Worldscapes: PeopleFun's Move Beyond Word Games

Haven't you heard? PeopleFun, the creators of Wordscapes, are working on something other than a word game (Worldscapes)! We'll dig into the new game further on, but let's first take the opportunity to see how PeopleFun's core word games-focused business is faring and how that's leading to broader change.

Word games have never been the most mainstream subgenre in the puzzle category. As it stands, not everyone enjoys going over all possible entries of the dictionary every move they make, but a select number of people do. Let's look at some numbers.

In 2021, the Words subgenre made up 3.4% of the Puzzle genre's total revenue while accounting for 10% of total puzzle genre downloads.

Over the years, we've seen a pretty competitive onslaught in the Words subgenre with quite a few games rising and falling over time. From the beginning of 2017, when word games became popular, the first big hit was Word Connect by Zenlife. The game has been around ever since, but it's seen more and more competitors trickle in. First, Zynga's Words with Friends 2 and PeopleFun's Wordscapes released, after which CodyCross and Words of Wonders came along. These five games accounted for most of the downloads in the subgenre -even in the huge slump caused by the pandemic in 2020 - until only recently when Applovin's implementation of viral hit Wordle started raking in a ton of players.

Games like CodyCross, Words with Friends 2, and Word Connect have all exceeded Wordscapes in terms of downloads at some point during these years. Words of Wonders even bested PeopleFun's game in absolute numbers. However, even though most of these games rely quite heavily on ad monetization, what makes a big difference in the end is what players are willing to invest into a game - especially an audience as loyal as Word puzzlers. And one thing is quite clear: Wordscapes is the absolute best word game at monetizing its audience. It took until October of 2020 for the next closest competitor, Zynga's Words with Friends 2, to start bringing home more than half of Wordscapes' revenue each month. And even though Words with Friends 2 is steadily climbing ever since, Wordscapes is still number one.

The devil is in the details when it comes to profitability, especially when looking at Wordscapes' monetization strategy, which builds on its demanding live-ops cadence. The game initially isn't much more than a series of levels that can actually be played without being gated. Eventually, when playing daily, two additional time-limited progression systems start popping up:

1. 1. A collection event in which players can earn unique avatars for their player profiles. These collection events can sometimes be pretty short (only a couple of hours) to keep players on their toes about when the events are actually happening.
2. A new room every month which the player has to fill with butterflies before the time is up. They can do this by completing the daily puzzle or by collecting cocoons in regular levels that sometimes pop up for a limited time.

The game's clear, sawtooth-shaped revenue graph shows that Wordscapes has the art of creating scarcity by time pressure very much down. Even though its competitor, Words of Wonders, has the exact same core mechanic, the events in Wordscapes make a 10x difference in comparison.

In interviews, employees of PeopleFun have confirmed that the audience of Wordscapes is diverse and of all ages. This might be true, but the game's biggest issue at this point is that its addressable market is capped. A whopping 88% of its $216M lifetime revenue comes from the US. The UK, Canada, and Australia contribute 5%, 4% and 3% respectively.

So what do you do when you've reached the majority of your audience with your best-in-class cash cow? You diversify. This is what PeopleFun is attempting with its newest game in soft-launch - Worldscapes - a block puzzler!

"What's a block puzzler?" one might ask. It's a relatively new game mechanic that has recently been increasingly popularized by hypercasual games like TripleDot's Woodoku, EasyBrain's Blockudoku, and Beetles Studio's Wood Block Puzzle. The first game that made a visible splash in September 2017 was a different app with the same name but from Russian origin.

Not a lot can be said about this genre as there has been almost no evolution. While there are some subtle differences in core mechanics of the mentioned games, all of them feature just one level and offer no variation on the mechanic when progressing throughout each game. PeopleFun's take on this genre is wildly more extensive and a lot more elaborate.

But will PeopleFun be able to penetrate the block puzzle market after working almost solely on their word games portfolio over the years? Does the company have enough experience and leverage to pull off releasing other puzzle games? To answer this question, we'll first have a look at who these Austin-based developers actually are.

