Reclaiming Merge Mansion's #1 Spot

Merge Mansion had spent 3.5 years as the undisputed #1 grossing title in its genre. This was not a broken game — it was a mature, heavily A/B tested product with years of optimization behind every mechanic. When three competitors out-innovated on LiveOps in 2023, it slipped to 4th place and monthly revenue fell from an all-time high of $11.4M to roughly $9M by February 2024. Moving the needle on a product this optimized is a fundamentally different problem than fixing a broken one. There are no easy wins left.

As Senior PM owning monetization and LiveOps from August 2024, I identified a friction pattern in the game's most advanced players. High spenders who had progressed deep into the game were running out of time before running out of intent — they would leave a session with energy still unspent, not because they didn't want to play, but because tapping through each energy action individually took time they didn't have. Compounding that, late-game tasks demanded high-level items, which meant spawning and merging one piece at a time to hit the required tier. The game had no mechanic that let these players act at speed.

Metacore's response was a coordinated push across the LiveOps calendar and monetization. Event frequency nearly quadrupled over 2024 — from 8 events per month in January to over 20 by year end. New event types were introduced to address the player motivations competitors had been exploiting: leaderboard meta events, album collection, weekly passes, and character-progression boards. My contribution within that broader program was the Supercharge and Hypercharge mechanic — a dynamic energy multiplier that let players generate higher-level items by spending double (or quadruple) the energy. Rather than launching as a permanent feature, we ran it as a limited-time event and stress-tested the economy with A/B multiplier tiers up to 16x to find the ceiling that lifted spend without disrupting balance. Once the data held, we made it permanent.

By December 2024, Merge Mansion hit an all-time revenue record of ~$12M — a 50% recovery from its February low, per independent analysis by AppMagic. The mechanic drove a 10% increase in daily energy sink and a 5% lift in ARPDAU.