Executive Summary

• Kingdom Maker has been in development since 2015 by the founding team of Kixeye, which has been iterating on the social strategy genre since 2007.
• Kingdom Maker’s assets and team were divested into a new organization, Global Worldwide, in 2019 when Kixeye and its legacy games were acquired by Stillfront Group.
• The game was in soft launch in the US during H1 2022 and generated $200k/month, 26k downloads/month, and $6-7 in RPD.
• The global launch took place on June 14, 2022, and as of August 2022 has generated $3.8M in revenue and 1.7M in downloads.
• Kingdom Maker is published by Scopely, whose best-performing title is another 4X strategy game, Star Trek Fleet Command, that accounted for 27.5% ($87M) of the company’s overall mobile IAP revenues in H1 2022.
• Kingdom Maker adds RPG elements to 4X gameplay with the addition of Nobles: a family of characters that players assign to lead armies, trade resources, and take part in diplomacy with other players.
• As a 4X game launched in a post-IDFA world, Kingdom Maker’s humorous, stylistic presentation and hybrid gameplay with RPG mechanics make it a worthy contender.

Make it Reign

Kingdom Maker is a new 4X strategy game developed by Global Worldwide (ex-Kixeye team) and published by Scopely. The game is a product of the iterative refinement of the build & battle strategy games made by the founding team at Kixeye (formerly Casual Collective). Kixeye pioneered the mid-core strategy market on Facebook with games like Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates, Vega Conflict, and Desktop Defender, generating more revenue per DAU and retaining players longer than most other social games on the platform.

Back in 2019 when Stillfront Group acquired Kixeye (link), the assets pertaining to Kingdom Maker were divested into Global Worldwide, along with the founding team that continued to work on it. According to Global Worldwide CEO Will Harbin (link), offers at the time did not fairly value Kingdom Maker, and hence he chose to sell the legacy games but divest Kingdom Maker and the team into another independent company, Global Worldwide.

Kixeye is famously known to have pioneered the build & battle strategy genre on Facebook, making it accessible with its stylized presentation and short-lasting battles. However, Kixeye was slow to adapt to market trends on mobile, with Backyard Monsters on Facebook being the inspiration for Supercell’s Clash of Clans on mobile/tablet devices. With the development of Kingdom Maker starting in early 2015, the team at Kixeye made a new technical start for mobile and aimed to build an architecture that supports operations at the scale of a decades-long game-as-a-service. It is seeking to further influence the future of strategy games on mobile by combining elements of the role-playing and simulation genres.

Kingdom Maker was soft-launched in the US in December 2021 for a period of 6 months before launching globally in June 2022. During the soft launch period, the game got about 26k downloads per month, generating around $200k in revenue every month, with RPD trending between $6-7. With these promising early numbers, the game was launched in partnership with Scopely, whose library includes the massively successful 4X strategy title Star Trek Fleet Command, and who saw potential in publishing the game.

Comparing Kingdom Maker’s early performance in the US with 4X strategy genre toppers like Lilith’s Rise of Kingdoms and Scopely’s Star Trek Fleet Command shows:

• In terms of RPD, Kingdom Maker is performing much better with $14.42 in RPD (US, iOS, 3 months from launch) than Rise of Kingdoms’ $9.89, and in-line with Star Trek’s $14.84.
• Rise of Kingdoms beats Kingdom Maker in retention (US, Android), likely due to the higher production values and UX improvements, but Kingdom Maker is mostly in-line with Star Trek, having a much higher D1 (43% vs 35%).
• Average revenue per DAU (US, Android) for Kingdom Maker and Rise of Kingdoms is close, yet lower than Star Trek’s, likely due to a more concentrated audience because of the Star Trek IP. This may also explain why Star Trek has lower D1 retention but better ARPDAU.

In 4X, players have extensive control over their empires, from resource gathering, base building, and raising an army for war to technological and political advancements to engage in diplomacy — all in a race to dominate a persistent and finite game world. The release of Kingdom Maker marks the refinement of what the ultimate 4X strategy game can be: one that offers players unrivaled freedom to choose between engaging in direct combat or toppling their enemies through the use of influence and espionage.

