Dream Games' hotly anticipated new puzzler Royal Kingdom launches globally on November 21 2024, following over 18 months in soft launch.

Dream Games’ previous title Royal Match dethroned King’s evergreen Candy Crush Saga last year as the top-grossing casual puzzle game in the world. So Royal Kingdom has big shoes to fill, launching globally just under four years after its older, hugely successful brother.

Royal Kingdom is effectively Royal Match 2.0. The newer game is a match-3 puzzler set in the Royal Universe, with a classic +5 moves, level-based monetization model just like its predecessor. Royal Kingdom has an added spin of two PvE kingdom levels every ten levels. This new level type is a PvE “attack the Dark King” level where the matches and boosters attack obstacles above the game board like a puzzle RPG (see also Empires and Puzzles).   

Dream's strategy with Royal Kingdom seems to be “more of the same, but different”. So, let’s take a closer look at the state of the puzzle market and break down the thesis behind globally launching Royal Kingdom as the next game in the Royal Universe.

The Top 10 Games in the Puzzle Market, Pre and Post Royal Match

Looking at the above high level trend pre and post Royal Match's release, the casual puzzle market has decreased in downloads and DAU, meaning there is a smaller audience than four years ago for this genre. But the market's earnings have increased significantly, largely due to an increase in revenue per download. (RPD is a stand-in for LTV.) App tracking transparency has had a major role in reducing downloads, necessitating product changes to drive up the LTV to compensate.

The key takeaway here is that the top casual puzzle games are able to monetize the audience deeper and retain them longer, driving up the LTV and revenue. Our previous digests on how puzzle games and merge games are leading the next generation of the market also shed light on this trend.

What Was Dream’s Original Thesis for Royal Kingdom?

Royal Kingdom has had two soft launches. In April 2023 it was a PvP-focused Royal Match meets Coin Master game with a social casino economy. Players are presented with the exceptional core gameplay of Royal Match's levels with the added rewards multiplier, similar to level based casual casino games like Solitaire Grand Harvest.

This makes sense for the puzzle genre going forward, as the biggest limitation for monetization has been time — for players to spend more money in level-based puzzle games requires them to play more levels and spend on the +5 moves. This is in contrast with casual games like Coin Master and Monopoly Go where spend and time spent do not go hand in hand: you can just as easily spend $5 or $100 in a 10-minute session due to the rewards multiplier.

We highlighted this trend of casual puzzle studios exploring these puzzle and social casino games here.  

Royal Kingdom changed course this April to stray away from its PvP, Coin-Master-like core loop, and casino economy back to something closer to Royal Match. This came with a hard reset for all current players as the game shifted its focus from PvP to PvE — attack levels against the game’s antagonist, the Dark King. There are two reasons why this happened:

1. The player experience of a match-3, level-based game with the social casino economy is hard to build.
2. With the advent of the Super Light Ball in June last year, Royal Match performs on par, $32 US RPD, with the best level-based puzzle game with a casual casino economy, Solitaire Grand Harvest (read our deep dive here). 

So this V2 of Royal Kingdom ended up being much closer to Royal Match than the original thesis intended it to be. But, looking at either version of Royal Kingdom, it is clear that Dream always intended to make another Royal Universe match-3 game, setting itself as its own biggest competition and hence risking cannibalization. 

Royal Match vs Royal Kingdom Levels

The 10-level repeating funnel above shows that Royal Kingdom is both harder than Royal Match as well as less rewarding with Coins, the game’s premium currency. This added difficulty comes from the aforementioned two additional "Kingdom Levels".

These kingdom levels are more difficult than the hard match-3 levels, making them ideal to deliver players with an "out of moves" screen, the game’s primary monetization driver. Royal Kingdom also rewards players with more event tokens per 10 levels than Royal Match, shifting the focus to events for progression and rewarding.

The impact of these level changes from Royal Match can be seen in Royal Kingdom’s ARPDAU being 20% higher. Note that this compares both games in their soft launch periods in the U.K., which is impacted with the game reset as well as Dream doing better targeting with its UA for Royal Kingdom.

Though V1 was much higher in ARPDAU due to the social casino economy, it looks like Dream is confident in its V2 being a better decision for the long term.

Which brings us to the question why it is hard to build a level-based match-3 game with a social casino economy. From the data above, in a six month soft launch in the U.K.:

• Royal Match was able to convert 5.8% downloads into DAU, with an ARPDAU of $0.092.
• Royal Kingdom V1 was able to convert 6.6% downloads into DAU (limited to Royal Match super fans/golden cohort), with an ARPDAU of $0.210.
• Royal Kingdom V2 was able to convert 16% downloads into DAU, with an ARPDAU of $0.110.

This highlights that Royal Kingdom V1 had far less broad player acceptance than V2. Though the systems made a case for a more robust business model, the player experience could not engage a wide audience.  

Dream Scenario

With the global release of Royal Kingdom, Dream has put forward its best iteration of what a match-3, level-based, casual puzzle game can be. Several of the UX changes have been incorporated back into Royal Match, like the increased speed of the match-3 cascades and shorter level-to-level flows.

At the same time, Royal Kingdom is essentially Royal Match 2.0, with the same core gameplay, same boosters and the small addition of one new power-up. Even Royal Kingdom's live operations events cadence has been 1:1 with Royal Match.

Across the board, Royal Kingdom is a better product than Royal Match, but it also risks cannibalizing Dream’s current audience. As we’ve mentioned, the puzzle audience has shrunk, so there’s no way this launch won't have a material impact on Royal Match, if Royal Kingdom scales, right?

However, this is a play straight from the Playrix playbook, which has locked Gardenscapes, Homescapes and Fishdom into the top 10 highest-grossing puzzle games since 2017. And this seems to be working for Dream, as since Royal Kingdom's soft launch in the U.K., Candy Crush Saga's active users' numbers have been in decline, while Royal Match's have remained stable.

Royal Kingdom may not overtake its successful older brother as its growth will be cautious because of the risk of cannibalization. But with Royal Kingdom's global release, Dream is on the path to have two games locked in the top 10 highest-grossing games in the casual puzzle market for years to come.

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