Executive Summary

Merge-2 (二合) games have become the fastest-growing sub-segment of the global casual games market. Their rise is, at its core, a structural upgrade of casual gaming from gameplay-driven to content-driven design. Unlike traditional match-3 games, which rely primarily on level design and per-session experience to drive retention, merge-2 games combine “merge + narrative + management + collection” in a fused model, expanding player demand from simple pastime to emotional experience, growth feedback and long-term companionship — significantly lengthening product life cycles.

In quantitative terms: global merge-2 IAP revenue reached approximately USD 1.4 billion in 2025, up 80% YoY, with downloads of 507 million (+9% YoY). Revenue now equals roughly one-third of the match-3 market (versus under 10% in 2023). In H1 2026, global merge-2 IAP exceeded USD 2.1 billion, with Q2 2026 topping USD 1 billion for the first time (+70% YoY).

On the competitive front, concentration is extremely high (2025 CR10 exceeded 80%), and the core of competition has shifted from gameplay innovation to industrialized R&D/operations capability. Chinese manufacturers now account for roughly 70% of global merge-2 revenue and occupied 7 of the top 10 positions in the 2025 global grossing chart. The report estimates long-term merge-2 market space of USD 7.3–11.5 billion (a 16.5%–26.1% penetration of relevant adjacent markets); under an 80% Chinese-manufacturer share assumption, this corresponds to roughly USD 5.8–9.2 billion of long-term revenue space (midpoint ~USD 7.5 billion under the neutral scenario).

The report highlights companies with mature global publishing capability, industrialized R&D/operations systems, and merge-2 product pipelines: Tencent Holdings, Century Huatong, and 37 Interactive, with IGG also cited as a relevant player in the value chain.

Main Body

1. Casual Games Enter a Structural Growth Cycle; Merge-2 Emerges as the Core Engine

1.1 Merge-2 takes over from match-3 to drive global casual growth

The casual games market has entered a phase of structural differentiation. Over the past decade, casual games have been one of the largest segments of the global mobile games market by virtue of low barriers, high reach and broad user coverage. However, the report notes that as user-acquisition costs keep rising and the life cycles of headline products keep extending, industry growth has shifted from “relying on user-scale expansion” to “relying on operational-efficiency improvement”.

According to AppMagic, the 2025 global casual games market (IAP caliber) was approximately USD 21 billion, down 0.7% YoY, entering a stock-competition stage overall.

Against this slowdown, the Puzzle sub-category showed notable structural resilience. Per AppMagic’s Casual Gaming Report 2025, among the top three casual sub-categories by 2025 revenue, only Puzzle achieved positive growth: full-year revenue exceeded USD 8.2 billion, up 7.6% YoY, with downloads up 9.9% YoY; Casino and Simulation both declined to varying degrees over the same period.

Within puzzle games, the growth engine is itself switching — traditional match-3 is entering maturity while merge-2 becomes the new-generation core gameplay. Key figures:

Metric	Value	YoY	Source
2025 global match-3 IAP revenue	~USD 4.8 billion	-0.1%	AppMagic
2025 match-3 downloads	—	-8%	AppMagic
Match-3 IAP over the past 3 years	Stably ~USD 5 billion	No growth	AppMagic
Match-3 average monthly downloads	~90 million → ~70 million	Cumulative decline >20%	AppMagic
2025 tap/2-merge market size	~USD 466 million	+0.8%	AppMagic
2025 tap/2-merge downloads	—	-32%	AppMagic

Headline match-3 products such as Royal Match, Candy Crush Saga and Gardenscapes still contribute stable revenue, but the category as a whole has entered a stock-competition stage.

By contrast, merge-2 is the fastest-growing sub-direction within puzzle games. AppMagic data shows:

2025 global merge-2 revenue of USD 1.4 billion, up 80% YoY;
Downloads of 507 million, up 9% YoY;
Revenue now equals roughly one-third of the match-3 market, a ratio that was under 10% as recently as 2023;
Headline products Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape both entered the overseas mobile-game grossing Top 200.

The report concludes: the rapid rise of merge-2 is not a short-lived dividend from a single gameplay innovation, but rather a structural upgrade of casual gaming “from rule innovation to content operations, and from traffic-driven to LTV-driven”.

1.2 Review: where does merge-2’s growth come from?

Reviewing the development history of the casual merge category, merge-2’s growth follows a stage-by-stage upward trajectory. Since the rise of the mobile internet in the 2000s, match-3 has dominated casual games; around 2010, merge gameplay sprouted; since 2021, the merge-2 rule has completed market validation and, combined with high-frequency LiveOps and mature user-acquisition systems, entered a phase of rapid expansion.

