We deliberately picked a midpoint between casual and hardcore
During product positioning, Leo and I spent about two weeks on what should have been a simple question: who is this for? The answer we landed on: not casual players, not hardcore players, but the people in between. Slightly contrarian, so let me explain.
What "casual" and "hardcore" mean now
Definitions first. In 2025's mobile context:
Casual includes match-3 (Candy Crush, Royal Match, Toon Blast), merge titles (Merge Mansion), idle (Cookie Run). Zero learning curve, huge content pipelines, progress driven by tasks/energy/ads. Average session 3–8 minutes, but opened 5–15 times daily.
Hardcore includes MOBAs, FPSs, ARPGs. Steep learning curve, skill-based, competitive systems (ranks/leagues). Average session 20–60 minutes, opened 1–3 times daily but long.
Most studios pick one or the other. Both markets are validated, data is well-understood, ad models are mature. The middle is commercially "dangerous."
Why the middle is commercially dangerous
A mobile-game studio's view (I spent two years at one). For a game to support paid acquisition, you need two numbers to work:
- LTV (lifetime value) high enough — sets what a user is worth
- CPI (cost per install) low enough — sets what you're willing to spend
Casual: low CPI (wide audience), monetized via ads and small purchases at scale, LTV works out. Hardcore: high CPI (narrow audience), but strong paying behavior (passes, skins, gear), LTV works out.
The middle: CPI isn't low (audience isn't that wide), but there's no strong paid moment either (people won't drop $30 to solve a puzzle). LTV doesn't close. You can't buy users, so you can't scale.
That's why over the past decade, the most acclaimed middle-ground games — Mini Metro, Threes!, Monument Valley, Two Dots — earned love but never grew into big companies.
So why pick it
Because we're not buying users.
BverGame's business model is plain: static site, Google AdSense banner placements, traffic from SEO and social sharing. Which means:
- We don't need a low CPI
- We don't need a high LTV
- We just need "site visitors who stay a few extra minutes"
That's exactly what the middle delivers. Casual gets closed in 30 seconds (nothing to explore). Hardcore gets ignored (requires 30 minutes just to try). The middle — 30 seconds to learn, 2–3 hours to play to a level you find satisfying — is the best mix for keeping users on a page.
Casual teaches you to "tap buttons." Hardcore teaches you to "practice technique." We teach you to "make choices."
The resulting difficulty curve
The design rules behind our 24 games:
Rule 1: Round 1 must be completable. No matter how new you are, finishing your first round must be near-certain. So our Minesweeper has Easy at 9x9 / 10 mines, our Snake starts 20% slower than the classic.
Rule 2: Round 5 must feel a real challenge. If beginners still find it trivial at round 5, they leave. So 2048 forces a strategy choice almost immediately, and our 9x9 gomoku AI grabs the center on move 1.
Rule 3: Round 20 must reveal "room to grow." After 20 rounds, players must perceive there's more to learn. Snake's special pickup timing, Minesweeper's 1-2-1 pattern — invisible in the first 5 rounds, sensed by round 20.
Rule 4: Round 100 must still have variance. Hardest one. The game must hold genuine emergence — 2048's near-infinite state space, Mind Match's random layout, Tic-Five's Medium AI making 30% suboptimal moves.
The cost of this positioning
Honest about the trade-offs:
1. Smaller user base than pure casual. "Willing to engage their brain a little" is a smaller group than "just want to swipe."
2. Lower ARPU than hardcore. Zero monetization touchpoints inside the game. AdSense CPM is an order of magnitude below what hardcore game IAP earns.
3. Slow commercially. This site probably never reaches 1M DAU, but might steady at 50K–200K DAU for years. We're fine with that pace.
4. SEO competition is brutal. "Free 2048," "snake game," "minesweeper" — competitors are Crazy Games and Poki at giant scale. Can't beat their volume. Long-tail keywords only.
Why do it anyway?
Because the supply of this kind of game is genuinely thin right now.
The App Store overflows with match-3 and ad-heavy casual. Steam overflows with hardcore and indie prestige. The middle ground — "I don't want to pay, but I want something with a bit of meat" — is the underserved majority in 2025.
These are people who want 10–15 minutes of play on the subway. They don't want match-3's 30-second forced ad. They don't want a strategy game heavy enough to tire them.
Those people are who we make this for.
BverGame won't grow big — but I hope it can serve this group steadily.
Max is BverGame's co-operator, formerly a user-acquisition analyst at a mobile-games studio. The LTV/CPI figures here are personal references with significant category variance — treat as illustrative. Views are personal.