders in the next session are easier to complete (keep in mind, one level seven item is twice as expensive as a level six item due to the merge nature), making every session have completable goals.
Besides the normal quests, there is a quest line that is introduced early on in the game that grants decoration on the renovation space: we refer to these as “order quests” in this article.
Order quests give out decoration pieces as unique rewards in the hotel renovation space upon completion.
These order quests have their own bespoke generator that creates only items relevant for the quest line. These generators have strict item generation caps (later on, producing only four items at a time with long cooldowns), making them persistent long-term goals that exist outside of the event framework. Due to their long-term nature, these quests can at times occupy a lot of your board space (in the example above, around 15% of space is taken up by the quest items), making the storage more attractive but also puts more pressure on the player to clean up the board and complete orders to free up space. New storage space in the game is extremely costly in Gossip Harbor, but it will be attractive for high spenders to sink their money into it as it ensures that you can focus on parallel quests more effectively.
From the image, 512 items does not sound like a lot, but the drop cap and cooldown makes the completion time incredibly long.
These order quests are indeed there to provide a long term goal for the player. In the example above, you can see that for a player with that quest type active, with three collections per day from the generator, it will take 43 days to complete the quest. The rewards themselves do not match the effort required, but since you spend so little energy per session (four energy per session in the example above), you don’t mind always making little progress towards the long term goal. There is also an event that we will cover later where all the cooldowns on the generators are removed, which makes these order quests very attractive to focus on. Once the player completes one quest, a new one appears and the cycle restarts.
If we examine the generators themselves, we identify several distinct aspects that set them apart. In the image below you can see a few aspects that differentiate the generators.
The generators come with a few different characteristics to them, which are easily learned throughout play.
Let’s take a look at a few of the differences of these generators. The tree is unlocked relatively early on in the user journey which provides items without energy costs. This ensures that you always have some no-brainer merge chains in your sessions given that you can always generate them for free. Additionally, the shellfish generator has an interesting setup as the true cost of the final items are obfuscated by having a generator creating a temporary generator. The temporary generator gets destroyed after a certain number of taps, and the final items can be created. Both of these two generators add some interesting meta gameplay by using items on the last generation before cooldown/destruction to split the temporary generator into two and then re-merge them which allows for more item generation.
The beauty of the merge-two space is the exponential growth in the costs of merging items as you progress to higher levels. The true cost of higher level items are difficult to grasp while playing the game, but let’s examine what this actually means by looking at the basket generator. This calculation assumes a 100% drop chance for the sake of argument (true values are more around 90% given you can get potatoes from the generator).
The fact that you need 16.000 level one items to merge a level 15 item is really hard to grasp, which is really good for the depth of spend in this genre
The graph above showcases the escalating cost of merging items. As illustrated, you need over 16.000 first-level items to complete the final item in this merge chain. These obfuscated costs are cleverly incorporated into the game’s event layer, which we will discuss later in this article.
Now, let’s examine the rare drops in the merge chain: potatoes. As said, the basket generator creates bread items with a high probability (90% or so) and occasionally drops potato (approximately 10% of the times).
Although potatoes only have seven levels, the expected energy required becomes high given that the drop chance is so low.
The potato merge chain has significantly fewer steps overall (highest level item is at level 7 against bread that has 15 levels), creating the perception that it is easier to reach higher levels because fewer items are needed. Specifically, you need 64 items to max out a level 7 item. However, with only a 10% drop chance, you will most likely need to spend more than 600 energy in order to obtain a fully maxed item, which is equivalent to a level 10 item with full probability. This dynamic adds excitement and strategic choice to the gameplay (should you activate 2x/4x item level generation or not to have a chance for higher drop items?). On the other hand, it can be challenging for players to grasp the true value of a level 7 item from a low probability item chain (we will get back to this later on when we look at value from season pass). Nonetheless, the order requirements and items work well in tandem to provide motivation on which generator to work on.
Regarding generator boosters, at player level 15, you unlock the option of boosting certain generators (not all of them) to create higher-level starting items, while the cost doubles/quadruples when you do so.
