We consider the Merge genre to be promising and worthy of attention. However, a deeper look into the genre indicates two different subgenres of the core mechanic—Merge-2 and Merge-3—depending on how many objects the player is to merge. This research gives an overview of the genres and compares their dynamics.
Market Growth
Though both genres appeared around the same time, Merge-2 lacked high-grossing titles for several years. In turn, Merge-3 intensively grew IAP revenue until 2020; since then, its earnings have become more stable. Despite the long stagnation, Merge-2 began to constantly increase its IAP revenue in the second half of 2020, almost reaching Merge-3 levels in the last months of 2022. In December of 2022, Merge-3 resulted in $26.1M cumulative IAP revenue while Merge-2 earned almost $22.7M.
A different situation can be seen in the downloads trend, which shows a much more intense lift for Merge-2 in 2021, leaving Merge-3 far behind in 2022. Merge-2 reached around 10.7M downloads in December of 2022 compared to 2.5M for Merge-3.
Releases
Both genres show the increasing number of releases through the years with the leading total of new titles in Merge-2 in recent years. In 2022, 80 titles were released in the Merge-2 genre and 44 in the Merge-3.
Market Structure
Merge-2 shows a more even distribution of income for 2022 than Merge-3. Though its leader occupies a larger market share (54.8% for Merge Mansion compared to 42.5% for Merge Dragons!), the IAP revenues of all other titles are more smoothly allocated. Overall, TOP-3 leaders of the Merge-3 market hold 75.5% of the generated IAP revenue, while approximately the same share is taken by the TOP-4 leaders of Merge-2 (75.8%).
Conclusion
Summing this up, both genres are considered promising, but Merge-3 represents a more established market than Merge-2, as the latter is still actively growing nowadays. Merge subgenres show significant volumes of IAP revenue and downloads, increasing number of released titles, and fine IAP revenue segmentation. However, Merge-2 shows better dynamics for both IAP revenue, downloads, and releases as well as it has a smoother revenue partition making this genre more attractive at the present time.