Trailmix on five years of Love & Pies: “There is no status quo in live service”

• Herst believes live games can't just stand still and that teams need to adapt alongside changing player expectations, technology and the wider market.
• Rising UA costs have pushed Trailmix to focus more on understanding its existing audience and turning players into advocates.
• With Love & Pies entering its sixth year, Trailmix is taking the lessons from the game into its next phase under new CEO James Nicholas.

When Love and Pies launched in September 2021, Trailmix set out to build a merge game with more to it than its core mechanics. Five years later, the game has continued to be supported not only by its long-running live service, but by a community that has grown alongside it too. 

For general manager of Love & Pies at Trailmix Games, Felicity Gracie-Herst, the clearest measure of that longevity is not a particular revenue milestone or chart position, but the players who have stayed with the game since the very beginning.

“The thing I keep coming back to is that there are people who downloaded Love & Pies in September 2021 and have popped into the Windmill Café pretty much every day since,” she says. “Five years of someone's free time is an extraordinary thing to be trusted with.” 

The game has become a space where players have shared experiences from their lives, with Herst saying the team has heard from people who played through hospital stays, night feeds and grief, while others have connected with the game’s diverse cast of characters.

That relationship with its audience has helped to define how Trailmix approaches the game. Rather than treating the original launch as a fixed concept and executing it, the team has spent the last five years adapting Love & Pies in tune with players.

Herst also says she's proud of the team, adding that “running a live game for five years means constantly rebuilding the engine while flying the plane, and this team does it with ridiculous care.”

Building Love & Pies with its players

At launch, Trailmix’s ambition was relatively straightforward: to make a strong merge game with characters players would care about. Five years of live operations, however, has changed that approach. 

“We now make the game with players rather than for them,” Herst says. “Our Discord Insiders see features from the very first test, and their fingerprints are all over the game.”

That has meant involving the community in changes that go beyond individual features and events. Last year, for example, Trailmix rebuilt Love & Pies’ entire economy, which Herst says had seen no fundamental changes since launch and was no longer serving its long-term players. Rather than making the changes behind closed doors, the team instead decided to work through the process publicly with its community and iterated it over several weeks. 

“It took a lot of changes but players eventually started calling it ‘Love & Pies 2.0’ which was exactly what the team called it internally," she says. “That kind of collaboration is the best part of the job.”

For a five-year-old live game, the willingness and ability to adapt and make fundamental changes is particularly important. 

“There is no status quo in live service,” Herst says. “The game you launch is not the game you run, and the team that shipped year one shouldn't be working the same way in year five.”

Herst goes on to explain that this is becoming even more relevant as technology and player expectations continue to change. For Trailmix, adaptability has become part of the day-to-day work of running Love & Pies.

Looking beyond the live ops treadmill

The pressure to continue to produce more content is of course one of the biggest challenges that comes with operating a live game, particularly in a competitive casual market. 

Herst notes that studios should question whether simply increasing a game's content value is always the best approach, not just for players but for the teams working on it too.

“It is possible to slow down the treadmill,” she says. “Everyone is pushing for more events, cheaper and faster, but there is a cost on both players and teams. I believe there is a leaner model: fewer things made deliberately with more love.”

Herst explains that features simply made with more care can have a big impact. One example is the Love & Pies Sticker Album feature, which was developed in collaboration with independent artists. 

The same thinking extends to how the team evaluates its player feedback. For Herst, metrics remain important, but they don’t always tell the whole story of how a community is responding to a game. 

“Qualitative feedback is data too, so listen to actual words from players, not just the metrics,” she recommends. “Soft signals - sentiment, what the community jokes about and complains about - move before the dashboards do, and when read together alongside the numbers, they’re way more powerful than either alone.”

That approach is also influencing how Trailmix thinks about growth in a mobile market where acquiring users has become increasingly difficult. 

Moving beyond buying an audience

The economics of mobile user acquisition have changed considerably since Love & Pies first launched, with rising costs making the old model of gaining users and scaling through paid acquisition increasingly difficult for casual games. 

