High Win Streak Multipliers Boost Revenue 13%

Read this month’s Headline Release and Market Watch

Competition with Huge Win Streak Multipliers

Toon Blast’s Shield Clash competition offers one of the highest multipliers we’ve ever seen for maintaining a win streak (10x after five consecutive wins). By making win streaks more valuable, Shield Clash pushes players to buy and use boosts to maintain their streaks or quickly rebuild a streak after a loss.

As a result, the event generated a strong revenue impact of 13% 25Do25D. This is especially impressive for an app in the puzzle genre, which has the weakest median and average revenue impact from competition events of any genre in the casual market.

Apps that design similar competitions should experiment with higher multipliers, longer streak requirements, or both. The best balance will maximize players’ desire to maintain their streaks without demotivating players who lose.

Release Trends

Competition events perform quite well in the casual market overall. However, they also have the highest standard deviation of any event type, indicating a wide range of impacts. 

This high variation of impacts is largely driven by the puzzle genre, which not only has the worst-performing competition events but also releases significantly more competitions compared to any other casual genre. The poor performance of competitions in the puzzle genre makes Shield Clash’s success even more noteworthy.

Read our full analysis of Shield Clash in this month’s Headline Release.

Revenue for event types is calculated using Liquid & Grit’s Lift Tool. For more information on the Lift Tool, email Brett Nowak.

Market Watch

Breakout Apps

Decor Match, from the creators of Cooking Madness-Kitchen Frenzy, combines match-3 gameplay with realistic home design mechanics reminiscent of Redecor. Compared to other realistic decoration apps, Decor Match puts a greater emphasis on match-3 and offers more colorful designs, which may have helped it climb into the top 50 grossing puzzle apps in the past month. 

Pokémon Sleep is a gamified sleep-tracking app that rewards players based on the quality of their sleep. The app shares many of the same features as Pokémon Go, including collecting and upgrading Pokémon, a shop that offers boosts, and compatibility with the Pokémon Go Plus + physical companion device. Pokémon Sleep has hovered in the 100 top-grossing sim apps since its launch in July.

Read our complete teardowns of these apps in this month’s Market Watch.

Innovative Feature and Event Releases

In Angry Birds Dream Blast’s Kite Festival, players beat consecutive levels to fill a bank with tokens. Players can collect tokens from the bank at any time to increase their score on a leaderboard. Collecting tokens or losing a level resets players’ banks and win streaks.

In Matchington Mansion’s Edna’s Poem, players beat levels on their first attempt to earn letters, which they use to fill in missing letters in words. Completed words are added to themed pages in a collection. Earning letters, filling in words, and completing pages grants rewards.

In Project Makeover’s Photo Studio, progressing in the base game unlocks backgrounds for the app’s player profile feature. Players can swap between unlocked backgrounds and a customizable room to display on their profile page.

Read our full teardowns of all notable releases in this month’s Market Watch.