Energy boosting unlocks at level 15 and 40, which puts less requirement on the merge activity which can become tedious over time.
As a player, this Coin Master / Monopolo Go / social casino mechanic introduces a light gambling mechanic that can be quite enjoyable, especially when fulfilling orders that require rarer items. This mechanic also increases the speed of energy consumption and reduces the number of merge moves needed in a session, which effectively makes your session time shorter and less intense in gameplay. Later on, at player level 40, you get the option of quadrupling the costs for +2 level items. This option is very helpful for less engaged yet dedicated players, allowing them to return to the game and quickly use up all the energy accumulated while offline in short burst sessions (alternative could be churn for some players who do not want to spend long sessions).
As mentioned earlier, items are used to complete orders, which primarily reward you with coins. Coins are used to uncover more of the story in the game. Advancing the narrative always grants player experience, which increases player level. Sometimes, it also allows you to renovate new parts of the hotel and provides additional rewards such as energy and item generator boxes.
The main coin sink is indeed to complete chores and drive the story forward, while renovating the hotel.
Again, the well-crafted loop of highlighting the next narrative point upon session start seamlessly guides users though the story, even if they are not particularly interested in it (skip options are available for those who do not want to read). As a player, you do not need to make any real decisions about spending your coins since it has a single main purpose, which also ensures that a lot of sessions starts with the player draining the coin wallet before starting the merge activities.
The other permanent currency in the game is a traditional hard currency: Gems (or diamonds). This currency has multi-purpose use and in general helps the player shortcut time or acquire items directly instead of through merging.
While coins have more or less just one purpose, gems have multiple purposes in the game
The implementation of hard currency is excellent and seamlessly integrated into the core loop. It allows for initially cheap energy refills that escalate throughout usage. Energy refills (and the energy chest in the store) cater to a wide funnel of players, including both free and low spenders, since they are cheap. In contrast, certain hard currency options, such as inventory expansion and skipping timers/bursting bubbles, are designed for heavy spenders or for long-term engaged players who save up gems. You will early on understand the value of having and using this currency.
The seasonal framework also supports the daily spend behaviour as you get a meaningful drip of seasonal points by spending a low amount of gems every day. Gossip Harbor has thus managed to create a game where it is very satisfying to spend hard currency, which effectively drives the need to obtain more of said currency. That said, let’s turn our eyes towards the event system that Gossip Harbor heavily operates.
LiveOps and event structure
One aspect that makes Gossip Harbor a pleasure to play and engage with is its rich and well-crafted live ops framework. As seen earlier in this piece, players unlock both seasonal and other events relatively early on in the player journey (an hour of effective gameplay or so to get into all the events). These events then become a consistent progression framework for each session, gradually advancing players through the game and through the events.
The image above shows an example of how the events start and overlays across a thirty day period.
One reason the event framework is so beautifully designed is that it seamlessly integrates with the core gameplay. The events emphasise playing the main game, using the core loop as the engine for event progression. This ensures no cannibalization of time between game modes and core gameplay and the player knows where to focus. Similar to how most match-3 games use events to get pressure into completing levels, Gossip Harbor leverages its framework to put strong temporal pressure to incentivize using energy to progress the game in their daily,multi day, and seasonal framework.
The image attempts to show how the events are layered on top of the strong core gameplay loop that merge games have.
Since these events all support the core game loop, having multiple events running simultaneously is not problematic, nor confusing or distracting, even if the events have distinctly different objectives. There is often a high degree of overlap of some objectives and most of the events work with singular tasks to complete them, putting a low amount of cognitive load on the player to decide what to focus on. The seasonal event acts as the long-term arc with focused and limited variability in objectives, allowing players to shift their focus to shorter-term events as needed. Let's start by examining the seasonal event, as it forms the long-term progression framework (we will not go through all event types in this article, but we will spend some time on the most important ones).
The events come in different forms and shapes, and during the research time of this article, we could understand that they come in a few different groupings although they at times have different skins / requirements.
