Everything he says is spot-on, but what's unfortunate is I'm not sure how applicable it is to Triple Town.
I adore Triple Town. It's the perfect combination of casual "pick up and play"-ness with meaningful and deep gameplay, layered with a fantastic visual aesthetic on top. It's one of the only F2P games I've happily spent real money on.
That being said, it doesn't strike me as an evergreen, "I want people to be active players for ten years" game. Its match-3 mechanic is fantastic, but once you get tired of it you stop playing. When it first came out a lot of my friends were spending hours a day on it for a solid week or two, but I don't know a single person who didn't essentially lose interest and completely give it up within a month.
Spry Fox is clearly trying to combat this fatigue by adding in new gameplay modes, but anecdotally that hasn't done anything to overcome the fundamental problem of people getting tired of the core mechanic. It's still a great game, and I still recommend it zealously to friends asking for iOS game recommendations, but I find it hard to believe that it'll be able to accumulate and sustain a highly-engaged userbase in the long term.
I adore Triple Town. It's the perfect combination of casual "pick up and play"-ness with meaningful and deep gameplay, layered with a fantastic visual aesthetic on top. It's one of the only F2P games I've happily spent real money on.
That being said, it doesn't strike me as an evergreen, "I want people to be active players for ten years" game. Its match-3 mechanic is fantastic, but once you get tired of it you stop playing. When it first came out a lot of my friends were spending hours a day on it for a solid week or two, but I don't know a single person who didn't essentially lose interest and completely give it up within a month.
Spry Fox is clearly trying to combat this fatigue by adding in new gameplay modes, but anecdotally that hasn't done anything to overcome the fundamental problem of people getting tired of the core mechanic. It's still a great game, and I still recommend it zealously to friends asking for iOS game recommendations, but I find it hard to believe that it'll be able to accumulate and sustain a highly-engaged userbase in the long term.