The puzzle game category has experienced double-digit year-over-year revenue growth for years now — 34% in 2018, 17% in 2019, 29% in 2020, and 16% in 2021. In January of this year, mobile marketing agency Udonis wrote this as part of its Puzzle Games Report:
The matching games subgenre includes eon-old titans like Candy Crush Saga, Homescapes, and Fishdom, which all have seen near-continuous revenue growth in recent years. These games terrorize the waters in the bloodiest ocean of the casual game space, while only a very select few manage to not get eaten alive.
Every year, growth in the puzzle games category can be attributed to only a handful of huge successes. For the rest of the contenders, it’s a hard-knock life. When looking at Classic Match-3 and Puzzle & Decorate (which is predominantly match-3 as well), only 2 new games during the last 5 years have managed to safeguard a spot in today’s top-10 (based on revenue). The first one was Magic Tavern’s Project Makeover. Most recently, Royal Match, Dream Games' regally themed smash hit, was added to this exclusive list. The rest of the spots are still taken by aforementioned oldies.
To better understand the success of a game like Royal Match, simply glance at last year’s absolute growth in revenue compared to other top match-3 games. As you can see in the graph below, Project Makeover, Candy Crush Saga, and Royal Match were the three biggest growing match-3 games in terms of revenue. Impressively, especially compared to the others, all Royal Match revenue in 2021 came from new players, as the game only officially released in February. For context, Project Makeover had already acquired ~20M players in 2020.
This makes Royal Match the 8th most lucrative match-3 game in the world in 2021 based on absolute revenue:
Want to hear another impressive Royal Match stat? Out of the top 10 list of 2021’s revenue growers, Royal Match is the only remaining grower in 2022. Literally all other competitors from 2021’s leaderboard are in decline, including Project Makeover, the fastest grower of 2021. New competitors in terms of revenue growth are classified as “other” — more hybrid-casual successes like Zen Match (which is #2 in the revenue growth chart below) and Cube Master (which is #10 below).
From the perspective of downloads, Royal Match acquired a huge number of new players (nearly 30M) in 2021. It was only bested by Project Makeover — which had an insane year in terms of UA — and Tile Master.
Regardless of growth in 2021, it’s important to note that the games from the days of yore still topped the charts in terms of absolute downloads throughout the year.
For 2022 year-to-date, Royal Match downloads have actually plateaued. However, the fact that the game doubled its Revenue Per Download compared to last year helps justify its #1 spot in the 2022 revenue growth chart above.
There’s a lot to dig into here. Why was Royal Match able to grow when most competitors couldn’t, including other more recent hits like Homescapes? How was it able to find a wedge into the match-3 market and chip market share away from the category titans? We’ll explore all of this below, but let’s first start by understanding the team behind the game; after all, this level of success is no accident.
The Dream Team
In 2019, Turkey-based Dream Games was founded by 5 ex-Peak Games employees. Undoubtedly inspired and seasoned by the success of their old company’s hits — Toon Blast, Toy Blast, and to a lesser degree their match-3 switcher Lost Jewels — they set out to create their own success. The ambitious quintet consisted of Soner Aydemir as CEO, Hakan Sağlam as CTO, İkbal Namlı as Head of Software Engineering, Eren Şengül as Product Director, and Serdar Yilmaz as Art Director.
Maybe the most striking aspect of this ensemble at the time was their confidence in regards to the casual puzzle market and its saturation. Many CEOs in the space would have argued that trying to penetrate this shark tank of a market segment by making yet another match-3 game with a renovation meta would be suicide, especially as a newly founded company. However, the founders had a couple of tricks up their sleeves that helped convince Makers Fund and Balderton Capital to board the Dream train as early investors. A short financial timeline:
- In November 2019, to fund its initial inception, the team of founders — together with a handful of trusted employees — raised a $7.5M round of seed funding.
- In March 2021, coinciding with Royal Match’s global launch, the startup secured a $50M round of Series A funding. It was the largest Series A in Turkey’s startup history.
- Only 3.5 months later, at the end of June, the company secured another whopping $155M in Series B funding.
- In January of this year, $255M Series C funding was secured.