Season Event
The season serves as the ultimate wrapper for the core loop and the event layer, which is an event that spans across an entire month. Each day, players can complete a set of escalating objectives, typically either completing orders or earning coins. In addition, the player will have two more quests (“use hard currency” and one quest of varying requirement) and then a final looping objective that always gives 100 season points after using 100 energy. Once the daily objectives are completed, another bonus mission is unlocked that follows the same condition as the daily objectives had before (if you were completing orders you will now have more bonus missions to complete orders). This event effectively encourages players to engage with the game regularly, adding daily pressure to achieve more and unlock additional rewards.
The season operates with a traditional battle pass system, featuring both free and paid tracks. In earlier versions, the paid option only unlocked the reward lane. However, recent updates have introduced another purchase option that gives bonuses, such as upfront season points and a 50% seasonal point bonus for completing objectives. This enhancement makes it easier for paying players to progress through the season, providing additional incentives to opt for the premium track. This addition is great for paying users who want to get a boost in their seasonal progression and the price difference is low enough for players who pay to most likely switch to this option.
Bloomin Season was one theme for the monthly seasonal events.
As the picture above highlights, there is no option to skip tiers nor pay for additional objectives. In earlier versions of the event, this made it challenging for even paying users to complete the season (we will examine this in more detail). The escalating requirements for the same objective type create a sense of being close to finishing the next objective, which in turn increases daily playtime for those invested in seasonal progression. Overall it is easy to make some progress in all days of play, while it can be hard to know how much value one is missing out if one doesn’t complete all tasks in a day.
The requirements are relatively known while playing, so you don’t have to remember how to progress in the game - just play and you will fulfil the objectives.
If we take a look at the objectives and rewards, you can see that the difference between the objectives in the picture above on “earn coins” is in the range of 150-200 coins, which is just another 2-3 orders normally, which is also the delta when the daily objectives are of the type of “complete orders” (except the last two that requires 5 more orders to fulfil for a daily total of 27). On days with order events, you can often return more frequently to the game to complete the newly spawned and easier orders, while on the days when you have coin requirement, you can use the coin bags that you might have saved (or finished the orders that you set up the day before). Thus, simple gameplay tactics are introduced by having only these two objectives in the daily play pattern.
As mentioned earlier, there is one daily quest that prompts the player to spend gems, which reinforces daily spend behaviour of hard currency. This does not feel punitive, as it is very rewarding to refill energy for 10 gems only for the first refill of the day, and now as a side effect you also get progress in the seasonal event by doing so - lovely combination.
The last stage requires as much as the first ten stages.
The event is balanced to provide easy progression upfront, but it significantly slows down as you approach the end. Completing the entire season, even with active and regular play, can be challenging because it requires consistent high activity over 21 days to fulfil every objective. Given that there was no option for paying users to catch up, this also could introduce a level of post-purchase regret which has a risk of reducing repeat spend across seasons. Thus, the fact that Gossip Harbor introduced an option to get more bonus across the season has also reduced the pressure of recurrent high level activity, which is most likely a great contribution to the paying player base.
Main reward differences appear to be generator items and high level items, both of which can be relatively hard to grasp the value of while playing.
The premium season pass in Gossip Harbor only contains regular merge items: there are no unique items at all in the season pass that are gated behind payment (e.g., unique skins or gameplay boosters). The initial tier from payment offers 150 energy, which serves as the primary value proposition. This seems quite low in value as a player can obtain that amount through two energy refills per day for a total of 30 gems (10 + 20). Examining the items included in the passes reveals that the premium pass contains more generator item drops (perceived as high in value) compared to the free track, which can be challenging for players to fully comprehend. Similarly, understanding the true value of higher-level items, which are more abundant in the premium pass, is difficult, as it's hard to mentally equate a level 10 item to 500 energy (assuming a 100% drop chance). The premium price point comes in at $5 and the low price point is most likely there to just ensure paying users are retaining and repeat purchasing (the new option with bonuses sits at $7.99, and the additional bonuses are high in value so another $3 feels justified).
