Legend Of Mushroom has been driven primarily by sales growth, rapidly climbing the sales charts, especially in Tier 1 Asian markets such as Japan and Korea. The game features a highly simplistic idle-collecting and improving cycle in which players progress by defeating waves of minions and bosses, acquiring equipment, and improving their characters.

Gameplay is reminiscent of RPG slots, as it relies heavily on RNG-based mechanics to encourage long sessions. The game features numerous progression and monetization strategies, including a battle pass and gacha system, that effectively engage players through clear objectives, psychological motivations, and social interactions.

However, there are notable areas in need of improvement, such as improved gacha mechanics, optimized ad placement, and improved social features to drive long-term retention and revenue growth.

Significant Revenue Growth

Over the past month, Legend of Mushroom has risen into the top 10 of the top grossing games list, mainly thanks to increased sales in Asia’s Tier 1 countries, Japan and South Korea.

Revenues from these two countries accounted for more than two-thirds of total revenue in March, yet downloads from these countries accounted for less than 20% of the game’s total installs during the same period.

This is likely because these two countries accounted for the largest share of downloads in the previous month. To see how revenues in countries where the game was released progress a month later, we need to look at the sales distribution at the end of April.

Overview of the core gameplay loop and progression systems

The core gameplay of Legend Of Mushroom is a very simplified idle task of collecting and upgrading equipment. Players must defeat minions and bosses that appear one after another. Killing the content will move the player to further content, but it becomes more and more difficult for the player to kill the content.

Players can obtain equipment by killing bosses. When a boss dies, it drops a magic lamp, which is a kind of free gacha equipment. The player then taps the Magic Lamp to receive a piece of equipment in one of the 10 standard equipment slots.

The slot the equipment is targeted to and the secondary stats assigned to the equipment are random. Primary and secondary stats both increase with rarity, with primary stats increasing the higher the gear level. The decreasing equipment level is set to a range of the player’s current level +/- a few levels. The player can improve the drop rate of rarer equipment by leveling up the Magic Lamp with a combination of gold and time, both of which can be paid for by the player. If the player chooses to sell the gear without equipping it, they will receive a combination of gold and experience points. These experience points are the main way players level up their heroes. Therefore, it is important for players to collect lamps and sell any equipment they cannot use from the lamps.

The game incentivizes long sessions, lots of RNG

During the introductory phase of the game, players must manually decide whether to invest or sell each piece of equipment they take out of the ramp. This process is intended to introduce new players to the pros and cons of different types of equipment. This is especially important later in the game when players choose class specializations that are significantly enhanced by certain secondary stats.

However, this process can become very tedious after a long session, given that players pull out a lot of equipment during a session. For this reason, the developers built a vending feature into the game that sells equipment with a certain rarity or with certain non-values ​​that the player can control. Many of the deconstructors in our community argue that this feature should be enabled much earlier in FTUE.

Players can earn hundreds or even thousands of these lamps in a single session, so they spend a lot of time opening, reviewing, equipping and selling unused equipment. Players can only open this gear if they have the app open, and thanks to the vending feature, they can just put their phone on a charger or stand and leave it running for hours and it will open/sell automatically.

What’s interesting is that this opening loop of unused gear makes up a large part of the early gameplay, reducing the gameplay to an RPG slot machine with almost permanent free entries. There are moments of evaluation and min/maxing that are key elements of unused gameplay, as well as boredom and exhilaration when a particularly good piece of gear drops. There is nothing else in the gameplay other than choosing what equipment, skills, balls, etc. to equip.

If the player gets stuck because they don’t have enough lamps to open, they have no choice but to wait 24 hours to get another large or small amount of lamps in the shop. The daily incentive to return is very strong: the number of lamps you receive each day through a daily mini-game called The Lamp Thief increases as you level up. However, it also adjusts the number of lamps you can open at the same time, so that opening all the lamps each day takes roughly the same amount of time (effectively 1-2 hours).

Power progression verticals galore

The game offers players different levels of progression, which is one of the main reasons why the game has so much depth. Currently, there are 11 different levels of progression, each of which affects the player’s primary or secondary stats, or the player’s and pet’s abilities in some way (excluding the player’s guild level). These progression levels are slowly unlocked over the first 14 days of the actual game.

