Competitive Research and Actionable Product Recommendations

CASUAL REPORT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

APRIL

2021

IMPACT DRIVER 3

Hero Mission Event Raya and the Last Dragon in Disney Magic Kingdoms Product Insights

IMPACT ANALYSIS 8

Casual Event Impacts Most Impactful Mission Events

MARKET WATCH 11

Breakout App Home Design App Comparison Notable Feature & Event Releases Notable Content Releases

APPENDIX 17

Endnotes L&G Puzzle Personas Premium Partnerships Puzzle Mechanics Taxonomy

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IMPACT DRIVERFeatures and events that boost revenue, retention, or downloads

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SIM > EVENTS > MISSIONS

Hero Mission Event Raya and the Last Dragon in Disney Magic Kingdoms

Disney Magic Kingdoms

Dai

ly D

ownl

oads

3K

6K

9K

12K

15K

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$20K

$40K

$60K

$80K

$100K

10/25/20 11/8/20 11/22/20 12/6/20 12/20/20 1/3/21 1/17/21 1/31/21 2/14/21 2/28/21 3/14/21 3/28/21

Revenue Downloads

Raya and the Last DragonHighland GamesThe Mandalorian

XDoXD = X days over X days. Graph data is iOS, U.S. only. �5

Disney Magic Kingdoms' revenue was +86% and downloads were +99% 16Do16D during the Raya and the Last Dragon event. The two previous iterations of this event, Highland Games and The Mandalorian, boosted revenue +93% 22Do22D and +141% 17Do17D, respectively.

REVENUE ANALYSIS

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Details • Players complete missions to earn currency and materials (1 and video). • Characters collected from this event and past events each unlock their own missions. • Some missions require multiple characters to complete.

• Players spend currency and materials to purchase new characters (2 and 3). • One character, Namaari, can only be bought with premium currency and is available from the start. • Four other characters become available to purchase as players progress through missions. • Some characters also have timers that must expire before they can be purchased. • Once purchased, characters grant rewards and activate their own missions.

• Players can buy buildings, chests, and a parade float that award currency and materials (4). • Buildings can be upgraded to award more materials.

• Characters and buildings purchased by players fulfill collection goals for additional rewards (5). Sub-Events • Light in the Shadows awards currency each time a challenge is completed (video). • Once completed, the challenge unlocks again in two hours. • Players can spend premium currency to skip the timer (6).

• Striking Gold ranks players based on trophies earned by visiting buildings or completing challenges. • Get off My Beach! ranks players based on the number of crabs they clear from their kingdoms.

Additional Information • See the Raya and the Last Dragon, Highland Games, and The Mandalorian libraries for more images

and videos.

FEATURE TEARDOWN

Players earn currency and materials from a variety of missions, collection goals, and sub-events. These resources allow players to buy new characters that unlock additional missions.

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Give players a reason to spend early. Getting players to invest at the start of an event increases the likelihood that they'll keep spending due to the sunk cost fallacy.1 In Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney Magic Kingdoms made missions scarcer at the beginning of the event, then drove early purchases by releasing a purchasable character that unlocks extra missions.

When designing purchasable characters, consider also adding perks that passively boost progress throughout the event to drive more early purchases. FarmVille 2: Country Escape took this approach during the Mail Match and Egg Packing Competition events—which helped grow revenue market share +52% and +34% WoW—by selling temporary characters that awarded rare resources at higher rates (1).

Design collection items with aesthetic appeal and meaningful functionality. In Disney Magic Kingdoms, players must use characters collected from current and past events to access missions. By giving players something to do with their characters, Disney Magic Kingdoms also gives players a reason to revisit their collections. This makes characters more meaningful by helping players form memories with them over time.2

Functional cosmetic items drive revenue in other apps as well. The FarmVille 2 events mentioned above also award permanent character skins with small but useful boosts. Characters released during Disney Emoji Blitz's Villain Events have special abilities and unlock certain levels, contributing to an average +54% 5Do5D revenue boost across three events. In Bingo Bash's Fish n' Chips collection feature, players collect fish that grant a variety of bonuses when fed (2).