“The era when you could buy your audience at a margin is over for most of casual, and to be fair I’m not sure I miss it,” Herst says.

For Trailmix, this has meant putting more emphasis on understanding the audience it has already built and looking for ways to grow that further. 

“One of our values is that we’re powered by our players and we mean it literally,” she says. 

For the team, the underlying idea is that a player who genuinely connects with a game can become an advocate for it, creating a different kind of growth from a traditional UA campaign. 

“It’s slower and messier than a UA plan, but it’s also much more fun to work on as game makers,” Herst explains. 

It is also part of a broader shift in how Trailmix views the audience for Love & Pies. Despite merge mechanics remaining at the centre of the game, Herst says that the studio increasingly thinks beyond the boundaries of the genre itself.

What comes after merge?

The merge genre has become one of the most competitive areas of the casual games market. The success of titles like Microfun's Gossip Harbor has demonstrated the scale the genre can reach, while newer games are looking at different ways to push the format in a new direction. 

For Trailmix, growth is encouraging, particularly given the studio’s experience with the genre since its early days.

“Merge is having a genuinely exciting moment - Gossip Harbor topping the charts past Royal Match, Tasty Travels flying. Five years ago people asked whether merge was a fad. I think the answer is now pretty clear,” says Herst.

However, she doesn't try to predict the future of merge as much as she does the people playing in the genre. That distinction matters for a studio thinking about Love & Pies as a long-term franchise. 

“Mechanics and genres evolve over time. They are important in that it's where you meet the audience but it’s not why they stay for the long haul,” she says.

That sentiment has also shaped how Trailmix approaches its relationship with Supercell. The Finnish company acquired a majority stake in Trailmix in 2022, bringing the studio into the wider Supercell ecosystem while retaining its independence around Love & Pies. 

Day to day, Herst says the game remains firmly in the hands of Trailmix and the team in London.

“The decisions are ours, that’s very much the Supercell way,” she explains. “Their whole philosophy is small teams trusted to own their games completely, and they live it.”

She goes on to explain that rather than directing the game’s strategy, Supercell's role is more about challenging the team and asking questions that could sharpen its thinking.

“What surprised me is how much of the value is simply people,” she says. “Being able to compare notes with teams who've run beloved live games for a decade or more, through platform shits, genre cycles, everything the market has thrown at this industry, is a privilege most studios don’t get.”

A new chapter for Trailmix

The five-year anniversary comes at an interesting moment for Trailmix beyond Love & Pies itself. After almost a decade as founder and CEO, Carolin Krenzer announced earlier this month that she is stepping down as CEO to become executive chair, with former COO James Nicholas taking over as CEO. 

In a post on Medium, Krenzer reflected on the company's evolution since it was founded in 2017. She noted that the studio remains focused on creating meaningful experiences while also adapting to a games industry that has seen substantial change over the last decade.

That broader direction sits alongside Trailmix’s commitment to Love & Pies, with the game now entering its sixth year while the studio looks at what it can build beyond its existing franchise. 

For Herst, the immediate priority is to make the fifth anniversary meaningful for the people who have supported the game over the years: “Five years deserves a party, and knowing Love & Pies, there will be cake.”

There is more to come beyond the celebration. Trailmix has new live ops content and foundation feature updates planned for the coming months, which Herst says will help bring Love & Pies into “a new era”.

The longer-term ambition is to keep building on the elements that have helped the game reach this point. 

“More of the game is made with community, more moments, like sticker albums, that are unmistakably ours and making it even easier for players to share the game with the people they love,” Herst says. “Ultimately, a forever game is about the players.”

And while the studio is looking beyond its first enduring franchise, Herst is clear that Love & Pies remains central to the studio’s future.

“Everything five years of Love & Pies has taught us, how a small craft-led team keeps improving, how you build a relationship with an audience rather than renting one, is a blueprint we are taking forward,” she says.

“I fully aspire to be doing Love & Pie's 10th anniversary interview with you.”

For now, Trailmix has reached a huge milestone in achieving five years of Love & Pies and will take these learnings not only into the next phase of that game but also for whatever comes next under its new leadership.