The final reward in the track consists of several chests containing high-value and rare items. In a recent update they also introduced an endless reward for the second purchase option that allows for more chase once the player is done with the pass. Previously, the pass concluded without any further progress to be made, which may explain the tight balancing to complete it. However, this limitation isn't necessarily a problem, as the event framework offers shorter and more engaging events to participate in.
Long Term Decoration Event
Gossip Harbor boasts a robust event framework with various types and forms of events. One notable event type we will explore now is their order events, where additional items are tied to standard orders. Among these events is the dice event “Lucky Larks”, which is inspired from Monopoly Go / Board Master, where players earn dice by completing orders.
Really well done execution of a Monopoly Go inspired event that is appearing in other titles as well. Another great fast-follow adaptation example from Gossip Harbor.
These events require progress outside of the core gameplay, but the player just needs to tap on a button to spend the currency (dice) to obtain the rewards. Players obtain the currency needed to advance in the event either by fulfilling orders in the core loop or by purchasing dice directly (effectively allowing short cutting / catchup through spend). Advancing in the event involves moving across a board (1-6 spaces depending on the dice roll), where players encounter four types of tiles:
Chance: Players get to pull a card that gives currencies or additional dice.
Steal/minigame: Players get to choose between different cards for a chance to win a jackpot reward if you are lucky (Coin Master / Monopoly Go inspired)
Pass go: Players are given event currency
Known reward: Players are given the reward and amount that is on the tile (Event currency, energy, coins, or gems).
This event does require interactions outside of the core gameplay loop, but they are simple and intuitive, and contain no cannibalization risk of time spent against core gameplay.
The entire event is about getting event currency, which is used to buy items in the event shop. The event shop has a main reward that is a decoration piece that the player can use to customise an event area in the game. The final reward in the shop is an avatar picture that the player can use on their profile (profile and social systems in general sit very light in Gossip Harbor - as opposed to games like Monopoly Go where the social component is very strong).
Although the entire shop and reward can be seen, only the rewards in the current stage can be purchased.
To unlock the second category of items, players must purchase all items in the previous stage, which includes acquiring even less attractive rewards. This limited shop also ensures that players do not have to feel overwhelmed with too many options, as only the current stage rewards are presented at any given time.
Event currency cannot be directly purchased, but players can indirectly get event currency through spend by buying dice to roll on the board (note that the cost of dice increases throughout the day). This allows players to bypass some gameplay time and focus on progressing through the event more quickly.
The cost escalation across stages is quite extreme, which only the highly engaged players will see anyway.
As stages remain locked, players won't know the total cost to complete the entire event, which unsurprisingly increases as more items are unlocked. The cheapest item in stage one is a decoration piece, likely positioned there to encourage initial player engagement in the event. As the stages unlock, the total cost roughly doubles from the previous stage (note: some of these costs are approximated so this assumption might be incorrect), making stage 5 approximately 11 times more challenging than stage 1, and stage 7 about 26 times more demanding than stage 1. This escalating requirement ensures that highly engaged users face a significant challenge to complete the event in its entirety. They are also uniquely rewarded if they do so, as the final reward is an exclusive avatar picture that can be shown off in the somewhat weak social layer of the game. But the event is well balanced to ensure that less engaged users can still make progress and earn a few skins for the hotel, maintaining those players' participation and satisfaction.
The player could obtain 33 items in total, where the cheapest item in stage 7 equates the more or less all items in the first two stages.
While playing the game, it is hard to gauge the escalating costs as the game only shows the prices of the current section in the shop. As a player, you're always dealing with a clearly defined and limited requirement to concentrate on. Examining the cost distribution across stages, we can see that each stage contains the following amount per stage:
Stage 1: 1%
Stage 2: 2%
Stage 3: 5%
Stage 4: 9%
Stage 5: 16%
Stage 6: 29%
Stage 7: 38%
With the values above, completing stage five means you're not even halfway through the entire event, despite feeling like you've made substantial progress.