This staggering turn of events has led the company to be valued at $2.75B, only 2.5 years after its founding date. With less than 80 employees at the time of its Series C, Dream Games surpassed Supercell as the games company with the highest valuation per employee, with every employee being worth about $34M in market cap. It’s arguably an unfair comparison given the difference in both companies’ life cycles, their cash flows, and the amount of games they produce, but it’s a very impressive feat nonetheless.
At the time of the Series B, it became clear that Dream Games aimed to take their game to the highest levels of perfection before releasing it, not unlike other immensely ambitious companies like Supercell. Outside of games, Pixar has been mentioned as an inspiration. In Pixar’s case, the team heavily focused on fine-tuning its famous story spine and testing it until it was perfect. Because of the rigidity that was required throughout the process, the length of a Pixar project could take up to 3 years to complete.
The same laser focus can be seen in the way Dream Games operates. As CEO Aydemir said when raising the Series B last year, “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years, but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match, but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.” With an intense focus on perfectionism and an urge to design elegantly, the team grabbed the match-3 bull by its horns and started making changes that increased the player’s quality of life in ways never seen before.
Finding the Right Wedge
Even though the biggest match-3 competitors are typically occupied with adding complexity to their games (in terms of meta), the team behind Royal Match went the other way and obsessed over simplicity. As a result, Dream Games scooped up millions of players that play games mostly to feel accomplished and skillful by trying to solve puzzles.
This approach holds similarities to what King has been doing with its Candy Crush titles for more than a decade — a heavy focus on the puzzles with a very minimal meta layer around it, which creates a very slight dose of long-term progression. However, whereas King refrained from innovating on its meta games, Dream Games took away all possible friction that most puzzle-hungry players felt when trying other heavy-hitters like Homescapes and Lily’s Garden: no written narrative and no customization when decorating.
In a way, Royal Match does what hybrid-casual developers have been trying to do for some years now, albeit in a more high-fidelity landscape: wedge right in-between the old-fashioned, one-dimensional, core-focused games and the deep casual games with rich metas. This approach has found an audience to cater to that doesn’t want to get bored soon and search for a new game but also isn’t looking for a deep game with too many bells and whistles. This means that Royal Match, since day 1, has attempted to capture the classic match-3 players, as opposed to Puzzle & Decorate aficionados.
Because the focus is more on the core game experience, more attention has to be put on things like fluidity of the puzzle board, color & power-up balancing, power-up combinations, transparent modifiers, and overall level design. When zooming in on the levels of the game, it becomes clear quite quickly that Royal Match has gone full force towards loss aversion mechanics. Its levels are extremely well-tweaked towards the creation of near-misses that create pressure on players to spend some currency on extra moves or force them to activate those in-game boosters.
Additionally, Royal Match’s levels are designed for the easy use of power-ups the player might have acquired in the numerous events of the game’s well-oiled machine that is its live-ops calendar.
In this essay, in order to deconstruct the exact way in which Royal Match was able to achieve the above success, we’ll dig into the following topics:
- An analysis of Royal Match’s core game design
- A look at the game’s highly lucrative live-ops strategy and how different features improved the game’s performance
- Why the game’s marketing strategies work so well
- Where Royal Match has room to improve and where we think (and advise) the team will focus next
Let’s dive in!
Royal Match’s Core Design
The Match-3 Evolution
Before digging into the core mechanics that make Royal Match stand out, it’s helpful to put in context how match-3 got to this point.
In 2001, PopCap popularized the match-3 game mechanic by creating Bejeweled, taking inspiration from a 1994 game of Russian origin called Shariki, which is a fascinating story on its own. Then, in 2012, King improved upon Bejeweled by adding varied game boards, level modifiers, a saga map for meta progression, and, most notably, power-up combinations. These powerful, animated amalgamations were so gratifying and did such a terrific job at making the player feel smart that they lifted the entire spectrum of puzzle possibilities to another level. After that, in 2016, Playrix released Gardenscapes, which made these power-ups more accessible by removing their colors, making them accessible at any time, instead of only when matched with a similarly colored piece next to it. Over the years, a wide array of additional power-ups — or combinations thereof — have made sure to remove the needless matching in irrelevant areas of the game board when it has clogged up, a phenomenon we have seen happen for a long time in the original Candy Crush.
