Century Games into Match-3 Arena: 4X Giant to Crack the Puzzle Code?
You may know Century Games as the leader of 4X genre with Whiteout Survival ❄️ and now Kingshot, but did you know that they are actively going into casual Match3 genre?
The most difficult thing for successful companies is to diversify into different genres, where they are not that strong. If we exclude 4X, Century games is actively trying to push into casual with Match 3 being just the most common attempt. There are also games from Sort genre, Merge genre and even Farming genre 👨🌾, where Century already did $300 Mil. revenue with Family Farm Seaside and Family Farm Adventure. So why Match3? Because 4X is the biggest genre category on mobile doing $1,2 Bil. a month 😲 and Puzzle is right in the 3rd place going neck to neck with RPG making $800 Mil. a month, so its an obvious choice for them.
Looking at the 3 games that we picked, you can see a clear continuation of the template that has began even before Party Match, which was launched as Disco Match in 2022. Truck Star released in 2024 then cornered the “male” match3 segment and completely pushed out Chrome Valley Customs, currently making around $90K a day and then we have Family Farm Match, which is a continuation of their farming IP and was soft launched 3 months ago. How will this do in the current market? We got again, Laura Taranto, the Puzzle Queen 👑, to give us her take 😁.
As she notes, success in match 3 lies not only in great level design, events progression, meta progression and these other important systems that you could see on the surface. The key is the very careful balancing of attempts per success curves and level to level difficulty increase and decrease that pushes players to monetize but still keeps them balancing on the frustration tolerance sweet spot. Which Century still need to figure out. Basically dark magic 🔮 😅. Thanks again Laura for coming on the pod and sharing a lot of insights 💡. Join us as we talk about all of this with Matej 🦩 & Felix on the two & a half gamers.