1) Inception (2010–2015): merge gameplay is born and establishes its underlying rules

Match-3 completed its migration from PC to mobile, with market scale expanding rapidly.
In 2012, Candy Crush Saga popularized match-3 globally, surpassing 500 million downloads within a year of launch, laying the market foundation for later casual gameplay.
In 2010, Triple Town pioneered the merge genre, allowing players to merge three identical adjacent elements into higher-level buildings on a 6×6 grid, establishing the design paradigm of combining “instant merge satisfaction + long-term building goals”.
In 2014, Threes! and 2048 further simplified rules and lowered the comprehension barrier.
Overall, merge products of this stage still used the three-merge rule, with a single gameplay loop and strategy-oriented design; a mature long-term operations framework for an independent category had not yet formed.

2) Formation (2015–2020): “merge + X” drives content expansion; hybrid model gets preliminary validation

Playrix launched Fishdom (2015), Gardenscapes (2016) and Homescapes (2017), the earliest series to achieve large-scale commercial success with the “match-3 + simulation” hybrid in the casual mobile market, proving that hybrid gameplay can effectively lift playability and user LTV.
In 2017, Gram Games released Merge Dragons!, the first to integrate management-and-collection into traditional three-merge gameplay by introducing resource collection, dragon-raising and camp-building peripheral systems; peak revenue in 2019 exceeded USD 180 million.
Subsequently, Ever Merge!, Magic! and Mergical respectively fused cultivation, fairy-tale narrative and island-building content, continuously enriching the content thickness and operational space of merge gameplay.

3) Expansion (2020–2022): rule innovation ushers in the merge-2 era

The match-3 market further consolidated toward the top, with overall growth slowing.
In 2020, Merge Mansion was the first to simplify the merge rule from “three-merge” to “two-merge” (merge-2) using a 2D grid, effectively lowering the cognitive threshold and operational complexity, and adopted a “merge + estate decoration + mystery narrative” hybrid; cumulative downloads exceeded 10 million within a year of launch, validating merge-2’s commercial potential.
Around the same time, Love & Pies and Travel Town quickly followed, exploring “merge-2 + narrative” and “merge-2 + town-building” directions respectively.
During the pandemic, online entertainment demand rose; merge-2 further reduced the learning cost while preserving the enjoyment of resource planning and long-term growth, rapidly expanding user coverage and pushing the merge category into high growth.

4) Maturity (2022–present): industrial competition intensifies; Chinese manufacturers lead the track

Since 2022, match-3 has been in further stock competition, with new-product breakthroughs increasingly difficult; merge-2 absorbed part of the match-3 user base and became the fastest-growing emerging category within casual games.
The report’s key observation: the biggest shift in this stage is that industry competition has shifted from gameplay innovation to a comprehensive competition in industrialized R&D/operations capability.
CNG (Gamma Data) 2025 Global Mobile Game Market Enterprise Competitiveness Report points out: in the 2025 overseas grossing Top 200 mobile games, cross-category hybrid products’ revenue share rose from 42% in 2024 to 45.1%, mainly from SLG and merge products.
In 2022, Lemon Fun (柠檬微趣 / Microfun) launched Gossip Harbor, deeply integrating short-drama-style narrative, high-density limited-time events and scaled user acquisition, pushing merge-2 into the era of continuous content operations; the product’s 2025 revenue exceeded RMB 4 billion.
In 2023, merge-2 annual revenue surpassed three-merge for the first time, becoming the mainstream direction of the merge track; Lemon Fun became the highest-revenue publisher in the merge mobile-game track on the strength of Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape.
In 2024, Century Huatong launched Tasty Travels, which fuses merge with food simulation (note: the product table and multiple body passages mark its launch as December 2023 — see the note at the end); Sensor Tower data shows cumulative global revenue has exceeded RMB 1.6 billion since launch.
Dominance is gradually shifting from Western to Chinese manufacturers.

Review conclusions (the report’s three main threads):

Rule simplification achieves user-scale expansion — Triple Town established the framework, but the three-merge mechanic was strategy-heavy; in 2020 Merge Mansion simplified “three-merge” to “two-merge” with a 2D grid, improving fragmented-play experience and achieving the first leap in user scale.
Content depth promotes business-model upgrading — in 2017 Merge Dragons! first introduced management-and-collection; Ever Merge! and Magic! then fused narrative, management and cultivation; entering the merge-2 era, Gossip Harbor and Travel Town strengthened narrative and simulation using seaside-restaurant, dessert-shop and town-building themes, giving merge games a life cycle and monetization depth approaching mid-core games.
Industrialized operations determine competitive advantage — Gossip Harbor, through weekly narrative updates, high-density limited-time events and continuous user acquisition, proved that an industrialized content-production system can continuously lift user retention and LTV.

