How Rollic scored a $100m hybridcasual hit by ideating 1,000 games a month

• Rollic vice president of gaming Utku Erdinç talks shifting from hypercasual to hybridcasual.
• Rollic requires fewer downloads to keep game economies healthy than it did two years ago.
• The studio has seen a “huge increase” in D90 retention and beyond.
• Color Block Jam has surpassed $100m in bookings, a record for Rollic’s catalogue.

Stay Informed

Istanbul-based mobile games studio Rollic has achieved more than two billion installs across hundreds of games in more than 170 countries since its formation in 2018.

From that publishing portfolio, at least 10 titles have topped US App Store charts across a range of categories like most-downloaded puzzle game, sports game, and mobile game overall.

But the industry has evolved dramatically over these past seven years and this Zynga subsidiary has needed to adapt along the way to keep up with modern times.

In particular, that’s meant a shift at Rollic from hypercasual to hybridcasual, which in turn led to the production of record-breaker Color Block Jam – a game that’s driven in-app purchase revenue to levels previously unseen at the studio.

We speak with Rollic vice president of gaming Utku Erdinç to discuss this shifting strategy, explore the role difficulty plays in Color Block Jam’s success, and discover how ideating “more than a thousand games a month” leads to the best game mechanics.

“For me, Color Block Jam is one of those games that expands the ceiling of what is possible in mobile gaming,” Erdinç says.

“It proves that to have a substantial annual run rate, building complex mechanics and experiences is not mandatory. It proves the entry barrier for such games can be different, as long as you ideate correctly on your audience’s gameplay appetite.”

Hybridcasual: Motivation, mechanics and monetisation

Erdinç’s role at Rollic sees him spearhead new game design, lead monetisation strategy for publishing teams and work across live service teams. He tells us that Rollic’s focus is on player retention and always has been, whether in its earlier hypercasual days or today with hybridcasual.

According to Erdinç, he has aimed to keep the company’s ideation structure unchanged after the genre shift, believing that hybridcasual is “what you build on top of an engaging core mechanic”. We ask how Erdinç defines the genre.

“Common discussions around hybridcasual games focus on their ad and in-app purchases mixture, so it’s usually a discussion of monetisation,” he answers.

“For us, the hyper-to-hybridcasual transition was never a pure monetisation switch. If a core mechanic is correctly managed to drive user engagement and adoption, it’s going to have better long-term retention.

“Thus, a game can shift to a genre with a strong roadmap, and it’s a representation of what your core game mechanic is capable of and what you build on top of it.”

Erdinç suggests that Rollic’s motivations to make a hybridcasual move were twofold: to focus on lifetime value versus cost per install and to tap into the team’s “eagerness” to build bigger games.

“We always knew that advertising lifetime value was very limited because of its exponentially slow growth after a certain point in a game’s life cycle. Thus, with ever-increasing CPIs, it was obvious that profitability would just go lower and lower in each subsequent quarter, so we had to target bigger lifetime values,” he expands.

That shift appears to be paying off. Erdinç highlights Rollic’s shrinking download dependency over the past two years, as the company has come to require fewer new installs to keep a game’s economy in a healthy condition. To Erdinç, this is “the most important indicator”.

He also celebrates the company’s “huge increase” in D90 retention and beyond, as Rollic “works extremely hard on keeping its existing users excited”.

“The hybridcasual shift is paying off extremely well for Rollic,” he says. “I would guess that in the history of mobile gaming, a very small number of studios have experienced this much growth in only one-and-a-half years.”

Captivation in colour

As for the games embodying this shift, the new king of Rollic’s catalogue is Color Block Jam. This colourful puzzler tasks players with strategically sliding shapes around each other and towards matching doors, clearing them from the screen within a time limit.

It peaked at number one on the US App Store and has quickly broken records as Rollic’s highest-earning game on an in-app purchase basis, with Erdinç confirming the title hit the $100 million bookings milestone in a short period of time following its 2024 launch.

Total earnings are even higher when including ad revenue, though in this case, purchases do make up “a significantly bigger share”.

Color Block Jam also reached three million daily players after four months on app stores and Erdinç confirms that it has a healthy, steady download stream with “solid 10% D90 long-term retention”.

Notably, many of the game’s high-engaging players have already been playing other long-lived casual puzzlers for years, so Erdinç suggests they have come to Color Block Jam looking for something new.

“Color Block Jam fulfilled that expectation,” he declares.

The game features more than 1,000 levels and the development team keeps players engaged through new features and events every fortnight. This allows Rollic “to plan years of development for Color Block Jam”.

“We communicate with our endgame players, and so far, they love our new obstacles and how the difficulty curve is shaping in the late game and plan to keep this flow,” Erdinç shares.

“Now that the game has a certain number of levels and obstacles to explore, we plan to reward level completion a lot more through seasonal events, keeping our players engaged with fresh mechanics and boosting eagerness to complete a very hard level.”

But, it’s important to Erdinç that new content continues to be creative – that it doesn’t simply recycle old ideas seen in other titles. To achieve this, Rollic is planning to take the same ideation approach it uses for creating new game mechanics and apply that to in-game events too.

“We’re seeing the same events in different games rolling over and over, and we want to avoid this,” he says.

“As Color Block Jam’s launch is a milestone, I genuinely believe its live ops management can be another milestone of how continuous creative feature releases can keep driving downloads and a stable, profitable long-term revenue for this genre.”

Erdinç also believes that it’s Color Block Jam’s “unique and engaging core gameplay” that is allowing it to monetise itself. He suggests the hybridcasual game benefits from its difficulty curve, and entertains the idea that it might be “the hardest puzzle game to ever scale this big”.

“This is the beauty of ideating more than a thousand games a month; we build our way towards the best core game mechanics.”

Color Block Jam’s difficulty also feeds directly into its monetisation, with every level being possible to complete without boosters – but the option is there for those who want to utilise them.

Evolving on

Finally, Erdinç gives us a peek behind the curtain at Rollic’s production strategy, revealing that the company has key ideation methods that it refines with its partners. These mostly evolve from a core mechanic with potential for high retention.

Rollic also looks for new mechanics with better long-term engagement, and tests hundreds of prototypes monthly, making the team “very confident” in whichever games are ultimately developed further.

The studio is currently scaling two new hybridcasual logic games called Hole People and Knit Out, and Erdinç teases some “very promising soft-launch games” in the works. He also alludes to the development of multiple new concepts with original and licensed IP.

Though Erdinç doesn’t reveal what those IP might be – Rollic’s also worked on Barbie Merge Mystery – he hopes that the resultant games will “expand our audience and reach”.

In the meantime, Color Block Jam is continuing to thrive – a product of constant ideation, a simple concept, and “a lot more freedom” than puzzle players are accustomed to.

Erdinç calls this year’s success “a foregone conclusion” and feels the same about the year to come, whatever those upcoming projects may turn out to be.