In this piece, we explore what makes Kingdom Maker deeper and broader than its competitors (and where it falls short), starting with:

• The state of the massively successful strategy genre on mobile
• What makes a 4X game?
• The unique RPG spin of Kingdom Maker on the genre
• What challenges in the post-IDFA world are holding it back?

Before deep diving into Kingdom Maker, let’s first look into what makes the XXXX of 4X Strategy games.

The XXXX of 4X Games

4X is a subgenre of strategy games in which players take the role of a leader, build an empire, and lead it to supremacy. The goal of a 4X strategy game is to grow in power through various means: economy, warfare, technology, and diplomacy to dominate all other players on the server. 4X games are known for their upfront complexity, strategic depth, and grand scale.

The 4X abbreviation stands for the order of gameplay in 4X games:

• eXplore (the Map) — The game world setting pulls players in to start building an empire in a new environment.
• eXpand (an Empire) — Exploring the game world leads to the discovery and expansion of the player’s empire.
• eXploit (the Resources) — Resources in the game world are ripe for use in order to grow in power and efficiency.
• eXterminate (any Opponents) — The game world is limited in territory and resources, leading to conflict between players and the environment for dominance.

4X games are systemic, persistent playgrounds with intricate connections and balance between the various game systems that give players an array of decisions to make as per their playstyles. Making decisions for your empire or clan changes the persistent game world for other players on the same server, giving rise to unique and memorable experiences as you play. In this manner, the game world is a living, changing entity, so it continues to chug along even when a player is offline.

The State of Strategy Games

The strategy genre is the second most lucrative (by revenue) genre on mobile today, accounting for $5.9B (or 33.2%) of App Store games revenue and $1.7B (or 15.3%) of Google Play games revenue in H1 2022. Yet it only accounts for 496M downloads on the App Store (or 11.8% of game downloads on the platform) and 1.1B downloads on Google Play (or 4.6% of game downloads on the platform), making it a high ARPU genre with a steep barrier to entry and overall niche appeal.

The top-grossing game worldwide in H1 2022 is Tencent’s strategy MOBA, Honor of Kings, which makes about $1B in China alone and is set to launch worldwide later this year (link). Alibaba’s Three Kingdoms Tactics is a strategy 4X game making it in the top 10 with $300M in revenue in H1 2022, again mostly from China. Lilith Games’ Rise of Kingdoms secures a spot at #14 with $247M in revenue and a more western-skewed distribution — China accounts for 15% of net revenue, and the US accounts for 30%.

Games in the strategy top-grossing charts in H1 2022 showcase the strong performance of the 4X subgenre, with 6 out of the top 10 being 4X. Games like Lilith’s Rise of Kingdoms, Funplus’ State of Survival, and IGG’s Lords Mobile have been known to find success globally. The other dominant subgenre is MOBA, featuring games like the aforementioned Honor of Kings, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which skew heavily towards China-only successes.

Looking at the above chart, which showcases the top US games in H1 2022 by revenue, two strategy games make the overall top 10 list: 1) Evony, Top Games’ strategy 4X game (with $108M), and 2) Clash of Clans, Supercell’s build & battle game (with $98M). The strategy games genre is dominated by the 4X subgenre in the US, with 8 out of the 10 top-grossing titles being 4X, with Supercell’s Clash of Clans and Clash Royale being the outliers. Scopely, the publisher of Kingdom Maker, also published Star Trek Fleet Command back in November 2018, a 4X strategy game making $62M in the US (and $87M worldwide) in H1 2022.

Looking at Scopely’s numbers for H1 2022, Star Trek Fleet Command accounts for roughly 27.5% of the company’s overall mobile IAP revenues, though accounting for only 3.9% of the downloads in the same timeframe. As a fresh take on the 4X subgenre, Kingdom Maker fits well alongside Scopely’s portfolio of mid-core games and has potential for knowledge sharing between studios to support the growth of such a complex product.

4X strategy games are niche in appeal and rely on finding a small audience of high-spending whales. Targeting such players has been made challenging since the deprecation of IDFA in April 2021, leading to a decline in global downloads for the genre. A revenue decline followed suit, though some games have so far been able to stabilize their revenues by investing in stronger live-ops content.

With strategy being the second most lucrative genre worldwide, and the US strategy charts being dominated by 4X games, Kingdom Maker is aiming to take the world by storm.

