Back to Insights

Spinner Merge Success Story: Catching Up on the Way to Two Million Downloads

First pitched to YoBro Studios in February 2022, Spinner Merge was soft-launched in November. Just a couple of weeks later, this addictive game about battle spinners covered in blades has hit a million downloads across platforms. Want to know what we did to reach this game’s first major milestone? Join us on a journey through the biggest events in the development of Spinner Merge.

Before the idea was even born, we at Sunday were determined to take the market approach for a higher marketability potential of the future hyper-casual game. We analyzed the market and noticed that titles with the merge mechanic show a stable and generally high engagement rate. That’s where the first inspiration came from: there’s a market and a demand for a novel merge game, and we were going to reserve a spot there! Without even realizing it, we’ve developed Spinner Merge within the proven-better-new framework. The mechanic has already been a proven success and we’ve improved it further by adopting the spinner theme. 

When taking inspiration from the current market, we always make sure to test out different features and mechanic iterations to create a unique product. Even though the combination of the merge mechanic with the spinner battle theme was already quite novel, we still entered the experimentation phase again in hopes to create an MVP with a higher retention rate and overall stronger KPIs. We tried different additions to the core mechanic, including the second level of merging, but they just didn’t work. In fact, iterations seemed to only worsen the engagement metrics.

We went back to the basic core mechanic and stuck to that instead. Where we found more room for innovation later was the battle characteristics of different spinners.

There was a moment when we didn’t know whether to keep going with the game. Not all of the ideas worked, and iterations only pushed back the IPM we’ve accumulated. We had to do something to keep up the pace set by the promising initial tests. Luckily, we found the solution to increasing the marketability of Spinner Merge, and it wasn’t hiding in the core mechanic. Around that time, we’ve taken over the creative direction for Spinner Merge and altered the overall feel of the game as well as marketing creatives. That was it! The new art style by Yobro and marketability videos by Sunday made a huge difference. After that, we saw a radical jump in IPM and a drop in CPI — a big enough reason to scale the game.

Since the start of the scaling process, the joined forces of Sunday and YoBro have been constantly polishing the gameplay and fixing bugs. With Spinner Merge, each sprint takes about two weeks and includes at least one new feature to increase engagement even more. If the added feature has a positive impact on the revenue, it gets to stay and continues receive updates. The strategy seems to work because, with sprint 1, we increased ARPI by 25%. The engagement rate followed with a 35% increase, while the revenue grew 51%.

In 2 sprints we’ve managed to drastically improve D1-D7 retention and get the app to its first million downloads. Right now the game is performing very strongly in terms of the first 7 days, leaving us room to build up on the momentum and improve long-term retention. This is the main challenge the team is working on right now, and the latest update includes more innovations that have been targeted directly at long-term retention.

This success story is not just about Spinner Merge. When one of Sunday’s partner studios succeeds, others win too. We’re sharing all of our learnings across all of our projects, so the rest of our external studios could get a boost too. Besides that, the emerging success of Spinner Merge has solidified our relationship with YoBro.

Through ups and downs, Spinner Merge has blossomed into a hyper-casual title that generates good revenue just weeks after the soft launch. We, of course, aren’t planning to stop any time soon! This success story is stimulating our hit receptors, and we’ll be following the smell of another potential cash-cow. If you have what it takes to repeat the success of YoBro and other partner studios of Sunday, don’t hesitate to use our Publish with Us form — let’s make another hit together!

Download Spinner Merge now!
-> On Android
-> On iOS