Metacore restructures around Merge Mansion, may cut 160 Finland jobs

Metacore is pulling back to the one game that made it matter. The Helsinki studio said it is restructuring around Merge Mansion, and the move could eliminate up to 160 roles in Finland as the company shifts away from the broader expansion plan it once built around the hit.

The company said the restructuring will begin with change negotiations in Finland, while operations in Germany and Sweden are also under review. Metacore framed the move as a way to improve operating efficiency in a more competitive market, but the message was sharper than a routine reorg: the growth it expected after Merge Mansion launched in 2020 never fully arrived, and the studio is now concentrating on the title that clearly broke through.

That pivot lands hard because Metacore has spent years trying to turn one breakout into a larger portfolio. In April 2024, the company said it had opened its first overseas office in Berlin, hired a Head of New Games, and was building toward a structure that could support more than one live title. By June 2025, though, Metacore was already saying competition in casual and merge 2 games had intensified, that it was no longer the category frontrunner, and that it was trying to regain leadership while learning from other players in the space.

The numbers explain why Merge Mansion still carries the company. Metacore says the game has surpassed 60 million players worldwide and generated $700 million in lifetime revenue. The studio also said it turned profitable in 2024, when it recorded EUR 154 million in revenue. It has raised EUR 180 million in funding from Supercell, which is already Metacore’s largest shareholder and now plans to acquire the rest of the company.

That deal would fold Merge Mansion into Supercell’s live games portfolio, giving one of mobile’s most recognizable operators another durable service title. Supercell chief executive Ilkka Paananen has said Metacore’s team created the first game in the merge 2 category, a reminder that the genre Metacore helped popularize has become crowded fast.

For Metacore, the restructuring reads like a familiar mobile-game reality check. A single breakout can fund years of experimentation, but once the audience plateaus and the genre gets more competitive, the safest move is often to retreat to the live game that still works. In this case, that means protecting Merge Mansion, even if it comes at the cost of the bigger company Metacore hoped to become.