Character-specific features and events like Raya and the Last Dragon are a growing trend across genres, but they are especially prominent in RPGs. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes' Clash on Kamino event (+40% revenue 2Wo2W) lets players try out a new hero before unlocking it; AFK Arena's Hero Growth Bundles (+20% 2Mo2M) unlock rewards and purchase offers as players level new heroes; and Summoners War's New Monster Update Special Event (+86% 25Do25D) includes challenges that both unlock new heroes and use those new heroes once they've been unlocked.

For more analysis of mission events, check out our Missions Guide.

PRODUCT INSIGHTS

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IMPACT ANALYSISInvestment and revenue trends for feature and event releases

Tracked puzzle apps: Angry Birds 2, Best Fiends, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, Candy Crush Jelly Saga, Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, Cookie Jam, Disney Emoji Blitz, Farm Heroes Saga, Fishdom, Gardenscapes, Gummy Drop!, Home Design Makeover, Homescapes, June's Journey, Lily's Garden, Lost Island: Blast Adventure, Matchington Mansion, Panda Pop!, Pet Rescue Saga, Solitaire Grand Harvest, Solitaire TriPeaks, Toon Blast, Toy Blast, and Wizard of Oz Magic Match

Tracked simulation apps: Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Cooking Fever, Cooking Madness-Kitchen Frenzy, Diner DASH Adventures, Disney Magic Kingdoms, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, Hay Day, Klondike Adventures, SimCity BuildIt, The Sims Mobile, and Township

Tracked lifestyle apps: Chapters: Interactive Stories, Choices: Stories You Play, Covet Fashion, Episode - Choose Your Story, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen, and My Story: Choose Your Own Path

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COLLECTIONS AND MISSIONS LEAD POPULAR EVENT RELEASES

Collections and missions outperform other frequently released casual event types like custom design and purchases. Mission events perform especially well in sim apps, averaging +29% revenue market share WoW in sims compared to +3.5% in the casual market as a whole (sim impact not shown).3

Impact models are made by Liquid & Grit by combining our data with revenue data from Sensor Tower. Only event types with 20 or more standalone releases are shown. WoW = Week over week.

Revenue Market Share WoW (Past 12 Months)

Competitions

Collections

Missions

Quests

Challenges

Clubs

Levels

Custom Design

Purchases

Rewards

Accelerators

-4% 0% 4% 8% 12%

Event Releases (Past 12 Months)

Competitions

Collections

Missions

Quests

Challenges

Clubs

Levels

Custom Design

Purchases

Rewards

Accelerators

0 50 100 150 200

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SIM APPS DOMINATE TOP MISSION EVENTS

Sim apps accounted for 16 of the top 25 mission events released in the past year. The two previous iterations of the Raya and the Last Dragon event—Highland Games and The Mandalorian—were particularly impactful. We don't yet have market share data for Raya and the Last Dragon.3

Top 10 Most Impactful Mission Event Releases (Past 12 Months)

App Event Release Date Revenue Market Share (WoW)

Disney Magic Kingdoms Highland Games 12/17/20 +263%

Disney Magic Kingdoms Lunch on the Loose! 10/8/20 +183%

Disney Magic Kingdoms The Mandalorian 11/12/20 +130%

Disney Magic Kingdoms MandoMondays Out of This World Sweepstakes 11/9/20 +121%

Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen Deepsea Secret 11/14/20 +88%

Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen Garden of Spiral Staircase 3/9/20 +67%

Farm Heroes Saga Rancid's Challenges 6/30/20 +62%

Hay Day River Boat Puzzle Piece Bonus 1/29/21 +60%

Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen Time Limited Quest from Momo 10/8/20 +59%

Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen Moonlit Playground 10/6/20 +58%

MARKET WATCH

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New apps and notable releases from established competitors

Merge Mansion by Metacore Games Oy App Details • Players spend energy to merge items in a grid interface (1). • Almost all items can be merged, including XP, currency, energy, and accelerators. • Energy is awarded every two minutes or collected from chests and merged energy items. • All items can be sold for primary currency.