What Makes a Kingdom?

In Kingdom Maker, every player starts with a Keep within their own City, which acts as their individual seat of power. Players gather resources to advance their cities through technological, economic, or warfare upgrades and build walls, towers, and defenses to stave off any invaders. Each city is located in a county where players can find other players’ cities, different resources for mining, enemy camps for PvE conquest, and dungeons to raid. Alliances can be formed for team play for up to 35 players.

Each county has a capital city that can be attacked and conquered for additional bonuses, as well as to generate Silver Tax for its alliance for every trade made in the player-owned county. If a player alliance owns the capital of a county, their banner is shown on the state map. Counties are further grouped into States, and States are further grouped into Regions, with their capital cities offering large bonuses for the players controlling them.

Players are able to relocate from free places on the map to higher-level regions rich with resources (and opponents), which is initially blocked by some level constraints in the early game. When victorious in attacking and conquering other cities, players then relocate to the fallen city, forcing their opponent to move outside the county that they were in. Players can relocate for free every hour, with the relocation cost being based on the time skipped on the hourly limit as well as the distance to relocate.

All new players are under a beginner’s protection called ‘The Bubble,’ which temporarily protects their city from being attacked until they reach level 10 or perform actions like attacking other players, which pops the bubble prematurely. This helps new players onboard in a safe environment and grow their cities, building up their resources and armies before getting into PvP conflict and being exposed to raids. The beginner bubble is a one-time exclusive for new players, and once it’s popped, its protection is removed forever.

These XXXX mechanics are standard fare for 4X strategy games on mobile, and Kingdom Maker does an adequate job of sticking to genre expectations and delivering the depth of gameplay options. Though not innovating too much on this front, the team focuses mainly on the innovation of adding role-playing mechanics to the mix: the Nobles.

A Noble Lineage

The Nobles are the biggest new addition to the 4X strategy gameplay and start as characters that each player creates when beginning the game, forming their Noble Family. Games like Rise of Kingdoms use Commander characters to lead armies and give some passive bonuses, but Nobles in Kingdom Maker are used for all the core actions in the game — scout the map, explore dungeons, lead armies, manage cities, and even give birth to more Nobles. Nobles range in Quality which is determined at birth from Runt to Mythical, with higher-quality Nobles having more traits and better bonuses.

This family simulation mechanic is prevalent in games like Game of Sultans and King’s Throne. These games have seen some success in the past but are struggling as a subgenre. This lineage-generating mechanic of giving birth to more Nobles in the hope of receiving higher-quality offspring comes off as quite male chauvinistic; arguably a good thing for the heavily male-skewed 4X subgenre.

New babies inherit appearances from their parents as well as a chance to advance in quality and stat potential. Nobles feature a huge range of customization options like picking their Role (Trader, Knight, Merchant etc.), Talents (Inspiring, Fanatical, Alluring etc.), and Equipment. They gain XP, levels, and stat increases as they perform actions, gaining bonus XP for performing actions that resonate with their role. Unwanted Nobles can be sent to other families or gotten rid of permanently by tossing them in the volcano at the center of the map.

The rooms in the player’s Keep are like a light implementation of the Fallout Shelter-esque base management, where rooms can be activated for bonuses by dragging and dropping Nobles into them. “Room boosting” grants bonuses like speeding up construction and research or increasing production in the city. Each room can be boosted by two of the player’s Nobles and one Noble requested through another player. Each Noble’s characteristics can synergize with different rooms and bonuses.

Nobles are used for all character interactions in the game like forming alliances with other players through marriages, helping or sneakily sabotaging other Noble families, capturing opponent Nobles, or bribing them to disguise themselves as other Nobles, causing human drama and chaos. These human characters are tools for improving the rapport with other players, finding allies and forging bonds, all the while crafting the player’s unique family story.

The Nobles elevate the core 4X strategy gameplay by making interactions feel human and unique to the characters. Players are in control of the human drama unfolding alongside the mechanical game of conquest, adding to the layer of political and diplomatic intrigue. Kingdom Maker is a grand strategy role-playing game of customizing your Noble family and leading them to carry out deeds under the family name for years to come.