In addition to the hero’s core gear slots, these tiers include:

• A Mount system

1. The mount system is unlocked on the fourth day and is one of the main unique incentives used in the LiveOps event system.
2. Top finishers on the leaderboard receive event currency that can be used to purchase much more powerful mount variants than those that can be earned outside of the event system.
3. Players unlock non-event materials needed to evolve their mounts in a daily mini-game called Chrono Tower, another idle combat system that players need keys to enter.
4. Keys refresh daily and can be purchased with gems or earned through watching ads within certain limits.

• An Artifact System

1. Artifacts are a weapon skin system that also provides tertiary benefits to players’ weapons.
2. Since these weapon skins are the main incentive for the Guild Event system, the materials players need to level up usually come from Guild Events.
3. All players have to do to farm these materials is log into their respective Guild’s Raids or Guild vs Guild events, both of which are completely inactive and can be advanced using artifacts.
4. Similar to the mount system, there are a few artifacts that are reserved for getting to the top of the leaderboards in certain live events. These artifacts have significant stat boosts compared to their counterparts.
5. Players can also purchase gacha for these items through a dedicated event store page.

• A Relic system

1. Relics are unlocked once the player has completed levels 1-10 in Hard Mode.
2. Relics can be purchased via the Semi-RNG Relic Search subfunction in the Relics tab for a price of N Relic Shards. Each turn, the cost of acquiring the next Relic increases.
3. There are seven Relic slots, and players can equip one of five Relics per Relic slot.
4. Each Relic increases the stats of a specific game element, from a base value to a specific Pole Effect multiplier.
5. Players can level up each relic using surplus relic shards earned primarily through boss battles in the daily minigames.
6. The daily minigames pair the player with two other real-life players to defeat several waves of enemies and a boss. This slightly forces players to compare themselves to the other players they’re matched with, giving them the opportunity to team up with friends to overcome more difficult levels.

• Skills and skill handbook AND Pals (pets) and pall handbook

1. Both skills and companions, and their associated manuals, are unlocked fairly early in the game. We group them together because acquisition and progression are the same system.
2. Players acquire both skills and companions through a shard-based gacha system. Gacha can be accessed in three different ways: through gacha tickets, gems, and exclusive ad views.
3. Players would have to pull gacha tens of thousands of times to collect enough poles/abilities to be meaningful later in the game. This makes the system less meaningful to players.
4. When players collect enough of a certain type of ability or pole, they level up. Collecting multiple rarity variations of a certain ability or pal also unlocks levels related to those pals/abilities in he manual, giving the player certain stat boosts.
5. Players can earn hundreds of free pulls every day by interacting with the Molten Ruins minigame. In this key-based, timed mini-game, players must compete against five waves of dragons. Once they have completed all five waves, a reward will be unlocked.

• The player’s Hero Level

1. As mentioned earlier in this article, players’ Hero Levels increase by selling unused equipment.
2. Players acquire this equipment through a combination of methods, primarily through the daily Lamp Thief minigame, but also through daily login and event rewards, exclusive bundle pop-ups, or the Lamp Fund Battle Pass.
3. This is one of the least monetized systems in the game.

• The player’s Lamp Level

1. A player’s ramp level is seemingly one of the most important levers for player progression, as the drop rate of higher quality gear increases as the player’s ramp level increases.
2. Players increase their ramp level through a combination of gold and time.
3. At higher ramp levels, players can expect to spend well over $1,000 per level on gold and speed boosts to increase their ramp level.

• The player’s Guild Level 

1. A player’s Guild level limits the amount of free resources the player can earn from the Guild Store each day, as well as the maximum number of Guild members a Guild can have.
2. Increasing these limits will grant additional free resources each day, accelerating the player’s progress in other star systems.
3. To access the best skills and friends in the game, players must belong to a competitive Guild. These are only accessible through a guild-based currency that can be won in Guild vs. Guild battles.

• The player’s Tech Park/Mine (Skill tree)

 

1. The Tech Park/Mine system is a combination of a mini-game and a limited skill tree.
2. Over time, players acquire mining tools, which they use to mine resources and spend on stat modifiers in the Tech Park.
3. These stat modifiers are a significant part of the player’s overall power, and competitive players should make the most of the amount of resources they collect and invest in this mini-system.
4. This vertical progression is monetized through monthly mining passes, which increase the yield of collected resources and the overall cap on mining tools a player can generate while idle. Additionally, players can put hard currency into timeskips to reduce skill research time.

1. In another two-part mini-game, the player’s prayer statue and the garden work together to improve the player’s base stats.
2. Players grow food in their gardens by planting seeds of various rarities and waiting for the growing season.
3. If the player does not actively defend their crops, rivals may steal this food while it is growing. You can get your friends to help you defend your crops, but you cannot stop them from stealing from you.
4. Players can spend gems to speed up the growing cycle and purchase monthly passes that increase the daily amount of free seeds and the player’s ability to steal resources from other players.