• Merged items award XP and allow players to complete renovation tasks in a mansion (2). • Completed tasks advance a storyline and award items, XP, currency, and energy. • XP levels award chests and unlock new design areas (3).

• Certain items produce other items at regular intervals. • Players can spend premium currency to skip cooldowns.

• A shop allows players to exchange primary and premium currency for a rotating stock of items (4). Launch Information • Released worldwide on 9/16/20 • Average daily U.S. revenue (90 days): $26,872 • Average daily U.S. downloads (90 days): 4,952 • View Merge Mansion on the App Store

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BREAKOUT APP

Liquid & Grit's Take

Merge Mansion offers a novel combination of merge-3 and renovation mechanics. Both are proven winners in puzzle, but the decision to go with renovation over custom design may present some long-term limitations.

The personalization offered by custom design creates a more robust foundation for compelling rewards, which facilitates future innovations in base gameplay, events, and features—which is likely why many new apps are opting for custom design mechanics.

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HOME DESIGN APP COMPARISON

Features4 Design Home: House Renovation Redecor - Home Design Makeover Home Design Makeover

Bonuses Daily gift and rewarded ads Daily gift Rewarded ads

Challenges Designer goals and challenges (events) Tasks and challenges (events) DIY Furniture Restoration and To Do List

Collections Owned Furniture My Collections None

Competitions Design challenges Design challenges Leagues

Currencies Cash, diamonds, home points, and keys5 Tokens, gold, and cash5 Energy, diamonds, coins, and event tickets

Custom Design Furniture and decor Furniture and decor Upgradeable furniture and custom furniture

Expansions My Homes and challenge (expansion events) Challenge (expansion events) Career

Hazards Challenge requirements Challenge requirements Match-3 elements

Interactions Friends6 and design voting Friends and design voting Team chat (clubs)

Leaderboards Friends, overall, and seasonal Wins, five stars, and friends Teams (clubs)

Profiles Yes Yes No

Purchases Content bundles Daily Deals, season pass, and content bundles

Bundles and Daily Gem Pack

Rewards Vote to earn and complete offers (Tapjoy) Vote to earn and redeem code None

Release Date 11/15/16 4/10/20 1/31/18

Avg. Daily U.S. Rev. $131,245 (past 90 days) $75,737 (past 90 days) $32,217 (past 90 days)

Avg. Daily U.S. DLs 7,227 (past 90 days) 13,438 (past 90 days) 1,114 (past 90 days)

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App Release Description

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Super Mario 35th Anniversary

collection event

• In this crossover event, players earn items from the Super Mario franchise through a login bonus or by crafting (1).

• An in-app photo feature includes Super Mario-themed hero poses (video).

Best FiendsMiguel's Mansion challenge event

• Players earn bracelets by matching pieces that have bracelet icons, spinning the Fiend of Fortune prize wheel, and opening crates.

• Bracelets are used to renovate sections of a house (2). • Renovated sections grant rewards and fill a meter for more rewards at milestones (video). • Completing the meter unlocks early access to a new fiend.

Diner DASH Adventures

Secret Menu mission event

• Completed levels award magnifying glasses (video). • Magnifying glasses fill a meter that advances players to the next reward tier when full (3). • A $6.99 season pass unlocks a second set of rewards for each tier. • The season pass also increases capacity for attempts in a competition feature, supplies, and

energy.

GardenscapesBoat Race

competition event

• Five players who are at the same level in the base game race to reach a target level. • Players' progress is represented as a boat race (4). • The first three players to cross the finish line earn rewards.

NOTABLE FEATURE & EVENT RELEASES I

SIM

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SIM

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App Release Description

June's JourneyLoyalty Cards

purchase event

• Each purchase adds one stamp to a loyalty card (1 and video). • Earning four stamps completes the card for a diamond prize. • The number of diamonds is based on the amount of money spent to complete the card.

