A Second Swing at a “Royal Match” Sequel — Will This One Work?

Executive Summary

• Royal Kingdom was soft-launched by Dream Games, the creators of Royal Match, in April of 2023. The game stopped receiving updates and content releases by the end of 2023 as the development team went back to the drawing board. On April 22, 2024, an update was released that reset all user’s progress and reconfigured some meta mechanics.
• The core match 3 gameplay remains completely the same, with no changes to mechanics or art.
• The biggest change in the new version is the complete removal of all social casino elements. Previously, players would reach Attack Levels where they would destroy the castle of another real player (an interesting adaptation of Monopoly Go! or Coin Master meta mechanics). These have been replaced with PVE “Kingdom Levels”.
• Additionally, the meta currency has been significantly tightened and the home base UI/UX has been revamped for easier expansion over time.
• While these changes are fairly sensible, the game is still too similar to Royal Match and taming its few differentiating factors will keep Royal Kingdom from standing out.

Introduction

In 2021, Istanbul-based Dream Games (made of casual mobile gaming veterans from Peak) released the match 3 game Royal Match (RM). Their combination of high quality art, best-in-class puzzle gameplay, innovative liveops, and a snappy UI/UX resulted in the fastest game to reach $3 billion in revenue. Last year, the team soft-launched their follow up: Royal Kingdom (RK), which combined the same match 3 puzzle engine with an expanded home base meta and social casino mechanics.

In my teardown of the game, I was pretty lukewarm about the game’s prospects. The game’s quality was equal to RM and the release was fully-featured, including events, social guilds, and even a battle pass. However, I felt that the new social casino mechanics were too lightweight to meaningfully impact retention and didn’t do enough to differentiate the sequel from the original.

iOS installs since soft-launch. Dream stopped UA in early 2024 as they worked on the revamp. The recent install spike is probably to compare the results of this revamp.

Estimated iOS revenue during soft-launch. Nice growth, but not enough for a full launch.

As 2024 started, I noticed that Dream had stopped releasing their traditional bi-weekly content drop in RK. Months passed without any app updates and it was clear that Dream had either abandoned the game or was preparing a revamp. On Monday, April 22nd, 2024, Dream quietly released version 2.0. Opening the app, I was greeted with a popup telling me that all my progress had been reset and that the game had received major updates. Let’s dive into some of those now.

New: Kingdom Levels

In RK version 1.0, Dream tried to mix the social mechanics of social casino hits like Monopoly Go! with their own solid match 3 base. Every 10-ish levels, players would enter an Attack Level, a pre-designed match 3 level where your matches would shoot upwards and damage a castle on the top of the screen. Real player’s names and profile pics were attached to each Attack Level, giving the impression that you had personally attacked their base. In Monopoly Go! or Coin Master, these “you attacked my base!” moments happen multiple times every session. In RK, these moments happen every 10 levels, which you are unlikely to experience even once per session (especially if you’re stuck on a hard level). Also, in Coin Master, the base you attack accurately represents the other player’s base that they are building. In RK, the Attack Level’s layout is made by Dream’s designer; players have no input at all on how the base is set up or defended. The mechanic in RK simply didn’t have the same gameplay impact as the other games, which is why it got replaced in version 2.0

Version 1.0’s Attack Levels made it feel like you were attacking the castles of other real players.

The Attack Levels have been replaced with Kingdom Levels, which occur at the same cadence (every 10 levels). Instead of attacking another player, you now attack a new NPC antagonist called the Dark King. The levels largely work the same as Attack Levels, your matches on the game board shoot upwards at the structures at the top of the screen. However, new mechanics are introduced, like the Golem who creeps downwards every turn, releasing a bunch of obstacles on the board if he reaches the bottom. Dream is also teasing a dragon in a future update, maybe it will shoot fire down on the board?

Version 2.0’s Kingdom Levels have players fighting the Dark King and his minions who attack the board.

These Kingdom Levels are fun and novel, but are too few and far apart to be impactful. 90% of the game are typical levels you’d find in RM, so these new level types don’t make a big enough splash. I’d love to see a version of this game with only Kingdom Levels.

New: Expanded World

In RM, players would use their meta currencies earned in levels to complete single rooms. RK version 1.0 changed that progression to be a continuous large map. Players would complete one area of the map before moving to the next. The map was very large and was capable of supporting several years of content releases. However, at some point the map would be complete, and how would the team be able to add new content then? Plus, this new design lost the completion satisfaction of the original game, since you never felt like you’ve “finished” an area.

Version 2.0 changes the map to address both issues. Players still see a larger map that they can scroll around in, but it has been reduced in size and split among multiple continents. Now, new content can easily be added by the team as a new continent. Plus players get the satisfaction of completing a continent before moving to the next.

Version 1.0 map vs 2.0 continent and overworld. Dream can add new worlds and continents over time.

New: Meta Economy

In my original teardown of RK version 1.0, I called out the meta economy’s flaw: different players will progress through it at different rates. The old version had a streaks feature that multiplied meta economy drops (potions) for each level you beat in a row. Streaks features like this are excellent for generating revenue in match 3 games, since it heightens loss-prevention pressure. But by including meta currencies in the streak reward multiplier, you are splitting your player base: some players will reach the end-of-content point of meta progression quickly, while some player may even find it impossible to reach that same point at all. When I played, I reached rank 12 with no more content left, while leaderboards showed other players at rank 13. That gap becomes a massive problem when stretched over several years of liveops.

In version 2.0, potions are removed from the streaks feature. Now all players move through the meta at the exact same rate.

Additionally, version 1.0 allowed players to gift small amounts of meta currency in the guilds feature. Version 2.0 removes that ability, players can only gift lives (just like in RM).

Conclusion

The team at Dream behind RK took a few months to revamp the game and now we see their takeaways: remove the social layer, fix the home base UI/UX, and tighten the meta economy. All very sensible fixes to flaws in version 1.0, but ultimately resulting in a game that’s even closer to RM than before. Combine that with art and core gameplay thats indistinguishable from the first game, it’s hard to justify the game’s existence. I feel like the team needs to take bigger swings if they want to open up new audiences that the social casino mechanics failed to bring. Maybe make all levels Kingdom Levels with some light upgrade/RPG mechanics to grab a more midcore crowd 🤔?

Chris Wallace is a game designer with over 10 years of experience with mobile free-to-play games. Hit him up if ya wanna talk games.