Alongside all these long-term events, there are short term progression goals through the daily and multi-day events. These come in many different forms (coined “collect events”, “energy events”, “earn coin events” above), but many of them share the same underlying goal framework of reinforcing the engagement with the core gameplay. We will now take a look at the type which we coined “earn coin event” earlier in this piece. We will first take a look at Lori’s Dough Derby (A nice touch on the story element is that players in the community like to comment when they beat this event because the event character Lori is so antagonistic).
The sawtooth wave balancing makes this event quite enjoyable to get into as the cost requirements are not constantly increasing.
The event is a single-player event with a sawtooth wave balancing that guides the player into three milestones of escalating rewards. The player collects coins in this event and once the event is completed, the player unlocks an extra challenge to layer in additional goals for the hyper engaged. The event is incredibly easy to get into given that a player can collect just one pile of gold and the first milestone is achieved already. Simple yet very engaging, while reinforcing the daily objectives as those are either gold or order completion oriented.
If we take a look at another “earn coin event”, we can look towards Ziva’s Goldrush.
These short term competition events are becoming best practice across genres
The event is a competitive challenge where players are matched against four others to reach the finish line. Progress hinges on collecting coins, and upon completion, the player unlocks the rewards and can activate a new challenge. Thus this “finite event” hides a number of event stages that unlock as the player finishes one stage. Interestingly, this has led to some meta-gameplay where players will kill the session so that they do not have to activate the event directly, and they start collecting coins before they activate the tournament to get a headstart. Achieving the top position is not daunting at all in the first challenges and it feels almost like a single-player event that happens to be set against other players. These events are very common in the casual match-3 space and are very easy for players to understand and engage with. They're simple yet compelling, reinforcing daily objectives focused on collecting gold or completing orders.
These event types, including "collect events" and "energy events," vary significantly in structure while adhering to the core goal of enhancing gameplay engagement. Worth calling out is that most of these events do not have any direct monetization angle attached to them, but monetization is done indirectly by putting time pressure on the activities (exception to this is some of the collect events where you need items to progress on a minigame - these often at times give IAP options to shortcut getting those items). This leads us into the next section of this article: the monetization approach in Gossip Harbor.
Monetization
Gossip Harbor is clearly a game that primarly focuses on in-app purchase to monetize its audience, a strategy similar to other games in the match-3 and merge genre (rewarded videos is the only ad format that exists in the game which most likely contributes 15-20% of revenue).
Early in your user journey, you will encounter various offers, as observed at the start of this analysis (the first one appears after approximately ten minutes of gameplay). These offers come in a wide variety of shapes. When you start your session of the day, you will get a sequence of popups and the offers are often prioritised below the engagement ones (example: first daily rewards, then new missions, and then offer pop ups). On the main screen, you will always find your currently active offers on your right-hand side of the main screen while the left carries all the running events (you will, however, find the season pass IAP through the season pass overview on the left hand side or through the energy popup on the top), and you also have your standard shop on the top right that also showcases one of the running offers above the standard packs.
You will have several access points on session start for finding the right opportunities to spend in the game.
Before we take a look at the bundle content, we will take a look at the standard gem packs to get a sense of the costs of the hard currency per price point.
In general, you have escalating payouts per price point for the standard gem packs.
Unsurprisingly, the payout per price point increases for the higher bundles. This is not, however, communicated that well in the shop and it is unclear that the $40 pack actually has the best gem to dollar value at 84 gems per dollar. The $2 pack shows that at the lowest price point, you get 50 gems for a dollar, and the average across all packs is 64 gems per dollar. For ease of argument, we will use the 50 gems per dollar ratio when we look at the value in the bundles.
Gossip Harbor has streamlined the way they generate and present the themed bundles, as most of them follow a similar layout with huge hero images in the middle with the content below followed by the price point on the purchase button.
The themed offers follow the same layout and strong hero image focus, which has a risk of creating “banner blindness” as one might not look at the actual content.
On the right, you can see a few examples of how these look different within and across seasons. We will take a look at two examples of themed bundles to identify how Gossip Harbor is using these bundles. The thematic hero images chosen for the offers make them visually appealing and non-intrusive for players, but there's a risk of losing clarity on the bundle's value proposition.
