Hatchlings Match is the newest Facebook game from the Des Moines-based Hatchlings team.
Just over a week ago, Hatchlings Match—a new game from the Des Moines-based Hatchlings team—reached 100K users. Seven days later, the game had surpassed 500K.
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“I’m also happy to announce that Hatchlings Match has officially passed Hatchlings 2 in terms of number of users,” Hatchlings founder Brad Dwyer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Yesterday it had about 15 times as many players sign on as Hatchlings 2.”
Similar to games like Bejeweled or Candy Crush, Hatchlings Match—the company’s latest Facebook game—challenges players to pair Easter egg tops with their bottoms before time runs out. The game launched last month and drew 5,000 users in less than 12 hours. 
While the Hatchlings team still isn’t quite sure what caused the sizeable spike in users early last week, Dwyer (right) told Silicon Prairie News that interestingly much of Hatchlings Match’s growth has come from two countries that never achieved popularity with the original Hatchlings: Italy and Argentina.
On the Hatchlings blog, Dwyer gave some context as to how Hatchlings Match came about, as well as offering some honest analysis about where his company came from and where it needs to go.
“Hatchlings was a startup that, while growing rapidly, was being treated by its founder like a small business,” he wrote. “I should have been hiring like crazy with focus on building something for the long-term. But, because I had it in my mind that Hatchlings was just a fad that was going to implode at any minute, I played it safe and didn’t hire anyone at all.”
After struggling to engage new Hatchlings 2 users—without the context of the game’s first iteration—Dwyer says he and his team had to take a hard look at what they’d built and think about making a change.
“With our kimono opened we could finally have a frank discussion about what we should be focusing on,” he wrote. “What we decided was that we needed to start from scratch and make a few simple games to test our theories on what would make Hatchlings more fun. The first of those games is Hatchlings Match.”
Dwyer says the team will continue work on its other endeavors, including Hatchlings 2 and AlphaBrawl, an iOS the team has been developing where users play an “anti-word” game.
“From a company perspective, if we can keep the momentum of Hatchlings Match going, October will probably be our first profitable month in a long while,” he wrote. “The new plan seems to be working, but we’re not out of the woods yet. We need to keep executing. At least now I have some confidence that we are executing on a solid plan.”
While all of Hatchling’s games can be accessed via a mobile web browser, Dwyer says users are much less likely to discover the game—noting that only about 2 percent of Hatchlings Match’s traffic comes from mobile users. However, a spin-off game designed specifically for mobile platforms may not be far off.
“I think you will see at least one of our Hatchlings spin-off games in mobile app stores before the end of the year,” Dwyer told Silicon Prairie News.
Read Dwyer’s full blog post, “The story behind Hatchlings Match.”
Credits: Photo from Facebook. Brad Dwyer photo by Anna Jones and Phillip Harder / Thinc Iowa. Graph from Hatchlings blog.