• Players can complete up to two cards during the event. • Cards disappear at the end of the event.

Klondike Adventures

Let's Build a Statue

challenge event

• Players place a statue in their home base (video). • Players collect resources from the game map to buy statue upgrades (2). • At the end of the event, the statue turns into rewards based on the number of upgrades.

Lily’s GardenHelp Your Family

club feature

• Players can request help from club members to complete a level (3). • Club members have a collective limit of five attempts to beat the level. • Players who complete a teammates' levels receive coins and unlimited life boosts (video).

SimCity BuildIt

Design Challenges competition

feature

• Players compete to build the best city based on a theme within a limited time. • Cities must meet certain requirements before they can enter the competition (video). • Once eligible, players take an in-game photo of their city to submit it. • Players vote for their favorite cities in up to three voting rounds every eight hours (4). • During each round, players choose between cities in a series of five pairs. • Completing a round awards a prize.

• Players earn blueprints for submitting their city, completing optional challenges, and based on their city's rank.

• Blueprints fill a meter for rewards at milestones.

Quickly review all features and events

Filter the Library Tool by month and year to see all new releases.

NOTABLE FEATURE & EVENT RELEASES II

SIM

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SIM

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App Release Description

Disney Emoji Blitz

Money Bags other

• Prince John's meter fills over time. • When the meter is full, a money bag appears on the board (1). • Money bags must be cleared by boosts. • Cleared money bags award coins (video).

GardenscapesWell

hazard

• Wells raise a bucket with each adjacent match or boost. • The bucket lowers following any move that doesn't result in an adjacent match. • Three adjacent matches or boosts clear the bucket (2).

HomescapesBlanket hazard

• A blanket with stitches around the edge covers part of the board (3). • Adjacent matches or boosts clear stitches. • Removing all stitches clears the blanket.

NOTABLE CONTENT RELEASES

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APPENDIX

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ENDNOTES1 Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Effect of Sunk Costs on the Decision to Escalate Commitment to an Ongoing Project

The sunk cost fallacy not only makes people less likely to abandon a project they've already invested in but also makes them more likely to keep investing and to think the project will succeed. 2 Materialising Digital Collecting: An Extended View of Digital Materiality

Scholars suggest that real-world collectible items have meaning because of the associations with people and places that they accumulate over time. The author of this study proposes a number of ways for adding these unique histories to digital goods, including surfacing meta-data unique to each player. Simply having a player return to interact with collectible objects is equally helpful for building memories and therefore meaning into digital collections. 3 Data compares tracked apps across the casual market (puzzle, simulation, and lifestyle apps) for the period of 2/9/20–2/8/21. This comparison uses only standalone releases—i.e., releases that did not overlap with other event or feature releases on the same day—to provide the most accurate assessment of each event or feature type's impact.

Market share impact is the average percentage change in an app's revenue market share for a given time period following a new release. This analysis helps isolate the impact of individual releases from external forces that affect large segments of the market at once, like holidays or COVID social distancing measures. 4 Some feature types have been trimmed to save space. None of these apps include level, mini-game, or quest features. Only Home Design Makeover includes accelerator, bank, and club features. Only Redecor - Home Design Makeover includes mission and notice features. 5 Keys in Design Home: House Renovation and tokens in Redecor - Home Design Makeover both function as energy that players spend to complete tasks. Players must vote on each other's designs to earn them. 6 Design Home: House Renovation lets players "borrow" furniture and decoration items from friends, a feature also seen in Houzz, another successful home design app.

