After four years in the live-service arena, My Perfect Hotel is tapping into IP integrations in a bid to entertain and retain its pre-existing audience, with the game’s developers at SayGames selecting Barbie as its first-ever third-party IP.
My Perfect Hotel launched the Barbie Dream Hotel, a Barbie-themed in-game event, on April 23. The standalone in-game location, which features iconic Barbie characters from different areas and includes collectible Barbie and Ken character skins that are usable in the main mobile game, will run until March 31, 2027. Similar to the main My Perfect Hotel game mode, players are required to manage hotel operations, serve guests, and improve facilities to advance in the game.
The Barbie Dream Hotel integration is the result of a partnership between SayGames and Mattel. SayGames chief publishing officer Anton Volnykh told GamesBeat that the company is interested in additional IP integrations in the future, but plans to focus on its Barbie integration for the coming year.
“We’ve just reached 300 million downloads for My Perfect Hotel. We want to extend the life cycle of My Perfect Hotel, and want to make sure that more people play the game — that the existing audience plays this Barbie collaboration,” Volnykh said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We will obviously be running more live ops in parallel not related to Barbie — like a Halloween event that is planned for later this year — so there will be another version of the existing spooky hotel arriving. There will be more hotels added to the game in the future, but if we’re talking about the IP collaborations, Barbie is what we’re going to be focusing on for this year.”
SayGames views third-party IP integrations as an audience retention strategy, with Volnykh acknowledging that some of the company’s core games, like My Perfect Hotel, were moving into a phase of live operations in which serving the needs of existing, longtime users was becoming an increasing priority. He said that a significant number of pre-existing players had returned to the game due to the Barbie integration, with over 700,000 players having completed the event so far.
“We decided that such collaborations would be something that would give a lot of value to our player base, depending on the game, and so this is when we started looking for potential partnerships,” Volnykh said. “Mattel was our first choice when reaching out.”
Mattel has been engaged in its own push into digital content and gaming over the past year, with the company taking over full ownership of its game development arm Mattel163 in February, just over a month after announcing that the studio had achieved a total player count of over 550 million. At the same time, third-party IP integrations have become an increasingly important revenue stream for live-service games, with prominent titles like Monopoly Go shifting to seasonal models that allow for more regular IP integrations.
Volnykh and his team at SayGames were so pleased with the creativity and performance of My Perfect Hotel’s Barbie integration that he decided to purchase a Game Developer Barbie for every member of the game’s development team. Game Developer Barbies haven’t been manufactured since 2016 — so, for better or worse, Volnykh’s decision to reward the My Perfect Hotel development team had the downstream effect of driving up global prices for the increasingly rare doll.
“The only way you can buy them is to buy them on eBay,” Volnykh said. “So, we basically bought all the Game Developer Barbies on eBay — you can’t find them anymore.”