Gardenscapes Original

[Kou Quintana]

Theoriginal version of Gardenscapes, which was released for Microsoft Windows in October 2009,[2] and was later released on OS X, iOS, Android, the Nintendo DS and 3DS, was a hidden objects game in which the player runs a B&B hotel. 2 sequels, Gardenscapes 2, which was released in April 2013 and Gardenscapes - Mansion Makeover are also part of the series.

According to VentureBeat, a mobile version was in development for over four years and was released in 2016 as a combination of match-3 gameplay with a city-building core. The storyline is centered on a butler named Austin, who strives to rebuild the dilapidated mansion and garden.[3] To complete the chores, the user must complete levels and earn the required "stars". Gardenscapes allows players to choose decorations for cleaned-up areas of a massively overgrown garden as they level up. The core gameplay is completed with pin-pulling mini-games in which players need to solve puzzles to save characters.[4][5]

Playrix regularly releases seasonal updates, for example, Christmas Collaterals.[6] In addition, in 2021, they launched Yoga Season in collaboration with the World Health Organization. The storyline describes recommendations on how to stay healthy while self-isolating.[7][8][6]

After the release, Gardenscapes was named one of the Top-10 free games for iPhone and iPad in 100 countries. The project was released not only on the App Store, where on the first day it was downloaded more than a million times but also on Google Play and Amazon Appstore. Gardenscapes was named by Facebook its Overall Game of the Year for 2016. As a result, the developers entered the Top-20 mobile publishers in the world.[9][10] During the 20th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated Gardenscapes for "Mobile Game of the Year".[11]

By 2019, Gardenscapes was named the fifth highest-grossing puzzle game, generating $1.5 billion from in-app purchases. The total number of app installs exceeded 213 million. An average revenue per install was about $7, making it one of the lead publisher's games. Google Play users have accounted for 70 percent of Gardenscapes' downloads and contributed 47 percent of overall revenue.[12]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gardenscapes' audience was over 10 million daily active players.[7] Sensor Tower estimated that Gardenscapes made almost $2 billion in lifetime revenue by 2021.[3][8] According to Statista, as of May 2021, the game remained the Playrix's most downloaded product with over 461.41 million total downloads.[13]

The success of the original game led to a series of sequels, such as Gardenscapes 2. A year after the release of Gardenscapes in 2016, the developers also launched another project, Homescapes, in which the main character returns to his childhood mansion and tries to restore it.[14][15]

Since 2016, Playrix has been running an active marketing strategy, where it hides the nature of the main game, and instead promotes the more interesting mini games, to imply that the mini games are in fact the main game. These Facebook advertisements for Gardenscapes and Homescapes were referred to as misleading and "not representative" at the beginning of 2020. Developers declared that the promoted images of gameplay captured the mini-games available every 20 levels. However, most of the audience never got to these games, because it takes several hours gameplay to get through 20 levels. The Advertising Standards Authority banned banners in October 2020 and warned Playrix about the representativity of other campaigns.[16] Similar criticism of advertising tactics occurred with another of Playrix's games, Township.

Playrix was founded by brothers Dmitry and Igor Bukhman in 2004 in Vologda, Russia. The brothers had already released 3 computer games and 30 screensavers, generating enough to buy a second computer. In 2009, the company released the original version of Gardenscapes for Microsoft Windows.

In 2016, a mobile version of Gardenscapes was released, combining a city-building narrative with a match-3 gameplay. It was downloaded more than a million times on its first day on the App Store and was named by Facebook as its Overall Game of the Year for 2016.- Advertisement -Your 2024 Guide to Sustainable and Profitable App GrowthTap into the collective expertise of leaders from ConsultMyApp, AppsFlyer, Braze, and Mixpanel. Start building a profitable, and sustainable mobile growth strategy today.

The same protagonist, Austin the Butler, is used in Gardenscapes and its 2017 successor Homescapes. While Homescapes has overtaken Gardenscapes in monthly player spend, Gardenscapes is still the top Playrix game in lifetime revenue at over $3 billion.

