Merge games are one of the fastest-growing segments in today’s Casual Market.
But how are these games actually acquiring new players?
I used Ad Insights by GameAnalytics to look at the top merge games, the creatives they’re running, and why those creatives work.
Looking across the leading merge titles, a few audience and distribution patterns stand out:
● AppLovin is the leading ad network
● Ads frequently appear in other casual games and reading apps
● Around 80% of the audience is female
● 25-34 appears to be the strongest age group, except for Gossip Harbor, which skews toward 18-24
And when looking at the creatives themselves, three main formats show up again and again.
Cinematic Ads
This has been one of the genre’s signature creative formats, often featuring dramatic scenarios like freezing families, relationship conflicts, and other emotional hooks before transitioning into simple merge and renovation gameplay. These stories often match the game’s themes and characters, while games like Whisper Castle even bring similar creative-style gameplay into onboarding, creating a smoother UA product funnel. And nowadays, AI hooks and narrative sequences are becoming increasingly common across these creatives.
Ads about Ads
Players have seen ultra-polished game ads enough times to know that what they see probably isn’t the exact game they’ll play. So some merge games simply join the joke. Cartoon dialogues, UGC-style videos, handwritten messages, and characters commenting on the ad itself are used to acknowledge that skepticism and turn it into a hook. And some creatives even use this format to highlight additional rewards and incentives players can collect after installing.
Borrowed Gameplay Ads
Merge games don’t have a traditional fail state like most puzzle genres. Instead, they rely on stopping states. While these work well for monetization, they aren’t always ideal for capturing new players. So, merge game ads often borrow mechanics from trending gameplay formats where success and failure are instantly clear, such as fruit merge, hidden objects, tile matching, sort puzzles and even idle arcades. Interestingly, many still maintain an abstract connection to merging, while some even bring these fake mechanics into the actual game as minigames.
The common thread across all these?
Merge games aren’t just selling the core mechanic. They are selling emotion, drama, and instantly understandable gameplay, while keeping enough connection to the actual product to make the transition work.
Which of these creative formats do you think has the most room left to evolve?
This is a sponsored post from GameAnalytics.