• The soul system

1. The Soul system is currently the final unlockable progression path in the game.
2. Players earn souls through a special gacha system.
3. The currency needed to draw from the gacha is primarily earned through a combination of events and the main “floor” based unlock ladder. Essentially, every 10 ladder levels gained gives you 10 draws.
4. Players can equip, fuse, or farm the souls they earn. Fusion, which is an option only for the highest rarity souls, significantly increases base stats.
5. Food gives you shards that can be used to increase your soul’s base level, thereby improving its stats.

• Future Unlocks 

1. There are three major UI elements remaining in the game that hint at further systems to come.
2. One is called Parking Wars, which seems similar to the serf dormitory system currently in the game, but instead of capturing other players, you can rent parking spaces for their vehicles.
3. The other two systems are completely unknown to the player.

A common theme of these progression systems is that they mostly revolve around mini-games that are updated daily through key-based time slots. Players can increase the number of keys they receive per day through monthly passes or by watching ads, providing a strong incentive to use these systems to make money. Most mini-games are just small variations of the core game, and the less easy ones can be completed in a weekend.

However, this suggests that players who love these types of games are not playing for complex gameplay, so developers don’t need to spend a lot of time coming up with new gameplay unless players try changing behavior.

Another important point is that most of these progression systems have their own monetization features. These include monthly passes, battle passes, gacha systems, etc. If players want to maintain a competitive level of performance on their server shards, they will need to invest equally into each system.

Player goals and how they influence monetization curves

When players first join the game, they are quickly taught that their goal is to kill monsters, and in return they receive several items that will make them better at killing monsters. This is an explicit goal established by the game’s core design. This goal is further reinforced by the addition of all the various progression vectors discussed above in this article. Additionally, players are taught very early on that they must compete against other players in the game’s many leaderboard systems to earn more free resources to purchase equipment. This is another explicit targeting system that directly rewards players for engagement and monetization.

In addition to these clear goals, you can dig deeper into why players want to get better at your game.

You can explore this by doing a mental “5 whys” exercise. These are typically used to get to the root cause of a problem, but I’ve found them useful for this purpose as well.

Using this method, we explore why players care about certain explicit goals and how they align with other unconscious natural goals we have as humans. Looking at the breakdown above, we can see how the explicit goal of “becoming more powerful” at the end of the exercise aligns with Maslow’s psychological needs.

From a design perspective, Legend of Mushroom provides players with an in-game area where they can showcase their guild the rewards they’ve earned in a leaderboard system. This happens in a few different areas, such as the Guild Town scene where all guild members can walk around, and the inspection panel where players can click to see the gear of every player in the game.

The review window also has a compare button to directly compare the statistics of two players. This greatly helps players showcase their efforts in front of their peers.

The leaderboard system that is the basis of the game’s objective has no real catch-up mechanism. This ensures that players who fail to win early leaderboards do not have a chance to win the next one, and these early winners get access to exclusive items that are significantly more powerful than the non-leaderboard variants.

This means that a targeting system driven by a combination of explicit and latent psychological goals greatly rewards monetization in the early stages of the game, but hinders monetization if you are late to server launches or miss offers. The price that players must pay to catch up with the early winners is many times higher than what the early winners spend.

Lacking a catch-up mechanic with the perks of the early edition, such a game would be expected to add significant revenue to the game even without the seasonal resets provided by the LiveOps event system.

Monetization strategies are used to meet player goals

Legend Of Mushroom garnered much of its initial progression value from the wide range of monetization offers presented to players very early on in their first session and then as each new feature was unlocked.

D1 Conversion Offers

Players will initially be shown cheap IAP offers for gear, skills, and friends to get them through the first two days of content. Prices start at $0.99 for the first conversion and gradually increase to $9.99.

These package deals will never exceed $50 and will not use targeting based on previous purchase history.

Launch event offers

During the first 7 days of a player’s lifecycle, we host live monetization events that run offers specific to the features unlocked that day. Players receive additional tasks and rewards aligned with the theme of the day’s unlock. They are also offered IAP packs that facilitate the interaction of these unlocked features, usually through additional keys or progression materials.

These offers help focus players’ spending habits on the most important areas of progression to focus on that day.

