With IDFA regulation changes and an influx of new games entering the market, publishers and mobile game studios are facing an ever-uphill battle to acquire new players (UA) and retain them. To stay ahead of the competition, studios are exploring innovative strategies, like enhancing ad creatives to attract new players and introducing fresh gameplay features to keep existing players engaged and invested in their titles.
However, as we wrote last year, many top-grossing mobile games have found that minigames are the best way to boost UA and player retention. Minigames can provide players with new, exciting ways of enjoying an existing game, incorporating elements from broader genres to widen a game’s motivational appeal. Introducing minigames into a game also provides an opportunity to add new monetization elements, like purchasable boosters or a new premium currency as a reward.
We previously stated that minigames have continued to grow in popularity since the IDFA changes, especially amongst casual and midcore games. That’s even more true now than it was back in April 2023. In this blog, we look at some of the new and interesting ways developers have implemented minigames into some of the most popular mobile titles on the market, from Royal Match’s Wordle-inspired potion puzzle to Goddess of Victory: NIKKE’s recreation of Dave the Diver.
Royal Match’s Wordle-inspired Magic Cauldron
Dream Games is no stranger when it comes to minigames. As we wrote in our earlier blog post on minigames, the developer previously launched “The King’s Nightmare” into Royal Match – timed match3 puzzle levels where players only have a limited time to complete the level and save the King. Considering that successful example, it’s hardly surprising that Dream Games has been looking at ways to incorporate minigames into its live events pipeline further.
Perhaps the most notable example is the Magic Cauldron event, launched in September 2023, which we named the “Best Minigame Event” for the Casual Market in this year’s Mobile GameDev Awards. Magic Cauldron tasks players with figuring out the ‘formula’ of various elixirs by placing them in the correct order to unlock various rewards, such as boosters and collectible cards.
To do this, players must first place elixirs (acquired by playing match3 levels) in a row of three slots on the Magic Cauldron’s event page. Once a row has been filled, the game reveals whether or not the elixirs were placed in the proper position. If they were, the slot would light up green. Assuming they weren’t lucky enough to get it right the first time, players must then complete more match3 levels to have another attempt at guessing the formula, using what they learned from the previous round to work out the correct combination.
If you’re a fan of the viral puzzle game Wordle, all of this should sound very familiar. Magic Cauldron follows Wordle’s template, with similar mechanics but featuring potions instead of words. Wordle fanatics reportedly collectively play the game for over 72 hours a year; while we doubt this event will ever prove to have that same level of immense success, it’s positively impacted general engagement at the very least.
The success is also made evident by Lily’s Garden, which added its own Wordle-inspired minigame, Juice Bar, in July 2024. The only major difference between the two is cosmetic, with Lily’s Garden players needing to figure out the “recipes” of fruits by placing them in the right order.
Digging engagement with more Royal Match minigames
But there’s more to Royal Match’s minigame offering than just matching up potions, especially for those willing to quite literally dig underneath the surface. In Hidden Temple, which has been running weekly since it launched in July 2023, players must use pickaxes – again, acquired by playing match3 levels – to dig out gems from a hidden grid.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of the classic PC game Minesweeper, except without the danger of mines. Once all the gems have been found from a grid, players receive a reward, and they unlock a new temple to dig up.
Much like Magic Cauldron, Hidden Temple’s success has been noted by the competition — significantly more so in fact, with a number of different titles launching their own iterations of the event. Here are just a few examples:
- Cooking Madness looked at how it could further monetize the concept beyond pickaxes with Pirate Treasure, which features a $4.99 premium battle pass.
- Candy Crush Saga took an unsurprisingly sweet approach to the Digging craze with Baker’s Box, which swaps sand for cookies and pickaxes for spoons.
- Matchington Mansion’s Jewelry Jubilee sees players cracking open bricks from a grid with Hammers. Underneath, players can find collectible gems that unlock various rewards.
- State of Survival’s variation on the digging minigame event, Jungle Gems, sees players using Jungle Chisels and boosters to dig out differently-shaped gems from a grid. Once all the gems have been found, the level is cleared. The event progression includes normal levels and randomly triggered bonus levels, where players get freebie Jungle Chisels before starting and extra rewards for clearing.
Midcore goes casual with minigames: State of Survival & Honkai: Star Rail
Speaking of State of Survival, this midcore hit has also been looking to boost engagement by introducing its players to more casual gameplay elements through minigames. Alongside the aforementioned digging minigame, the title also launched the Paw-Some Puzzle Party, where players can take a break from State of Survival’s usual 4X Strategy gameplay (and its post-apocalyptic zombie stylings) in favor of feline-themed match3 battles.
In each match, players are joined by a kitten with a special match-3 power that helps players clear the board. This ability can be charged further by clearing gems that match the kitten’s color. By achieving a higher kitten power by the end of the round, players can win the minigame by reducing their opponent’s health to zero. Opponents are controlled by AI and can be tweaked through three difficulty settings (easy, normal, and hard).
While this might sound like a unique idea for the midcore market, it was actually Honkai: Star Rail which first coined the idea with Origami Bird Clash. Launching in July earlier this year, this match3 minigame event saw players going head-to-head with actual players to clear the board of fruit and feed their Origami Birds. In this event, whichever player cleared the most fruits within the limited available moves in each round would damage their opponent’s HP, with victory going to whoever took down the opposition first.
Despite arriving later, Honkai: Star Rail’s iteration of the event offers much more depth. For example, Origami Bird Clash features a Story Challenge mode where players take on characters from the main game and experience a short narrative. This mode also unlocks several new Origami birds that players can choose to bring into battle, each of which has unique abilities that players can use to their advantage. The Birefly, for instance, randomly triggers a cross-shaped detonation on the board every time seven bananas are eliminated from the board.