Royal Match takes all of that as a base. As any successful Puzzle & Decorate game, the game’s core loop is very simple to allow for minimal friction and easily onboarding even the most inexperienced of casual gamers.
In 2021, Dream Games’ Royal Match in turn optimized the power-up mechanic by evolving it into a truly frictionless experience. The power-ups are more generous and smarter — bombs with the biggest radii, propeller pieces changing target mid-air, and simultaneous moves, all in a game board so nimble and smooth it can only be described as the way Bruce Lee intended.
Some other specifics: the game features new levels every two weeks, doesn’t have multi-board levels, and has no visible loading screens, which means that the time it takes to reach the fun is best-in-class. Additionally, the game board almost never reshuffles (except when using the dedicated Jester Hat booster to force this), which definitely means some color-checking shenanigans happen with every move the player makes.
King Robert: Your New Best Friend
Royal Match is the first match-3 game that is so friendly and generous to the player with its power-ups that the game feels like it wants you to win instead of purposely making you lose. Even the constant presence of King Robert’s face at the top of the screen is designed to invoke human emotion by making him mirror the player’s feelings by checking the moves left to complete the game board. And when the going gets tough, Bobby gets real sad…
To frequently conjure up these moments, a good part of the game’s assortment of levels is designed specifically to create occurrences of “near-miss” experiences. For the ones unfamiliar, a near-miss in luck-based games is a commonly used technique to strengthen engagement of users into the experience. This is because players still take the near-miss as if they were playing a game of skill, in which case their failure would give them useful information on how to improve.
As R.L Reid (1986) states: “The conception of randomness of outcome is difficult to grasp and misconceptions are common. In everyday thinking ‘luck’ is often regarded as a variable that can have different values at different times. A near miss can be taken as a sign that ‘luck’ has changed value.”
This is not a new technique by far in puzzle game design, but Royal Match has really mastered creating these near-miss occurrences and banks on players getting triggered by them. Traditionally, the ramifications of losing a level would only be constricted to the experience within it (by forcing the player to start over). Royal Match perfects the streak-based loss aversion we saw executed so well in Lily’s Garden’s live-ops and doubles down with its own take: the Butler’s Gift.
When completing up to three levels in Royal Match, a bar is filled directly on the end-of-round screen. For every level won, the game places up to 3 power-ups into the board at level start. While this technique is far from new, levels in Royal Match are designed and balanced in a way so that these inaugural explosives are crucial to paving the way towards winning them. Instead of spending countless initial moves of opening up the board manually, these bombs blast through the initial layers of blockers like a knife through butter, opening up the level and allowing the player to start working on the level’s objectives right away.
As is common practice nowadays, the game sometimes tells the player a level is more difficult by flagging them as “Hard” or “Super Hard.” Even the latter levels can be won with 15 moves remaining because of combinations created by power-ups facilitated by your friendly neighborhood butler.
So what’s the trick here? With such limited reward space, what did Royal Match do to monetize enough players and allow for this streak-based, extremely gratifying, and forgiving level progression? The answer is simple: it charges more!
King Robert Loves Taxes
Initially, puzzle games allowed players to purchase 5 extra moves even before running out of moves entirely. Then, King started charging players $1 for 5 extra moves in Candy Crush Saga. Back in those days, the main innovation was putting players back into the level, allowing them to “cheat” by paying. Therefore, monetizing loss aversion in puzzle games as we know it was born.
King innovated further by letting players purchase Hard Currency to reduce sticker shock on the extra move prices, which allowed the team to gradually increase the cost of extra moves over the years. Others followed suit, and in 2022, one can see why Royal Match is called Royal Match: its cost of extra moves is $2 worth of coins for the first set of 5 moves - the highest in the genre! (e.g. Project Makeover: $1.19 and Fishdom: $0.89). At this point, King Robert starts showing his true colors: prices for consecutive sets of 5 extra moves are taxed heavily, going for $4.35, $6.65, and $8.95 consecutively. He didn’t become king for no reason! Luckily, the coin currency isn’t super hard; players earn coins constantly by winning levels, participating in events, and completing areas, but when having to buy these coins flat-out, these prices sure crank up real fast!