Battlepasses everywhere

This game has more battle passes than any other game I’ve played. Nearly every system has its own battle pass. Each system has multiple passes, usually three, one free, one for $4.99, and one for $9.99. Players advance through the battle pass by completing daily tasks, earning progression points to unlock the next milestone.

If players want to stay competitive on the server, they must purchase all the battle passes and keep track of their progress every day. Some battle passes require players to purchase a monthly pass for that system in order to fully unlock the daily quests available in the battle pass. It is estimated that the game has around $100 worth of battle passes each month, for the core system and the event-based battle pass.

Gacha game

There are two types of gacha systems in the game. The first is a shard-based gacha, which is used to acquire friends and skills. Players drag this gacha tens of thousands of times to collect shards of friends and skills, and then unlock and level up those friends and skills. This first type of gacha has no drop rate protection visible to the player. Players can affect the drop rate by improving the gacha. They do this simply by pulling gacha.

This means that players gradually improve their skill and access to friends over time, as the chances of drops increase.

The second type of gacha is a direct pull gacha system where the user pulls the whole carrot, which does not require multiple copies to provide added value to the player. This second type of gacha also comes with a drop cap guarantee, ensuring that players will receive a specific reward after a certain number of pulls.

These gachas are exclusive to time-limited events and often combine an event-based quest system with event store offers to generate event gacha pulls.

How to improve the design

Gacha Improvements

Both of these gacha designs have some pretty significant design flaws that result in players not getting a good sense of value for their money. With the first design, a shard-based system, even collecting very rare pieces doesn’t feel like a real big win because players feel like they have to collect a ton of pieces. Additionally, unlocked items don’t necessarily translate into solid progression; many of the game’s top skills simply lack balanced utility and therefore impact progression more negatively than some of the mid-level skills.

The second gacha system lacks value transmission for the average player because of the proximity achieved. With free gacha pulls, players are a long way from reaching the number of gacha pulls needed to ensure they get a carrot. To achieve the first conversion in the system, this distance must be filled with a single purchase.

Games like Genshin achieve this brilliantly. In Genshin, players earn enough free currency each month to reach roughly 70% of the pulls needed for a guaranteed 5-star character. A single $20 purchase helps fill the gap until the player reaches the 100% needed for a guaranteed 5-star character.

Spending depth for high-spending players is achieved through a low-count shard system where players collect multiple copies of characters (up to six) to unlock meaningful utility and play combinations.

Ad Placement best practices in Midcore games

Legend Of Mushroom does a decent job of structuring its IAP strategy around key progression areas and player motivations, but its ad offering leaves a lot to be desired.

Players can pay $9.99 to remove ads permanently, but this seems very out of place and unoptimized in a game with so many monthly subscriptions. This effectively gives players two more keys of each key type to start daily minigames, three 15-run gacha pulls for each gacha type, some short time jumps to speed things up, and other very low value placements.

Given the number of progression areas and the developer’s success in monetizing Legend Of Slime (this game’s predecessor) with ads by placing ads in one of the main progression areas, there is little risk of IAP cannibalization.

Future Social Iterations

Legend Of Mushroom’s social features are one of the weakest parts of the game design. While the game includes the standard friends list and guild systems expected of a midcore RPG, they don’t engender meaningful long-term social goals or bonds as effectively as other recently released Idle+ games: for example, the social targeting systems in Whiteout Survival and Top Heroes. These two games encourage deeper social engagement through their expansive 4x systems built on idle play.

Legend Of Mushroom’s social system fails to motivate players to coordinate their gameplay or invest social and economic capital in friends and guilds. The game often requires players to harm people within their social network in order to make meaningful progress in the leaderboard system.

Games like Legend of Mushroom tend to have better long-term retention and recurring revenue when their social systems support building long-term friendships/communities. Players and their social interactions are becoming a central part of LiveOps, and due to the dynamic nature of most relationships, this means that there is always new content for players to interact with.

In summary, Legend of Mushroom has achieved a highly compelling core loop through clever use of a free and semi-continuous gacha pull mechanic. This gacha system is gradually being replaced by a wide variety of progression areas, each with their own mini-games and focused monetization systems. Access to these systems is typically timed by access keys that are updated daily, making for a strong return mechanism. Players typically interact with these games subconsciously setting psychological safety goals and achieving those goals through social performance in a shared social space. While the game has a great monetization design, its gacha system, IAP targeting, ad placements, and social features could all use some significant modernization to adopt best practices from other industry leaders.

Bonus Appendix Content

The launch month LiveOps event calendar