This makes Kingdom Maker significantly stand out in its genre, where connection to most 4X games is purely driven by the XXXX and alliance gameplay. Adding this 5th X to the genre —eXistence — may well be the secret to Kingdom Maker’s higher early retention, and investing in your family lineage is a powerful long-term engagement and monetization driver. The first session in Kingdom Maker leaves players not only with a new empire to rule but with a family of Nobles they birth into existence, making their empire a home to nurture and grow.

One of the biggest roles that Nobles play is leading all the players’ armies. Armies in Kingdom Maker are used for offensive actions like attacking and raiding PvE and PvP settlements for resources as well as defensive actions like reinforcing and guarding against attacks. They are also used to gather resources from mines by making a camp beside them to quarry the materials over time. Each Army is led by a Noble from the player’s family and supports additional battalions under Champions – strong secondary characters recruited using the game’s gacha system.

Players can then assign troops under their Nobles and Champions from the pool of troops they have already trained in their city, including Infantry (Swordsmen, Axemen), Ranged (Archers, Crossbowmen), and Mounted (Cavalry, Lancers). These troops can be further equipped with items to boost their stats and abilities. Through research and upgrades in their cities, players can increase their army size along with offense and defense bonuses.

After every battle, players can heal their armies and revive any injured or damaged troops for less time and resources than it takes to train new ones. Each unit type functions in a specific way on the battlefield, and all combat is AI-controlled in real time. Players can only choose to reinforce or retreat from battles. Units grow in strength in tiers from Bronze to Silver to Gold, requiring higher-end combat research as well as rarer resources for training higher-tier units.

The Stuff of Legend

Champions are at the heart of the game’s gacha and are recruited using Bronze/Silver/Gold tokens earned through daily quests and chests or bought in bundles in the game’s store. Players need to collect Champion shards to unlock and upgrade them, with rarer Champions requiring more shards. Champions give a bonus to troops in their battalions, and some also have unique skills that are used in combat.

The game contains three timed chests that act as appointment mechanics to return to the Stuff tab every 10 minutes, 4 hrs, and 24 hrs. These chests reward players with resources like Food, Wood, and Stone, as well as speed-up tickets to skip any timers. Similar to the champion gacha packs, there are battalion equipment packs that are divided into Bronze/Silver/Gold to roll for equipment for the troops.

Consumable items range from cosmetic items that can change your Noble’s appearance to ones that boost certain Noble actions like increasing the chance of acting aggressively or decreasing the chances of capture. The ‘Mask of Many Faces’ is a unique item that lets players steal the identity of another Noble and infiltrate their keep, opening up more mischievous options. Items are found as loot and can be purchased in the store.

With all these characters, items, and systems at play, let’s look at how the game encourages players to interact with them for engaging sessions.

The Daily Grind

Kingdom Maker features a robust task list of quests and dailies to guide players in every session, and they are primarily divided into:

• Dailies: Quests that reset daily and reward players with resources for completing them. These quests cover a variety of daily actions like mining, raiding, and exploring dungeons. Completing these quests fills up a daily milestone meter with additional rewards to unlock. Completing the daily milestone meter seven times unlocks an even bigger reward, and players do not lose progress if they miss a day. These quests nudge players into participating in various game actions every session and chasing completion on a daily basis.
• Objectives: These quests go hand in hand with the progress of the player’s city, often requiring players to build the next upgrade or research the next technology and usually offering as a reward some of the same resources required to complete them. They form a base blueprint for all players to help them move forward and advance their cities.
• Story: These quests take players through a campaign narrative that introduces them to new characters and various game mechanics. Players learn to navigate the game world through character interactions and dialogues and steadily get to know the game’s growing systems like how to explore dungeons, trade for silver, and bribe other Nobles. The narrative carries the game’s signature humor and even references the player as ‘The Finger,’ thereby breaking the fourth wall.

The daily grind is well balanced, with the early game being generous with resources and short timers for players to progress at an exponential pace. The mid game slows down to nudge players to alleviate resource pinches and long timers by grinding more PvE/PvP content, engage in social interactions or make purchases outright, while keeping a steady flow of achievements and rewards for every session.

These to-do lists are mechanically set up as part tutorials for the game’s systems and part reminders about the available options to interact with the world. The campaign does a good job of taking the player through every possible interaction, whereas the objectives ensure players are always making steady progress on growing their city, army, tech, and families. All of these to-do lists exist under the Objectives button on the main HUD for easy access, with notification badges to show when a quest is complete.