1.3 Competitive landscape: rising concentration; Chinese manufacturers come from behind

(1) Highly concentrated market; the strong get stronger

Per AppMagic, 2025 global merge-2 CR10 exceeded 80%, with Gossip Harbor alone holding nearly 40% share — a clear gap has formed between the head and the long tail. In addition:

All top-5 products by 2025 revenue launched in 2022 or earlier;
Of the 200+ new merge-2 products launched in 2025, only 6 exceeded USD 100,000 in monthly revenue — a success rate below 3%.

Headline products, by virtue of rich accumulated content, a stable user base and mature data-optimization systems, have formed high industrialization barriers.

(2) 2025 global merge-2 headline-product market share (AppMagic, Figure 11)

Product	Publisher	2025 share
Gossip Harbor	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	39%
Travel Town	Moon Active	15%
Seaside Escape	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	13%
Merge Mansion	Metacore Games	7%
Merge Cooking	Happibits (天天玩家)	5%
Tasty Travels	Century Huatong (点点互动 / Century Games)	4%
Flambé: Merge & Cook	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	3%
Others	—	10%

(3) Three-tier competitive structure (original)

Tier 1: Lemon Fun’s Gossip Harbor. Sensor Tower data shows monthly grossing exceeded USD 100 million as of June 2026, with the single product’s revenue approaching the combined revenue of the No. 2–5 products. Launched in 2022, it deeply integrates merge-2 gameplay, short-drama narrative and high-frequency LiveOps, achieving rapid growth through sustained user acquisition.
Tier 2: Tasty Travels (Century Huatong), Travel Town (Moon Active) and Seaside Escape (Lemon Fun), with monthly grossing of USD 29 million / 18 million / 14 million respectively as of June 2026.
- Tasty Travels focuses on restaurant management, linking food themes across regions to sustain player curiosity;
- Travel Town adopts a narrative-free, pure “merge + management” differentiated route and was, at one point in 2024, the world’s highest-grossing merge mobile game by monthly revenue;
- Seaside Escape uses an actress returning to rebuild her seaside hometown as its core narrative, adopting an auto-build mode to simplify decoration; it ranked third in 2025 category revenue.
Tier 3 and below: relatively smaller gaps, including Lemon Fun’s Flambé: Merge & Cook, which ranked No. 8 in 2025 full-year category revenue, showing good growth potential.

Among established Western products, Metacore’s Merge Mansion, once the category creator, has seen its influence fade and revenue enter a decline channel; Merge Hotel Empire and Merge Prison have shown relatively flat revenue growth.

(4) Headline merge-2 product information (Figure 14, ranked by 2025 full-year revenue)

Game	Country	Developer	Theme	Launch	Description
Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story	China	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	Narrative, restaurant management	Jun 2022	A short-drama narrative about an independent woman rebuilding a restaurant drives the merge loop
Travel Town – Merge Adventure	Israel	Moon Active	Travel, town building	Jul 2020	Explore, befriend villagers and help repair the town by merging items
Seaside Escape: Merge & Story	China	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	Narrative, resort management	Sep 2022	An actress returns home to rebuild a seaside town as the main storyline
Merge Mansion: Mystery Puzzles	Finland	Metacore Games Oy	Narrative, estate decoration	Jun 2020	The merge-2 category creator; players uncover family secrets while renovating an estate
Merge Cooking	China	Happibits (天天玩家)	Food & cooking	Feb 2022	An early food-cooking merge-2, introducing a realistic ingredient-processing flow
Tasty Travels: Merge Game	China	点点互动 (Century Games)	Food & cooking, world travel	Dec 2023	Streamlines ingredient-processing steps with a fast-delivery food-themed merge-2
Flambé: Merge & Cook	China	Lemon Fun (Microfun)	Food & cooking, restaurant management	Oct 2024	Fuses restaurant management with merge-2, retaining ingredient-cooking operations
Merge Hotel Empire: Design	Israel	Moon Active	Hotel management	Mar 2022	Players help the protagonist transform a run-down estate into a luxury resort
Merge Prison: hidden puzzle	China	Blue Ultra (蓝色奥义)	Mystery puzzle	Feb 2024	Prison-break background; players merge puzzle props to advance the escape story
Fatgoose Go: Merge & Story	China	Hortor Games (疯狂游戏)	Gym management	Mar 2022	Players play the store manager, merging materials to build a gym for the goose

(5) Chinese manufacturers complete the leadership switch

The global casual games market was long dominated by Western manufacturers, especially in match-3 (with Candy Crush Saga long at the top of the revenue chart, a segment Chinese manufacturers never truly cracked). Lemon Fun’s earlier match-3 products (Jellipop Match, Munchkin Match, 梦幻蛋糕店) had relatively limited commercial performance; only a few products such as Maimai Giwen’s Project Makeover achieved periodic success.