Completing the story even unlocked two further modes, an “Open Challenge” where players can take on the story battles again with harder opponents and all of the different mechanics unlocked, and Multiplayer Bonanza, a 6-player battler royale where the last player standing emerged victorious. Taking part in the minigame also gave players useful items for the main game, such as a 4-star Character and Stellar Jades (premium currency).
Dave the Diver x Goddess of Victory: NIKKE
As Honkai: Star Rail demonstrates, it’s possible for minigames to have an immense amount of depth and cater to an entirely different audience. But one title that showed how you can take this concept even further is Shift Up’s Goddess of Victory: NIKKE, which recently went so far as to recreate a completely different title that’s unavailable to mobile players.
Of course, we’re referencing the action RPG’s collaboration with Dave the Diver, a restaurant management sim turned action-adventure fishing hit that has sold over three million copies across PC and console. In Aegis the Diver, players dived, fished, and foraged for ingredients to use in a restaurant management simulator— just like in Dave the Diver—except using fan-favorite Goddess of Nikke characters. The event looked the part too, utilizing the same pixelated art style as Dave the Diver, and was monetized through a premium battle pass.
The event was almost like a demo for Dave the Diver, with the full title on sale across PlayStation, Switch, and other platforms for the duration of the event. All players could also get a special Goddess of Victory skin for their boat in Dave the Diver by entering a code, further bolstering the link between the two titles.
It’s worth noting that Dave the Diver isn’t available on mobile, and the developer behind the title, Mintrocket, hasn’t suggested a port is coming. However, this minigame event could have been a way for the studio to test how the game may perform on mobile devices via Goddess of Victory’s massive, pre-established audience. If that’s the case, it’ll be interesting to see whether other titles end up sneaking their way into Goddess of Victory. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, as the game also launched a roguelike reverse bullet hell-type minigame reminiscent of Vampire Survivors in November last year, so the developer is more than familiar with wider gameplay types.
Island Hoppers: Mystery Farm – Minigames integrated into narrative elements
There are quite a few tycoon and crafting games on the mobile market, and you’d be forgiven for not giving Island Hoppers: Mystery Farm a second thought when it fully launched onto the scene late last year. After all, taken at face value, Island Hoppers looks relatively similar to other titles from the subgenre, such as Family Farm Adventure, combining exploration and resource gathering with traditional tycoon game elements, including farm construction, crop harvesting, crafting, and fulfilling orders.
However, Nexters Global LTD’s Island Hoppers has managed to find a way to stand out from the pack by interweaving heavily story-driven gameplay design with a plethora of different minigames. But first, to explain how that works in practice, we need to dial back a bit.
In Island Hoppers, players take control of a character who has become stuck on a strange island. The narrative focuses on finding their missing brother (whom they became separated from upon arrival) and unraveling the many mysteries of the island. The primary gameplay loop revolves around an abandoned farm, which players have to care for to survive, planting and harvesting crops, constructing buildings, and fulfilling orders for villagers.
Where it starts to diversify is when you begin to explore the wider island. In order to progress the story and enter new areas, players must solve different kinds of unique puzzles, which almost always take the form of different minigames. For example, one has the player putting together a jigsaw puzzle to assemble an important map. Another has them working through a grid of similar-looking keys, trying to find the correct one to progress. Others include navigating a maze or moving obstacles into a specific path to create an exit.
Island Hopper has also integrated minigames into daily login mechanics, presenting players with a refreshing memory minigame every day. If they complete it, players are rewarded with energy to help them progress in the main game. They also receive the usual standard bundle of currencies and materials either way.
While none of these minigames are particularly innovative, Island Hoppers is unique in that it’s one of the only mobile games on the market to have integrated the concept in such a significant way. Players are clearly fans too, given the game has made over $47 million in revenue and been downloaded more than 20 million times. We suspect that success could become even more effective in the long term, as the developers can naturally introduce new minigames over time if players become tired of the current selection.
Interestingly, Playrix has also launched a similar title, Mystery Matters, which works in a very similar fashion. This leads us to believe many other developers have bigger plans for the future of minigames.
Keeping track of minigames using our live events tracker
Minigames offer several benefits that can enhance player experience, overall engagement, and revenue. They provide exciting and refreshing ways for new and returning users to play, boosting retention, while also remaining entirely options for those who prefer not to engage with them. By catering to diverse player motivations and appealing to a broader audience, minigames can also help attract new players and expand the potential player base. From a business perspective, they boost monetization by introducing new opportunities for IAP, such as through a dedicated minigame battle pass.
If you’d like to see even more examples of minigames within the mobile market, then you should try out our Live Events Tracker. In case you’re not familiar with this tool, it enables you to analyze, visualize, and compare the performance of over 35 different types of live events. The tracker has a range of filters that allow you to easily hone in on the exact type of live events you’re most interested in, which include three different options for minigames.
With these applied, you can monitor the duration and timing of different minigames, understand how they’ve been implemented, and directly see how they’ve influenced revenue. There’s no limit on how many types of live events you can compare at once either, enabling you to see how minigames were factored into the strategy of specific titles as a whole, such as competitors in your specific genre.
If that’s still not enough for you, remember that you can also find hundreds of additional examples by simply searching with the “Minigame” feature tag in the GameRefinery platform.
Enjoyed this blog post and want to learn more about minigames, as well as some of the other ways that mobile game developers are boosting engagement? Then be sure to check out some of our other content:
