Founded in 2020, Ridgge is a small studio based in Turkey. Their latest title, Conquer Countries, is their first dive into hybrid-casual gaming. To scale, balance, and monetize the game, they needed a publisher who understands how to drive success for hybrid-casual titles - so they turned to Supersonic.
Together with Supersonic, Ridgge was able to take the game from a promising idea to a leader in the decision-making genre. Here’s the story of how a mix of the Supersonic team’s insights and the Ridgge team’s talent transformed Conquer Countries into a player favorite.
How to conquer the world
In Conquer Countries, players need to make high-stake choices every five seconds about their state’s rise to global domination - whether through diplomacy, conquest, or decisions about their nation's happiness and resources.
The primary gameplay mechanic is decision-making. Players have to choose between several options, with each option leading to a different outcome. Each outcome has long-term effects on the player’s progression, creating a compelling connection between the player’s choices and the world of the game. This, combined with Conquer Countries' simple but polished visual style and compelling narrative of conquering the world, has proven to be a winning formula.
The best ideas are a collaboration
Finding this formula was a collaborative effort between the Supersonic team and Ridgge. Ridgge’s strongest point has always been their production skills - their team are experts at building high quality, good-looking gaming experiences. But, they needed an extra edge in ideation and figuring out how to iterate for long-term success. They looked for a publishing partner who could help with both while also offering robust support.
The originalidea for Conquer Countries originally came from the Supersonic team, inspired in part by another Supersonic idle decision-making game - Family Life.
While developing and managing Family Life, the Supersonic team recognized players’ love for decision-making simulation games. But, the team also found that this subgenre struggled to maintain late-game retention after D7. Games in this subgenre require a huge volume of content to keep players engaged, and with so much similar content players often find the gameplay repetitive and can churn.
However, the team also recognized that if players were presented with long-term consequences as a result of their actions, they were more likely to stay later in the game and experience greater emotional investment.
With these insights, the Supersonic team took the idea of creating a decision-making simulation game that leveraged late-game consequences to Ridgge.
To make the game uniquely theirs, Ridgge’s team came forward with the idea of adding a real-time strategy loop and an empire building narrative on top of the decision-making mechanics. The result was a highly marketable game with solid monetization potential: Conquer Countries.
A perfect candidate for IAA
In the game, players are presented with a new decision every 5 seconds. These gaps in gameplay, between the decisions players need to make, positioned Conquer Countries as a perfect candidate for interstitials. On top of that, the decision-making mechanics offered prime placements for RVs: when deciding what choice to take next, users see a text box featuring multiple options with the result of each option displayed - and the best outcome behind an RV.
Once ads and RVs were implemented, the game’s revenue skyrocketed. Part of the success was frequent RV placements in the early-game, resulting in positive player LTV despite the late-game drop-off often common in decision-making games. The early-game placements also led to engaged users very quickly understanding the impact of RVs in their progression, incentivizing them to watch RVs early and often. On average, acquired users were ROAS positive by D14.
Boosting retention through gameplay
To further increase engagement and player investment, the team optimized the decision trees in the game with dynamic questions that branched into unique paths based on the player’s choices. Then, to boost replayability and reduce predictability, questions and outcomes were randomized for each playthrough. Together, these optimizations gave players the sense that their individual choices mattered, while also keeping storylines fresh.
More content was added in the form of new territories that players needed to conquer in order to keep players playing for longer. At first, players could only conquer North America, but later updates made global conquest possible. From the maps to visuals, the team optimized feedback mechanisms like including a World Map view and global conquest progress visualizations to make every win feel more tangible.
Creating a better FTUE to combat churn
Beyond optimizing gameplay and monetization, the FTUE is also critical for preventing early-game churn. For Conquer Countries, one of the biggest problems the team discovered was player frustration from inconsistent question sorting and a steep difficulty curve early on.
To address this, they implemented standardized early game questions and tested it alongside reduced early-game difficulty. These optimizations resulted in smoother onboarding, less churn, and more players making it past the early-game.
Achieving a balance of engagement, monetization, and retention
Turning Conquer Countries into a hybrid hit meant balancing content depth with monetization and variety. Together, the team from Ridgge and Supersonic were able to achieve that balance resulting in an average ARPU D7 uplift of 19%, an average playtime increase of 10%, and a 10% increase in RV impressions on iOS. On Android, D7 average playtime increased 8.5% and RV impressions increased by 7.5%, while D7 retention increased 4.5%.
Conquer Countries proves that innovative mechanics, a thoughtful approach to monetization, constant iterating and testing, and a publishing partner you can rely on is the formula for hybrid-casual success.
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