PeopleFun was co-founded in 2012 by games industry veteran Tony Goodman (co-creator of Age of Empires) together with four trusted key members from Ensemble Studios. At the time, Tony mentioned PeopleFun would grow to about 10 people, but he also mentioned the company was "experimenting with Mobile RTS prototypes" in his Reddit AMA. Some things didn't pan out exactly as planned, but with regards to both of these facts it's most likely for the better.

From the get-go, the company has been involved in making word games, a niche that turned out to be highly lucrative for PeopleFun. A timeline:

• In September 2012, PeopleFun released its first title, Word Chums, on iPhone, Android, and iPad. By 2014 the game had 300K active players, and the PeopleFun team was kept small (under 10 people) for a few years.
• In 2015 and 2016, the company tried releasing smaller games like MixTwo, Adventure Smash, Spell Blitz, and Race Time. Although none of these titles were particularly successful, they allowed the company to keep searching for that much-needed innovative success. On top of that, Adventure Smash was an important title in PeopleFun's portfolio as it provided much-needed experience with match-3 puzzle games.
• In June 2017, the company released Wordscapes, which turned out to be the catalyst game the company needed to grow. Today it's "the number one word game" on the market with about 1M downloads every month, raking in an impressively steady $5M of monthly revenue since the end of 2018.
• In October 2018, Word Stacks was released. It saw success, even though it has never grossed more than a quarter of Wordscapes' revenue in any given month. Even though it's the studio's second-biggest success, the game has been in decline since a year after its release.
• At the end of 2019, PeopleFun took another stab at a non-word game and achieved some success. They release Blockscapes, which uses the age-old block puzzle mechanic and turns it into a high-score based experience. It never surpassed its biggest competitor, Tripledot studio's Woodoku, and after seeing acceptable downloads numbers but very low monetization, the company stopped user acquisition in September 2021.
• At the end of March this year, PeopleFun soft-launched its new and confusingly named title, Worldscapes, in Australia and the Philippines. The game's UX is heavily inspired by match-3 wunderkind Royal Match but features a highly innovative puzzle mechanic. Two months into soft launch, the game has been downloaded ~90K times.

Why is the soft launch of Worldscapes such a big deal? PeopleFun has released games before that didn't catch on, like Magic Bricks in 2020, so why do we think Worldscapes is likely to succeed? In short, PeopleFun knows the Blockscapes mechanic and the player base's demographics, which also means the team knows how to market a game like that. But more importantly, we're deconstructing Worldscapes because we think - despite the risks we'll be laying out later - it has a chance to not only innovate on the block puzzle subgenre but be a case study in how a studio can successfully enter a new genre. By this time next year the game could be the Royal Match of block puzzlers, and you heard it here first!



Worldscapes looks like a game with a very different scope and level of polish than the previous PeopleFun games. This is why we will dive deep into what opportunities arise by utilizing their familiar Blockscapes mechanic and the risks PeopleFun is taking by releasing their most ambitious game as of yet.

Another sign that this is not just a quirky experiment is that the company currently has a Lead Game Designer (Match-3) opening on its job board, which clearly signals further ambitions to expand into more proven, non-word puzzle games. The company hasn't shied away from handcrafted level design (since Wordscapes also features set levels played by millions), but designing consistently fun levels for a grid-based puzzle game is a different exercise than coming up with the crossword-shapes in which the Wordscapes levels are laid out.

Throughout the rest of this essay, to fully analyze the potential of this mechanic, we'll cover the following topics:

• Breaking down the core mechanic and its inspiration
• A full analysis of every level objective in the game as it stands right now
• Strategy: which choices does the player need to make when playing the puzzles?
• Speculation about Worldscapes' metagame
• Our analysis of pros and cons that stem from using this mechanic instead of a more proven one
• Recommendations with regards to the risks this game's development encompasses

This concludes the introduction to this article.
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