The merge-2 track was likewise dominated by overseas products (Merge Mansion, Travel Town, Love & Pies) through 2022 and earlier. The turning path was:

In 2021, Lemon Fun’s Merge County gave preliminary validation of the category’s potential;
In 2022, Gossip Harbor ran through the “merge-2 + narrative + high-frequency operations” model to become a global hit;
After the path was validated, more Chinese manufacturers (37 Interactive, Century Huatong and others) quickly followed.

Per AppMagic, 7 of the top 10 spots in the 2025 global merge grossing chart were held by mainland China and Hong Kong manufacturers, including: Lemon Fun, 点点互动 (Century Games), Happibits (天天玩家), Blue Ultra (蓝色奥义) and Hortor Games (疯狂游戏). The report estimates Chinese manufacturers now account for ~70% of global merge-2 revenue.

(6) Chinese manufacturers’ three competitive advantages (original, expanded)

Product design — higher content density drives LTV: Western developers historically favored lean, smooth, lightweight design (e.g., Travel Town’s town-building is a simple linear unlock with no complex narrative or free decoration); Chinese manufacturers tend to stack multiple layers of playable content. Gossip Harbor, for instance, deeply binds merge-2 gameplay with narrative, restaurant decoration and album collection, and embeds operational mechanisms such as limited-time offers and event previews into the experience from the player’s very first entry.
User acquisition — ROI-oriented performance marketing:
- Western manufacturers’ “slow-cultivation” brand narrative: per Sensor Tower, 72% of Merge Mansion’s top-25 ad creatives in 2025 were cinematic brand-narrative type, emphasizing worldview and story expression with relatively less gameplay display;
- Chinese manufacturers’ high-emotional-impact creatives widen the top of the funnel: per Gamelook, ~44% of Gossip Harbor’s top-25 creatives were “shock/clickbait” or fake-gameplay traffic material, and ~24% were real-footage or real-time operations content;
- The report argues the Chinese strategy helps broadly reach and convert the core target group (female users), achieving higher conversion efficiency at the same spending level.
Operations — high-frequency LiveOps magnifies lifetime value:
- Merge Mansion averages about one major update per month, Travel Town twice per month;
- Gossip Harbor updates its story weekly on average, with average monthly events climbing from ~20 in 2023 to nearly 100 by end-2025, and up to 8–10 concurrent events;
- Event-type cycles: 24-hour limited-time events, 3-day order gameplay, 7-day card-collection events, 15-day decoration tasks, 20-day order challenges, and a 30-day season system — multiple layers nested together.

Synthesis (original): product design determines user lifetime value (LTV), the user-acquisition system determines customer acquisition cost (CAC), and LiveOps determines lifecycle length (Retention) — the three together constitute merge-2’s industrialized competitive system. Chinese manufacturers came from behind because they were earlier in building an industrialization capability centered on content production, data-driven decision-making and fine-grained operations.

2. Track Methodology

2.1 Methodology: LiveOps, numerical design and industrialized replication create the success pattern

The report distills headline products’ success paths into three directions: high-density LiveOps to extend the lifecycle, precise gameplay and numerical design to lift retention and monetization efficiency, and migration of mature-category experience to reduce R&D and publishing costs.

(1) High-density LiveOps — building a sustainable content system on a lightweight mechanic

Merge-2 has low learning and operational costs and can quickly cover the mass user base, but the underlying mechanic struggles to sustain freshness — so the deciding factor for a product’s lifecycle is the density and quality of content operations. Headline products generally build multi-layer event systems:

Daily: check-in, daily tasks — cultivating login habits;
Weekly: leaderboards, order challenges, weekly tasks — sustaining activity;
Long-term: card collection, season passes, festival events, themed decoration — providing sustained growth goals and periodic anticipation.

High-density LiveOps requires a mature industrialized team. Taking Gossip Harbor as an example, to support a weekly narrative update and nearly 100 monthly events, per NAAVIK (May 17, 2026, The Eastern Playbook for Dominating Western Audiences), its R&D/operations team is estimated at 50%–75% of Lemon Fun’s 400+ employees. High content output combined with diverse monetization broadens commercialization while raising the entry barrier — the moat of headline developers.

This content is hidden. Please pay to view it

文章版权归作者所有，未经允许请勿转载。

THE END