Assuming — as with any puzzle game — that the lion’s share of monetization comes from the End-of-Round (EoR) purchase that is extra moves, Dream Games carefully chose where to put its focus. The team has been A/B-testing different versions of the EoR screen, eventually converging towards a simplistic and ruthless display of the player’s options. Only crucial things to upsell the player extra moves or the game’s battle pass are shown, including King Robert’s sad face with a big zero next to it. Even the objectives are conveniently blocked by the player’s coin balance.
New Feature: Card Collection
When looking at Royal Match systematically, like any other classic match-3 game, it suffers from a lack of reward space where eventually everything the player cares about is winning levels and not much else. There is no way to diverge, collect, or achieve in any way in the meta game. It’s purely progression-based.
However, at the time of writing, Dream Games just released a new feature: card collection. It’s the game’s first permanent secondary progression mechanic. Next to earning boosters, infinite lives for X minutes and coins, players can now also earn a few cards every time they engage with events or complete milestones in the main progression of the game. These cards belong to specifically themed sets. As cards are acquired randomly, players can also find duplicates which they can eventually turn into a card of their choice. The team must have chosen to add it mainly to create the illusion of a more rich reward space, even though eventually, completed collections circle back to rewarding boosters and coins as well.
While features like these most likely won’t move the needle in terms of long-term retention, it does allow for a feeling of depth in its permanent feature set. As this is not something the team has been focusing on in a while, it’s refreshing to see. That said, the real power of Royal Match’s engagement lies in its event framework, so let’s dig into that next.
Live-Ops in Royal Match — A Noble Effort
Royal Match launched globally in February 2021 with only two kinds of live-ops events implemented: 1) King’s Cup (a single-player PvP event), and 2) a couple of collection events outlined below. Now, when opening the game 15 months after its conception, one can only be impressed by the sheer amount of events, sales, and secondary progressions that are present on the game’s home screen.
After the player wins a level, the secondary rewards that are earned are shown in a very gratifying, best-of-class sequence of events. The game takes its time to show these, as it adds to the continuous optimization of positive reinforcement that Royal Match shows the player whenever it can.
To show the impact of the game’s live-ops features that have been added after Global Launch, we’ll be looking at the apparent impact every one of these features has had on the game’s performance (in order of release) and presumably why. All following revenue numbers are taken from GameRefinery’s detailed update tracking over the 30 days after the feature was released. Note that these numbers could be muddied by other changes unrelated to the events themselves, as they are simply metrics measured after the update was rolled out.
February 2021: Book of Treasure & Propeller Madness
As mentioned above, when Royal Match launched globally on February 25th, 2021, these two collection events were already implemented. They seem like live events but are in fact permanent features disguised as events. Given that the game is developed by an ex-Peak team, one could say these events have replaced standard level-after-level progression in Toon Blast and transformed it into a time-limited path of rewards the player can choose to chase every few days.
It’s difficult to see the direct impact in terms of KPIs these features bring, as they were present on launch, but something that cannot be discounted is their potential to strengthen the player’s loss aversion at the most crucial moment during their journey. After losing a level, when trying to quit, the player is shown an additional prompt stating how many propellers or books the player has gathered while playing the level, which they will lose when deciding to not continue playing. This extra question makes the player think again if they really are doing the right thing; it’s much easier to hit that big green button below and pay the infamous $2 to continue.
June 2021: Royal Pass
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 31%.
Battle Passes are nothing new to games in the top grossing category. In fact, recent figures have shown that >64% of them contain a similar feature, and Royal Match is no exception. When integrated well, this feature can easily provide double-digit KPI increases, as has been the case here. Figures even show a D30 retention increase of 2% in June 2021, which is a very impressive feat but not uncommon for well-implemented Battle Pass features.
Usually, for games in the Puzzle & Decorate genre that feature customizable decorations, the final rewards of a battle pass are a major reason to purchase the pass in the first place. This is because the most effective implementations take their chances to offer unique skins for decorations or even more special rewards like pets.