There also exists a Quick Access button above the Objectives that opens a handy overlay showing actions that are currently idle, like building, researching, and training troops. This button gets a notification badge when previous actions are complete and new actions are available. Due to its higher position, ease of access, and notifications logic, it’s easier for players to get into the Quick Access actions loop every session than jump into the Objectives tab and chase the campaign or dailies.

Though it is important to ensure building, research, and training actions are always working, the nudge from the Quick Access button dominates the Objectives. This may leave players lagging in the Campaign and missing useful tutorials for new game systems as well as losing out on the comfort of chasing the daily goals. When it comes to priority, Objectives should be prioritized over the Quick Access to ensure that no players miss out on the functionality of the game’s complex systems.

Alongside these quests, the game features an event framework to add variety to the goals and rewards that changes on a daily basis.

Everyday Live Ops

Events in Kingdom Maker come in two types:

• Solo Milestone Events: Players gather points for doing activities like combat, research, or building to unlock rewards on a progress bar. Players can chase rewards for the next milestone until the event is completed or the timer ends.
• Solo Leaderboard Events: Players gather points for defeating enemy camps or ranking up their champions, competing with other players on a leaderboard. Rewards are granted at the end of the timed event according to the final ranking.

These events are simple and functional, nudging players to pursue specific actions like building or combat, changing it up every few days and repeating on a weekly cycle. They reward players with tokens to recruit more Nobles, XP to level them up, as well as resources to advance the city. Each event is displayed using the same format, with a progress bar of rewards followed by a list of actions to score points. Though the actions differ from one event to the next, their presentation does little to make them feel varied. Their simplicity makes them lack charm and delight, leaving them feeling purely transactional.

Kingdom Maker is light on events and live operations, currently running safe, by-the-books progression events for players to chase without much attention and lacking any seasonal content and variance to drive player focus and investment. This area requires more investment to make the game events feel truly changing over time and drive a stronger sense of FOMO that makes players want to return and pleasurably experience it every day.

Players can pursue these goals single-handedly, but the game is more rewarding when played with others, forming an Alliance.

Forging Alliances

Alliances can be formed between up to 35 players, with one player being the Leader, one being the Temple Keeper, and some players being promoted to Managers by the Leader. Alliance gameplay is one of the key features of 4X strategy games, supercharging the map domination gameplay from individuals to teams working together. All members’ activity and support are measured by Prestige, a weekly rolling resource that signals to the Alliance what a member’s overall effectiveness is.

Players can ask their Alliance for help on all timed actions in their city, and alliance members can reduce the timers by helping (within system-generated limits). Since all core gameplay activities have timers or cooldowns, this makes the Alliance an essential part of the game, with each action followed by an ‘Ask Alliance for Help’ prompt. The Alliance also shares a chat where members are notified if a player gets attacked, giving them a chance to act in real time and send reinforcements.

The Temple Keeper of an Alliance can build the Alliance Temple in their city using Blocks that can be crafted by all members. The Temple gives access to Spells that can be charged by Alliance members winning battles, with higher-level opponents granting bigger charges. Spells affect all members of the Alliance and come in two forms: 1) offensive spells that apply a debuff/handicap on opponents, and 2) defensive spells that grant bonuses to production and armies.

The Temple grants additional defenses to the city hosting it and needs to be protected from attacks. When at the highest level (40), if the Temple Keeper’s city is defeated in battle, the Temple loses a level. Alliances work together to protect, build, and upgrade the Temple for unlocking and upgrading spells, and this forms the crux of a unified community building with a shared benefit. Alliances are also a great place to find Nobles to marry!

Leveraging Levity

Kingdom Maker’s medieval fantasy setting is elevated by a stylized world and self-referential humor leaning on satire. Though the cartoony presentation feels very inviting, it may broaden the appeal to less hardcore players who find the complexity of the game daunting. Humor is always tricky to work with, and Kingdom Maker shines when using fun visuals to incite laughter, like the low-level archers depicted aiming seriously at a target next to them, or the game’s notorious ‘Boink’ animation when two Nobles hit the sack to make a baby.

