Makeover Event with Multiple Endings

Starting this month, we’re publishing our reports directly on our website in two pages: a Headline Release and a Market Watch. The Headline Release analyzes a new feature or event with especially impactful mechanics, while the Market Watch tears down other noteworthy feature, event, and app releases. Our goal is to make our reports nicer to read and make our Market Watch content more searchable.

Headline Release

Lily’s Garden’s Makeover Time continues the successful trend of makeover events in the casual market but adds an innovative narrative that changes based on players’ progress. 

In 2021, makeover mechanics gained popularity with custom design-focused apps like Project Makeover. In 2022, Playrix’s Homescapes, Township, and Gardenscapes all released events with gameplay similar to Project Makeover, which led to significant revenue impacts. Makeover Time closely resembles these events with a comparable UI, three design choices per makeover item, event tokens, and a dialogue-driven narrative.

While other makeover events require players to complete the full event to see the story’s ending, Makeover Time takes the unique step of allowing all players to access a version of the ending and offering different endings based on how far players progress in the event. This gives players a reason to keep engaging even if they aren’t on track to complete all the event’s tasks. 

Release Trends

Custom design events are most common in the puzzle & decorate subgenre, which includes Lily’s Garden. However, Lily’s Garden has released relatively few custom design events, and those events have shorter runtimes compared to custom design events in other puzzle & decorate apps such as Gardenscapes, Matchington Mansion, Project Makeover, and Homescapes. 

Read our full analysis of Makeover Time in this month’s Headline Release.

Market Watch

Soft-Launch and Breakout Apps

Happy Hospital: ASMR Doctor closely resembles Crazy Hospital: ASMR Doctor, a hospital time management sim that we covered in our January ‘23 Casual Report. These apps share similar core mechanics, upgrade systems, and design elements, but Happy Hospital has improved visuals and a secondary progression focused on individual patients. Due to these apps’ similarities and the identical terms of service on their developers’ websites, we believe that they may share a common parent company. Both apps generated comparable revenue last month.

Royal Kingdom builds on the match-3 and lite custom design gameplay of Royal Match by introducing PvP mechanics inspired by Coin Master. In Royal Kingdom, players encounter levels in which making matches destroys other players’ defenses and castles. This PvP feature includes a revenge system, defensive shields, and increasingly challenging defensive formations and mechanics.

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

Feature and Event Releases

In Candy Crush Soda Saga’s Shipmates, two players compete in a Battleship-style mini-game in which each of the player’s ships represents one of their friends. Whenever a player’s friend completes a base game level, that player earns one attempt to attack their opponent’s ships.

In EverMerge’s Storylands, players perform merges in event levels to unlock story content for fairytale characters. Completing merge chains awards items that players activate in the base game to earn boosts.

In Seekers Notes’ Mentorship Program, mentor players offer guidance to mentees while the mentee completes tasks. Both players earn rewards when the mentee finishes tasks.

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

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