For Royal Match, things aren’t that simple, as the game doesn’t allow customization. The solution? Social prestige. Right after purchase, the game temporarily ups the player’s amount of lives by 60% and gives the player a golden profile picture frame for the month. Additionally, all the player’s team members receive a small monetary reward. It’s not something everyone would willingly pay for, but Dream Games knows very well that it only has to monetize a relatively small amount of superfans, so the team repeated what it did with the extra moves and upped the price.
The revenue increase this feature caused is definitely attributable to the steep price tag the most engaged (and financially stable) players are required to flesh out. Assuming the pricing is well-tested, it’s pretty revolutionary that a >$10 tag is the most lucrative price point. The average price of a monthly pass in competitor games is usually a handful of buckaroos lower (Homescapes: $4.99, Lily’s Garden: $5.99, Candy Crush Saga: $6.99). This proves to show that with a high-quality and heavily polished product, enough players may be willing to pay a hefty price each month.
Something Royal Match could do to drive more engagement in the “social monthly pass” is add social mechanics directly into the pass, like adding some co-op progression in the reward track. This is more experimental and would have most likely distracted too much from the company’s focus during its implementation. As it has become quite clear, approaches like that are not in Dream Games’ DNA, while polishing the proven is.
June 2021: Endless Treasure
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 20%.
When Royal Match’s Endless Treasure feature came out, it was one of the first implementations of this kind of “Prize Road” and has been adopted into more games ever since. In short, the game initially shows a sequence of freely claimable prizes before it starts adding IAPs into the mix. The next free rewards are already visible, all locked up snuggly behind that low-price/high-value purchase.
Remember when the Piggy Bank became a thing in casual games around 2017 (yes, it’s been 5 years already)? The Endless Treasure sale is the new rendition of this now very much overused Piggy, as it clearly attempts to convert dubitable players into paying for the one paid option in the list to keep the free rewards flowing. It uses a slightly different variation of behavioral economics techniques based on the Endowment Effect. Not an approach to be expected from a king, but it certainly works.
October 4th, 2021: Sky Race
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 12%.
By far the most lucrative of the added live-ops events in this trip down memory lane is the Sky Race. It’s the first piece of PvP gameplay Royal Match features, and the team nailed its implementation. Over time, most opponents realistically (whether they are bots, real players, or a mix of the two) progress forward throughout the duration of the event. The top 3 players who win 15 levels the quickest earn prizes.
Events like these are as old as the hills themselves, with examples able to be found in games as old as Hay Day and Township. Adding competitions to trigger player types that are sensitive to these kinds of things is never a bad idea, as it makes the whole experience more rounded by adding another motivation to the mix.
In casual games like these, it’s usually not the highest priority, as it only appeals to a relatively small percentage of the player base, but for the ones that feel tickled, it’s a fun experience. The trick Royal Match uses is to keep the engagement pattern very low — players only need to keep winning levels, something they were doing anyway. Additionally, rewards for events like these need to be valuable but not unmissable; it’s important to not pressure sensitive players into unwanted, stressful situations. What also works is making the rewards a surprise, as the team at Dream Games chose to do.
October 18th, 2021: Piñata Party
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 6%.
Only two weeks after the previous update, another time-limited event was released to the players. Piñata Party requires the same tasks from players as the Sky Race, but this time it’s not against other players but simply against the clock. This safeguards all players to be able to get rewards from the event, instead of only the top 3.
Spread out over 3 increasingly profitable milestones, players can break the festive piñata every time they earn candies and reach the ‘levels beaten’ milestones required. Another difference with the Sky Race is that all prizes are foreshadowed instead of in closed chests.
November 2021: Team Treasure
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 2%.
When looking at the revenue numbers, this event clearly focused on player retention instead of monetization. Players earn steering wheels by winning levels. They simply can’t participate if they are not in a team, which makes this feature the most important incentive to be social by far. After joining a team, the player can see how far the team has progressed, and after winning one level, they can collect all treasures the team has been gathering so far. Of course, players can only do this once per event.
Because the player doesn’t have full control over their performance unless they motivate the entire team to push forward more, the final reward of this feature — one copy of every booster — is very generous.