The humor in the self-referential writing is hit and miss, with the most common jokes referencing the mobile game and the player’s existence as an omnipotent figure, ‘The Finger.’ The game also punctuates serious moments of drama with shallow jokes and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The light narrative with its witty humor keeps the pace of the game moving and is well suited for short bursts between sessions and skim-reading.

Monetizing Strategy

Gold is the premium currency in Kingdom Maker and can be used to buy various resources and skip timers. All players start the game with some Gold, and more can be earned by completing quests. Gold is protected from raids and cannot be looted or traded between players. Kingdom Maker does not gate any items behind Gold purchases, ensuring all players have access to earning all items through play and giving players avenues to only speed up their progress through purchases.

Gold is charged at a flat 20 Gold per $1, with one-time bundles and limited-time sales driving the best value for Gold/$. Players are encouraged in this way to buy bundles that support their way of play — bundles that double resource production, double PvE damage, or give access to rare Champions. The store also contains two Fancy Chests, which are direct purchases that trickle Gold rewards over time, either once every 24 hours or every time the player upgrades their Keep. These offer the best Gold/$ albeit acquired over a period of time.

Most Noble interactions, like the aforementioned action to ‘Boink’ to produce a baby, go into cooldowns which can be skipped using Gold. Gold is well integrated into all the game’s systems in a way that, regardless of playstyle or strategy, is always beneficial and makes it easier to progress. As a game whose primary motivation is growth in power, the monetization strategy comes down to ‘Gold is Power’.

The Future of a Kingdom Maker

4X games form a playground of systems interacting with each other and with players, creating situations for interesting decisions. Instead of holding the player’s hand through direct means and leading them through a crafted experience, 4X games create opportunities for players to find their own playstyles and personal journeys to achieve their goals. The potential of this type of game design is to appeal to a broad range of players, from players interested in the social aspects of diplomacy and treachery to pacifist players looking to progress by trade and research.

For this gameplay experience to be engaging, players need to have a really strong understanding of the game’s various systems and how they interact — with the game nudging the player to experience all the options available and giving clear, consistent feedback on their actions. The game systems also need to have some imbalance for players to react to, since if all systems were stable, there would be no spikes in experience creating drama or surprises.

Global Worldwide CEO Will Harbin mentioned off-handedly in an interview (link) that Kingdom Maker requires over seven million rows of variables that keep the game’s complex systems ticking, creating the playground for emergent gameplay for all players on a server. This is apart from the player data the team needs to draw insights from in order to iterate and balance the constantly growing game world, making running a 4X game severely challenging.

Player discontent in the early game ranges from an inability to grasp the game’s complex (but consistent) rules to late game discontent of the game leaning too heavily on conflict and PvP as the best path to progress. The game does offer defense capabilities, but PvP players are more likely to attack cities that are vastly weaker than them, as from an economic standpoint, it’s inefficient to lose. There is a debuff for attacking weaker players with a minor inconvenience to the city morale.

The current strategy game charts are dominated by games released well before IDFA deprecation, which has affected the growth in the 4X genre as these games historically depend heavily on targeting whales. Most newcomers in the genre brought more hybrid gameplay into the mix to broaden their demographics, such as with Top War’s merge mechanics, Puzzle and Survival’s Match 3 mechanics, as well as State of Survival’s hero collector RPG mechanics.

Lilith’s Rise of Kingdoms excels in industry-leading production values, which is leveraged in its creatives and more polished and accessible in-game player experience. Kingdom Maker uses its signature humor and stylized, fantasy world in its creatives, going for a broader appeal and in-game RPG mechanics to allow players to engage in different ways. Along with IDFA deprecation, this may be a recipe for a game that’s harder to scale in today’s environment.

Kingdom Maker’s live operations and events remain unproven and largely underutilized. With the game’s recent launch, this is an area we can expect to see the most expansion in the future — with seasonal content and an events framework that adds variety to gameplay experience on a calendar basis.

With Kingdom Maker’s family tree simulator in the form of Nobles, the game broadens the 4X subgenre with RPG mechanics that effectively supplement its core. The game’s current performance is promising, but scaling it globally comes with its own challenges of getting the right players and keeping systems in perfect imbalance in order to become an evergreen playground to continually come back to.

A big thanks to Harshal Karvande for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.