As can be seen, different offers use the same hero image, putting extra effort on the player to understand the value proposition.
For the first bundle, we are looking at the St. Patrick’s Treat bundles. There were more price points available than the selection above, but we can already see the structure from the following bundles.
Microfun seems to balance the price point in the bundles in general against the gem to dollar value of 50 gems equals one dollar, and then the rest of the content is seen as a bonus on top of that. When the price increases one dollar from $1.99 to $2.99, the bundle content is just incremented with the 50 gems (from 100 to 150 gems). When the price goes from $2.99 to $3.99, then the gem amount is increased with 50 (from 150 to 200 gems), but also another chest is added into the bundle, making that dollar relatively giving out more. However, this is quite hidden as a user and it is hard to know what the additional bonus is when one looks at the bundle presentation.
Let’s take a look at another one: Easter Treats.
In the above offers we have two different chest types without any clear information of what they are.
Here we can see that the $1.99 bundle is equally balanced as the St. Patrick’s Treat bundle for the same price point. What differs is that in these offers, the $3.99 bundle has two items instead of one in the St.Patrick’s Treat bundle for the same price point (what these items give is very unclear for a player as there is no additional information available - no tooltip). In this sequence, we can also see that the difference from $3.99 to $4.99 actually gives 70 more gems for that additional dollar, which is a better increment than the other we looked at, but there is no communication as well about this. What is surprising is that there is no callout on the bonus worth of these sales, because as we will see below on the user journey bundles, there is a tag with the added value. One could hypothesise that Microfun potentially is using other targeted offers for conversion / repeat spend where they use bonus value as a layer of additional value prop that is novel to the user, but it is unclear if this is true.
What is clear is that Gossip Harbor has loads of different offer types and also different presentation methods.
A few rough groupings of offers that are available in the game. Most likely, the game has way more than this, while constantly introducing new ones.
The game most likely has more types than the ones depicted above, but just for fun, let’s spend a few more words about the usage of the energy offers. The energy offers seem to appear towards the end of the events/season (most likely also catered to how far the player has progressed in said events) which is a great way for players to get a chance to catch up through spend. What is really great in these games is that the spend velocity is incredibly high (if you as a player use the 2x/4x cost increase for generating items, you also increase the velocity of burning through energy). If we assume a energy consumption of one energy used every two seconds, then we get the following time requirement to consume the energy in the packs:
A player with the 4x generator boost active can spend 780 energy in seven minutes.
We can see that even with just using the 1x generator, a player should be able to burn through all the energy from the big pack in one session if the player plays for 26 minutes (this assumes only straight focus on the core gameplay). As depicted above, when the player uses the 4x generator, that time effectively is cut into a fourth, meaning the energy can be consumed in only 7 minutes. The big pack sits at $3 so one could most likely run through three of those offers in one session of 20 minutes. Without that 4x, it would take one and a half hours of gameplay. Also to keep in mind, 780 energy might sound like a great deal, but remember that the level 7 stage of a potato requires 640 energy. So this $3 spend will give you more or less one maxed out potato. With the fact that $3 can give you a level 7 potato, you can easily understand that this game has an economy that is well catered to paying users who are willing to shed thousands of dollars to play the game, and it has some payment options for players who want to do regular low-price purchases over time.
Another nice addition to the energy packs is that the offer also adjusts prices dynamically; if a player doesn't convert on their first exposure to an energy offer, prices may be lowered the next time they appear to encourage purchase: a common tactic in many IAP-driven games.
Aside from in-app purchases, which constitute the majority of its revenue, Gossip Harbor includes a few placements for rewarded videos: the strong ones are most likely the energy related ones (refills and chest in the store) which are restricted once a player spends (the energy chest in the store becomes payment only and the energy refill caps appears to be lower than before paying). Most highly engaged non-payers will most likely make frequent daily usage of these placements, so we would assume that the ad watching rate is relatively high and the frequency of these energy placements are almost as high as the game allows.