Table: Player personas by demographics, monetization, engagement, and motivational buckets

Gamer Gary Escapist Emily Trainer Tracy Challenger Chris Casual Carol

Demographics

Size (N) 24% 15% 22% 18% 21%

Female (%) 53% 68% 73% 59% 66%

Age (mean) 35 36 42 40 34

Monetization

Propensity to spend across all platforms 15.0 7.0 4.8 7.0 4.3

Propensity to spend on F2P games 1.8 1.1 0.7 0.6 0.7

Engagement

Weekly play hours 6.6 7.4 7.6 7.8 6.7

Puzzle motivation 3.1 2.9 2.6 2.7 2.4

Motivational Buckets

Engrossment 0.7 -0.3 -0.2 -0.2 -0.2

Escape 0.0 0.6 -0.3 -0.1 -0.1

Utility -0.2 -0.3 0.7 0.0 -0.3

Challenge -0.2 -0.1 0.1 0.7 -0.3

Boredom -0.3 0.0 -0.2 -0.3 0.9

Survey data from 1,513 puzzle players produced five personas with distinct motivations: Gamer Gary, Escapist Emily, Trainer Tracy, Challenger Chris, and Casual Carol.

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L&G PUZZLE PERSONAS

Liquid & Grit partners with these premier market research and analytics companies to infuse our reports with the most relevant and detailed gaming user personas, data, and statistics available.

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PREMIUM PARTNERSHIPS

Quadrant Strategies Kinrate Analytics Sensor Tower

Market Research Quadrant Strategies

Player Personas Kinrate Analytics

Mobile App Store Intelligence Sensor Tower

Quadrant Strategies is a market research consultancy that uses research to help the world's most prominent technology, gaming, and entertainment companies develop strategies for building their user base, increasing user engagement and spend, and strengthening their marketing and brand plans.

We do that using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including gamer segmentation and persona development, feature testing, message creation, and loyalty and engagement modeling. The work of our senior leadership goes back many years, and includes long-term engagements for console and gaming-PC hardware-makers, individual games in a range of genres, and across consoles, PCs, and mobile, and for some of the top game franchises.

Kinrate Analytics offers game developers, consultants, publishers, and cloud gaming operators the best cross-platform game recommendation engine for targeted marketing, as well as a novel profiling-as-a-service solution for intelligent market segmentation and social networking.

Other services include advanced market prediction analyses for identifying emergent gaming trends and access to unique AI-enhanced data of 140 thousand game titles and 48 million game players.

The products of Kinrate Analytics have been developed in university-led research projects in collaboration with economists, psychologists, game scholars, and data scientists.

Sensor Tower is relied upon by financial analysts, VCs, and publishers who need to leverage data to identify the fastest-growing apps, emerging markets, and more.

Clients harness Sensor Tower's suite of app intelligence tools to:

‣ Evaluate app economies and app vitality. ‣ Drive organic growth with the leading App Store

Optimization platform. ‣ Get the best global download and revenue

estimates for the App Store and Google Play. ‣ Discover top creatives and better shape user

acquisition strategy.

Family Definition

Accelerators Increases in the power, impact, or efficiency of play

Banks Features that save a % of spend to be unlocked later

Bonuses Free bonuses given to players (e.g., retention or W2E)

Challenges Goal-oriented tasks for players to complete

Clubs Groups that accomplish goals or compete with other groups

Collections Sets of items that players collect (often for a completion prize)

Competitions Features where players compete against other players

Cosmetics Improvements or updates to the app or features

Currencies Changes to currencies, economies, stores, and items

Custom Design Options for cosmetic customization

Expansions Additional rooms, worlds, play modes, VIP lounges, etc.

Flows Specific flows, like the NUX, ratings, and surveys

Family Definition

Hazards Level elements/blockers that increase difficulty

Interactions Social features with direct or indirect interaction

Leaderboards Stand-alone leaderboards

Levels Anything to do with leveling

Mini-Games Smaller, shorter games within games (e.g., scratch cards)

Missions Linear sets of tasks that players must accomplish

Notices Feature or product announcements

Other Miscellaneous features and outliers

Profiles Features related to a player's settings, profile, and controls

Purchases Anything to do with purchases

Quests Tasks that advance players along a map-like feature

Rewards Rewards players receive for engagement or spend

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PUZZLE MECHANICS TAXONOMY

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