Why Supercell Is Buying a Five-Year-Old Merge Game

Supercell, the studio behind Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars, is about to own a merge game. Its acquisition of Helsinki-based Metacore, the maker of Merge Mansion, was signed at the start of September and is expected to close by the end of the month. The financial terms have not been disclosed, and the $700 million figure floating around online is Merge Mansion's estimated lifetime revenue, not the price tag.

What makes this interesting is not the size of the deal. It is the age of the game. Merge Mansion launched in 2020, is widely credited with creating the merge-2 category, and is still reported to bring in roughly $8 million a month on around 400,000 downloads a month. Its growth had plateaued, and Metacore went through a painful restructuring earlier this year that put up to 160 roles in Finland at risk. Supercell looked at all of that and decided the game had "untapped potential." In CEO Ilkka Paananen's words, "Merge Mansion's best days are still ahead."

That is a striking bet, and it lines up with what the wider data says about merge. In our last post we covered AppMagic's H1 2026 numbers: merge games pulled in $1.3 billion in the first half of the year, up 74%, making it the fastest-growing corner of the puzzle genre. Supercell's read is that a well-built merge game is a long-lived asset. It does not need a hit launch every year; it needs steady live operations, smart user acquisition, and a core loop players are happy to return to for half a decade. Those are exactly the things Supercell says it will bring to Merge Mansion, and it is the same playbook it used when it bought Space Ape Games.

For Anahata Interactive, this is close to home. Idle Plants is our merge title, and Mithai Masti sits in the neighbouring match-3 space. The lesson we take from Supercell's move is that the value in this genre is not in shipping fast and moving on. It is in keeping a game alive, measured, and improving for years. That is why so much of our current work is on retention, instrumentation, and live content rather than on chasing the next new project. A five-year-old game that still earns $8 million a month is proof that the slow path is the one worth walking.

If you play Idle Plants, this is what we are building toward: a game that gets better the longer you stay with it. Thank you for sticking around while we do the work.