December 2021: Lightning Rush
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 9%.
The last and second-most lucrative addition to Royal Match’s by then very impressive live-ops arsenal, Lightning Rush, came out at the end of last year and is definitely the most intense experience the game has to offer. This time, King Robert, the butler, and the obligatory dog every Puzzle & Decorate game must have jump into the tech lab. The player has 1 full hour to create as many 5-in-a-row matches as possible to create Light Balls. When firing these power-ups, the amount of pieces removed is tallied. The player who (after 1 hour) has removed the most pieces this way wins the competition and its treasure (5 boosters). All other players get zip; all or nothing!
The excellent performance of this event (or at least what is visible without any inside information) shows that some Royal Match players are triggered strongly by the PvP elements it provides.
February 2022: King’s Nightmare
During the first 30 days after this feature’s release, revenue increased by 1%, but downloads decreased by 21%!
Now let’s look at the most interesting case of incremental optimization seen in a long while. The King’s Nightmare feature is Dream Games’ way of avoiding “false marketing” by implementing the abstract puzzles that are shown in the game’s video ads as level goals, to keep CPI optimized.
When this feature was launched, it was A/B-tested as a level with seven varying animations at the top, to thematize the time pressure. Initially, this level was refreshed daily and reachable through a dedicated button in the main screen of the game, where all other live-ops have their point of access as well. When looking at the metrics of this release, that initial implementation didn’t show positive results in terms of downloads. For this reason, the levels were added to the game “invisibly” by sometimes popping them up in-between normal levels in the linear progression. This way, the levels — which are optional — are more likely to be perceived as fun palette cleansers instead of a distracting, mostly inactive placement on the main screen.
Data shows that D14 retention in March was up by almost 3% MoM, which — if this can be attributed to the variation these timed levels bring — is an astounding accomplishment.
A Regal Rhythm
When laying out all events like above, one can see that Royal Match has implemented several events that focus on the social motivations of its players. This is no surprise, as Toon Blast and Toy Blast also have a meta that gets a lot of engagement from teams and the gifting of resources. Now, in the case of Royal Match, even something like the Royal Pass that’s usually a player-specific purchase and a solitary engagement is garnished with a social component in terms of team rewards.
When laying out all events — and taking into account their lengths and frequencies — one can construct something like the following cadence diagram:
What’s important is that at any point in time at least a couple of these events are active. And since all these time-limited elements are lined up neatly near the screen’s edges, the game is perceived to be much richer than most of its competitors. What adding all these live-ops has created is that the player always feels like there’s something to do — all while keeping the timelines short enough to require the player to log into the game every single day. The result? A Revenue-per-Download (RPD) increase of a whopping 100% over the last year! Royal Match has managed to get its RPD to match that of its biggest competitors and may start exceeding those in the months to come.
The aforementioned live-ops are such a good combination of habit forming that it leads a steady amount of Royal Match players to pay for its battle pass every month. And even if that’s too high a price for some players, they might get tempted into paying for another, less pricey one-time offer. This could, for example, help them finish an event with a better ranking. All in all, the time-limited events in Royal Match are a true success story.
The Marketing
Royal Match has a well-chosen theme and player fantasy. Its entirely non-verbal storytelling is about King Robert and his castle, which he needs to restore to its former glory. This is a widely appealing theme that is able to overarch most cultural differences. In turn, the game’s marketing is highly story-driven as it focuses on the same narrative, but, as mentioned briefly above, somehow the castle now features rooms with dangerous traps King Robert needs to escape from.
Since trap-ridden castles as a phenomenon are even older than the medium of video games itself, this jump isn’t too far-fetched and allows the marketing artists to utilize a plethora of cartoon-esque trapping techniques like snake pits, moving walls with drills, lasers, rooms on fire, and even David Copperfield’s iconic water tank. Most videos show King Robert somehow finding himself on top of a grid of the game’s gems placed in such a way that matching them keeps him from getting hurt by aforementioned contraptions.
It’s unsure how far these ads reduce CPI for Dream Games, but usually acquiring one player for puzzle games like these can easily cost over $10. For this reason, it’s important to use every trick in the book to reduce these rapidly rising expenses.