Paying users will not get the daily energy chest post-payment, which might have been one of the most used placements prior to payment.
Worth calling out: The removal of the ad watching chest once payment has been made can feel punitive as paying users often also want to get value from playing the game and they most likely had a habit to watch that ad placement up until the payment happened. A better method is what Gossip Harbor potentially does is to cap the amount of ad refills that are done at the “buy energy”-popup as that is a more hidden way of capping for paying users.
Competitor Benchmark and Merge Portfolio
As we saw in the beginning of this piece, there are several well-performing competitors in this space: Love & Pies from Trailmix, Merge Mansion from Metacore, and Travel Town from Magmatic Games. In this comparison, we will focus on comparing Gossip Harbor to Travel Town.
Gossip Harbor and Travel Town share a lot on the game side, while the light city building expands on the available economy by having building items in the game loop as additional requirements.
Travel town and Gossip Harbor are very similar in gameplay with the big difference that Travel Town relies less on the narrative plot, but puts focus on light city building elements which includes building parts (which have their own generators). One can also argue that Travel Town is potentially skewing slightly older than Gossip Harbor in terms of audience age due to the more mature visual style. One could further argue, potentially a bit weak, that Travel Town also skews slightly more male than female (given less focus on narrative and more on city building simulation).
The games themselves have obvious differences, but one of the big differences worth calling out is how the titles are focusing their creatives in user acquisition campaigns. Scanning through a few creatives, one could quickly get a sense of how the two games are trying out what works in the market. This creative research is by no means exhaustive, but the following examples were some of the first ones to show up when researching the games.
Gossip Harbor seems to focus more on emotional story building while Travel Town leans into the game story and collaborations.
The merge mechanics themselves are used by both titles to showcase the core gameplay (most likely high CPI territory to attract the pure merge audience), but where the titles differ is in the other creatives. Gossip Harbor is leaning more heavily into emotional and controversial creatives while Travel Town leans into mysteries story telling, but also with collaborations with celebrities and influencers (as we all know: UA is about heaving testing of creatives to figure out what works, so both games most likely are experimenting with all possible themes of creatives). If we attempt to map the two developers’ strategies to a few other big game titles, it feels like Gossip Harbor is approaching the market the same way as Hero Wars / Gardenscapes / Lily’s Garden are doing, while Travel Town’s approach more resembles Royal Match / Clash of Clans / Candy Crush).
Gossip Harbor follows a strategy similar to Playrix, while Travel Town (especially under the umbrella of Moon Active), goes more towards how Dream Games operates.
To get a sense of why developers chose to try these waters, we can look at the great article “The Case of Playrix and why Product-Market fit is a moving target” by Nebojsa Radovic. The author shares the performance of different themes of creatives and how that impacts different metrics in the marketing and early game funnel. The differences in Impression per mille (IMP), cost per install (CPI), and day 7 retention is very substantial, hence developers such as Playrix have clearly found success with how to bend the space of what the creatives can become (even incorporating the minigames in the game funnel).
It is clear that Microfun is paying attention to the market, because the company has started releasing more merge games, one of which has found success already: Seaside Escape. This game is more or less a copy of Travel Town, with the addition of having mini-games early on in the user journey as well, most likely to support the UA funnel.
As can be seen, Microfun has released their own light city building merge game which also includes minigames as part of the game.
This game was released not long after Gossip Harbor, and Seaside escape has also experienced tremendous success since launch. When we combine the revenue from Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape, we can see that Microfun is actually the top grossing publisher in the merge space (Magmatic Games has Travel Town as its sole live title).
Concluding Remarks
In this long article, we've highlighted how Microfun excels at creating game experiences that resonate in Western markets, particularly with the success of Gossip Harbor. However, that's not the only area where the developer shines. Microfun is also a remarkable fast-follower, not only in swiftly developing new titles in response to successful ones but also in adopting best practices from the genre and other successful F2P titles, all while having very strong marketing capabilities. Microfun is a publisher that we as an industry definitely should keep an eye on, and we are very eager to see what they come up with next.