The company experienced revenue and usage growth during the coronavirus pandemic and, as of 2021, it had a valuation of $8 billion. It has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in European game studios including Vizor Games and Nexters. Recent acquisitions include Zagrava Games, Eipix Entertainment, Plexonic and Cateia Games.

The client built their very modern home on an old historical site that had existing stone retaining walls. We were challenged to incorporate the old retaining walls with the style of the modern home while keeping a formal look. The view of the Huron River was critical to keep intact so that the view was not blocked by landscaping in any area of the backyard. Additionally, the homeowner preferred a very minimalistic plant palate.

We started with a blank slate by clearing and grading the backyard to prepare for a tiered patio that would not block the stunning views of the Huron River. We chose Corten retaining walls to echo the color of the cedar on the house. We kept the design simple for the homeowner's preferred minimal plant palette and introduced plants that either accented the hardscaping or didn't take away from the beauty of the home.

This clean and contemporary design incorporates elements of both the modern home and the original, historic fieldstone retaining walls. With a mix of modern hardscaping materials, this newly built home features large-scale concrete pavers bordered in Michigan natural stone, limestone walls and steps, and custom corten retaining walls that echo the color of the cedar on the house. The custom stone fire pit serves as a social space in the heart of the patio. The minimalist plantings highlight the hardscape. Prairie dropseed was selected for its fine texture, and light-catching ethereal seedheads in fall. Behind, boxwoods frame the seating area & also appear in the custom-made corten planters along with the house. The patio is tiered so as not to block the stunning views of the Huron River from the upper patio, and floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the house.

Armed with a short presentation I co-created with our chief designer, we were able to get just enough buy-in from the rest of the executive team to create a new team, the Gamification Team. The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.

We implemented the feature and hoped our second attempt would be more successful. Instead, new users increased by only 3%. It was positive, but not the type of breakthrough we needed. Still, the team doubled down and pushed through, shipping iterations to the referral program and making some other bets, but no avail.

In both of these situations, we had borrowed successful features from other products, but the wrong way. We had failed to account for how a change in context can impact the success of a feature. I came away from these attempts realizing that I needed a better understanding of how to borrow ideas from other products intelligently. Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:

In other words, we needed to use better judgment in adapting when adopting. Being more systematic in just this area would have made a big difference in what gamification mechanics we chose to pursue. And we would have probably been dissuaded from focusing on referrals altogether. I was committed to making sure our next attempts would be more methodical. We needed to be better at basing our decisions on data, insights, and foundational principles.

My time at Zynga and MyFitnessPal gave us inspiration on how to segment and model our users by engagement level. Zynga separated their users and measured retention based on the following weekly retention metrics:

I hypothesized that we could use these metrics at Duolingo as a starting point to create a more sophisticated model, and use that model to identify a North Star metric. Working with the data scientist and the engineer manager in the Acquisition Team, we came up with the model below. We used the same retention rates as Zynga and MyFitnessPal, but we tweaked from a weekly view to a daily view and we added several more metrics.

The blocks, or buckets, represent different user segments with different levels of engagement. And every single user who has ever used the product is in one, and only one, bucket on any given day. That means the buckets in the model are MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) in representing the entire base of users who have ever used Duolingo. The arrows measure the movement of users between the buckets (these include CURR, NURR, RURR, and SURR, but evolved into daily retention rates rather than weekly). Combining the buckets and the arrows, the model creates an almost closed-circuit system, with new users being the only break.

The fact that DAU, WAU, and MAU can easily be calculated from these buckets made it easy to model them over time. This is a key feature of the model. Additionally, by manipulating the rates represented by the arrows, we can model the compounding and cumulative impact of moving these rates over time; in other words, the rates are the levers product teams can pull to grow DAU.

With the model created, we started taking daily snapshots of data to create a history of how all of these user buckets and retention rates had evolved on a day-by-day basis over the past several years. With this data, we could create a forward-looking model and then perform a sensitivity analysis to predict which levers would have the biggest impact on DAU growth. We ran a simulation for each rate, where we moved a single rate 2% every quarter for three years, holding all the other rates constant.

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