Additionally, Dream Games has also been exploring other angles, most notably a series of full-on CGI ads, which seems to have become “the boss level of User Acquisition” you can only reach after you have successfully bested most of your competitors and secured those sweet rounds of funding that were mentioned before. A similar example of this trend was seen with Merge Mansion’s mysterious lore expansion at the start of this year. Six months after the $150M investment from Supercell, Metacore’s live action videos featuring Kathy Bates playing the game’s twisted-looking granny popped up. Where these videos were meant to pull audiences into the game through the use of more traditional media like TV, the videos were soon followed up with CGI versions that could be used in paid UA in competitor games to double down on the mystery. What’s next, Mark Addy as King Robert?
For a deep-dive into Royal Match’s creatives, have a look at Andrea Knezovic’s recent analysis on the Udonis blog.
Royal Match’s & Dream Games’ Future
What has become abundantly clear is that Dream Games can optimize a game with relatively scarce reward space and add enough variety and a sense of liveliness to it to make it into a very stable source of revenue. What is not so clear yet is how adept the team will be in adding more depth to the game while keeping its fans engaged. This might prove more difficult especially now that players should be getting sufficient rewards through live-ops to smoothly progress through the main levels.
The closer one gets to classic match-3, the more they will find that players care less and less about potential meta features being added. Given the game can’t use its decoration meta for exclusive rewards, and since it has a strong social foundation more than anything else, it makes a lot of sense to take that to the max. As social interaction in Royal Match currently is quite one-sided, this is where future big wins may still be possible. Any feature that expands the field of social interaction would be beneficial. It’s preaching to the choir, but it will stay true that features like these should feel as seamless and heavily polished as all others, to not dissociate parts of the game’s (by now most likely ironclad) audience.
Royal Match's Team Battle feature is live, which occasionally allows players to participate in asynchronous team-to-team competitions. But asynchronous competition can only bring players together so far. It would be refreshing to see feature implementations that have the potential to invoke more personal communication. This can, for instance, be done by social appointment mechanics like the Drinks feature in June’s Journey’s Detective Clubs.
Other more straightforward features in this trend that can still be added are things like a ‘level help’ mechanic, as seen in Lily’s Garden.
As its market saturates and CPIs keep rising, Dream Games will have to perpetually keep innovating on Royal Match’s marketing, which means that eventually that the LTV>CPI equation might eventually start swaying the other way. To preemptively counteract this, Royal Match and its marketing team could potentially benefit from Synchronous PvE events the likes of King’s Nightmare, but having a shared goal to save e.g. the entire castle from impending peril, which players would have to do together with their teams.
As for Dream Games as a company, in earlier interviews the founders hinted at their next game. The way it looks today, a new title should be in development now and might still reach soft-launch by late 2022. While no one knows what this title may be, it’s very likely that it will stay close to home in the puzzle space; the team seems to prefer to bank on expertise than on divergent experimentation. We’ll keep you updated on what the next game is as we learn more.
Conclusion
Nearly 1.5 years of steadily improving the game while being live has helped propel Royal Match — and, by extension, Dream Games — to become a king of the puzzle genre. Its high level of polish is to be admired, and its ability to both rapidly steal market share and monetize at such high rates should be studied by most F2P teams.
Again, more specifically, the company achieved this success by:
- Meticulously focusing on player experience above anything else; conviction to remove friction
- Not tread into Puzzle & Decorate waters but cater the game to classic match-3 players
- Doubling down on loss aversion while monetizing heavily on the most wealthy part of its audience
- Keeping feature scope manageable instead of expanding the game into many possible directions
- A/B-testing every change to make sure optimizations actually pan out as intended
Even though Royal Match still has room to improve and grow, it’s hard to imagine a better first game success for any games team. Royal Match now provides Dream Games with steady cash flows, which can be reinvested into designing the next great game(s). Following up on Royal Match will be a tall task, but if the team takes its valuable skillset and lessons learned into a similar category, then it very well may find fresh success. We’re excited to watch Dream Games’ growth for many years into the future.
Big thanks to Niek Tuerlings for writing this deconstruction, with a special thanks to Harshal Karvande for his shared insights. If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.
