Puzzle Monthly #2: Match-3 Is Broken, Pixel Flow Clones, and Royal Kingdom’s Rise

Your monetization plan should be like 50% in app, 40% legitimate ads, 10% clone ads. You know this.
Welcome to Puzzle Monthly by Deconstructor of Fun, your one-stop shop for all puzzle news with takes from your favorite puzzle officials. I'm your host AC, chief product officer at Rotate Lab, a hybrid casual puzzle developer, and I'm also a writer and consultant at the the constructor of fun.
My name's David. Played a lot of puzzle games, worked on a lot of puzzle games, and I'm going to share something that I hope pisses off Mushka. [laughter] That's my goal today. How can I piss off Mishka?
Bringing the spice early. [laughter]
I'm Laura Tranto. Used to be on Twig. Now I'm jumping to Puzzle Monthly because this just feels like home because I also love puzzle games. play a lot of puzzle games even though I'm I work at Microsoft on Minecraft, but I also love Minecraft. So, there we go. Tom, throw it over to you.
Uh, my name's Tom Store. I actually had

the pleasure of working with David and Laura at King for a long time. So, that's cool. And yeah, so I was at King for a long time and now I am at the experimentation group where also I've been working with David and Philip from Twig and yeah, looking forward to talking about some puzzle stuff with AC.
All right. Thank you, Tom. So today we're going to start with news which are mostly about Turkish founders getting money and we're going to follow up with the Pixel Flow Colon that we talked about last episodes and we're going to wrap up with discussing Royal Kingdom's recent performance. So let's start with the news and the first piece of news is Vanto Games out of Turkey raised $4 million in seed investments coled by Makers Fund and Arcadia Gaming Partners. The company is founded by former Pik Zinga and Fugo employees. So they come from some of the largest casual puzzle developers in Turkey. And the company currently has a single title out in the market called Blossom Word Search which generated most of its downloads from

Turkey thus far. So they either have strong metrics with the game and they want to scale it further or they are looking to expand their portfolio through different games. But either way, congrats and good luck to the Vento games team. The next piece of news is again Turkish founders but this time based in Barcelona. Cheer games raised $4.5 million in pedant led by makers fund again but this time participated by play ventures and a handful of angels as well. The founders most of the founders come from the publishing side of Lion Studios where they worked on shipping where they shipped basically Hexosort. And for those who don't know, Hexosort is a game that I would like to call the poster child of hybrid casual puzzles because they basically laid out the playbook for hybrid casual puzzles which generated actually over $50 million in in a purchase revenue so far. And for a hybrid casual puzzle game, you can safely assume that they generated at least that much in ad revenue as well.

So the founders have proven their success under the lying games umbrella and now they want to go and like basically do their own thing with the hybrid casual or casual puzzle space potentially. Good luck to the cheer games team as well. And one thing that is worth mentioning especially with this piece of news is like the Turkish founders both from Turkey and Barcelona [clears throat] they are both getting the investment attraction or interest from the VCs no matter their location. So I guess the stamp of like being a Turkish founder goes beyond just stumble or like goes beyond just Turkey. So as a like a fellow Turkish puzzle enthusiast it's is a proud moment. That's
I'd like to add to that. And actually on Twig, we've called out quite a bit how the great innovative puzzle content is coming out of Turkey. And I wonder how much is Mishka saying how awesome it is and how awesome they're they're making things and it's like this positive spiral of acknowledging what's being done out there, giving attention to it,

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Um, the next one is a bit different, but also similar. Supercell has a new puzzle game in early access, heyday match, a match tree game built by a London studio called Playbit. And Playbit was originally founded in 2021. Early employees from Pik who worked on Toy Blast and Tomb Blast during their early journey. And the company was actually founded through wildlife studios funding where they had this external studio program where they funded you know experienced operators experienced veterans to basically run their own thing and at that time they worked on a blast title called time blast which was quite interesting. I think the game was

really fun and you know quite original but just like any other blast game in the last five to six years it just failed and couldn't make it through soft launch and now they are working with supercell and interestingly this is second attempt at a puzzle game with heyday IP and ironically enough the first attempt was a blast title called heyday popup and I think Laura you wrote a deconstruction about it right
walking down memory lane here that was my first one if you want to check it out. It's on the Deconstructor of Fun blog. It was a very polished game that when you want to make a puzzle game, you have to understand the heart of puzzle and the heart and what puzzle players want. And I never saw behind the scenes, but how they did the game was a good mix of decoration and blast. The blast puzzles were great. The meta was very weak. I felt like they were missing someone who could connect the I guess the ability of Supercell to make games. They need that one person or a couple people to translate that to what exactly do the puzzle players want. So it was close when this game had a match their

second attempt
currently in I think what Indonesia, India and Philippines [clears throat] if
I'm correct once I'd love to play it and see if they've you know they found that secret sauce they didn't have the first time if they're and how this what they've learned from that first attempt to see and what they changed. It's interesting that you say that because like that's almost a kind of direct description that I would say about Time Blast like it's also a really super it's really highly polished.
Yeah, it was it was awesome.
But it's just kind of like lacking something, man. Like it just doesn't it doesn't work. There's something missing about it. So it's it's a weird puzzle to me in that
I can see given that the team did a similar thing with Wildlife, right? like Wildlife brought in this external studio to make this game and they made this really polished but kind of non-performer game and now for some reason Supercell who I thought had stepped away from casual are now like yes this is what we want to do like I

don't
I think one thing that I want to say is I like kind of view it more as a market fit type of problem it was not because the game failed or the game wasn't like strong enough to s like succeed because we literally had no successful blast puzzle in the last six years. So I think that was more of a market issue rather than a game related problem. On the other side like is is this [clears throat] the right time to enter the m3 market? That is also no. I don't think like it makes sense right now to enter the m3 market like it's not practical at all. But I think those are kind of like two different realities that can live like at the same universe. Time blast was a market related fail. Entering the mage 3 market is a really hard freaking task. I'm interested to like see how they are going to deal with that.
To to jump on your point, Time Blast launched in 2024 and that was one of the most polished blast games that I played. I agree it's market kind of, but if that

game had come out three or four years earlier, it would have demolished. It would have been a great addition to the blast portfolio. So yes, market it was just that they had two they polished beautiful gameplay. I haven't seen that level of of thought and care that into the visuals and how that [clears throat] combined with the mechanics in a in a while. It just came out two years a couple four years or three years a little too late.
And then sorry Tom, I'll hand to you now before and then I'll jump back to my one more point. [laughter] kind of reminds me a little bit of Candy Solitaire in that it feels like a proposition which works in PowerPoint, you know, like internally someone's made this deck and it all makes sense and it gets signed off by people and then they do the project but actually like it doesn't I don't see how it stands up in real life. My last point is is I think it's a fiery one that is now the right time to make a match three game. And to answer that question, maybe we don't maybe we cover that in its own episode, but my instinct when I play match three games in general, and this is why I'm so curious to play a heyday match, is I don't see

enough innovation. I don't see enough risk-taking and getting weird with games. Like we have so much of the same. So is it a question of are we building the right things for what players want because they have so much of great uh match swap? So, how are you going to make it different? Whatever. I'm going to reveal my my deep dark secrets here. I always thought there were elements of Social Casino in terms of how they do bonuses that not necessarily don't misunderstand me. This is not saying make a match three slots game, but there's elements of how they do kind of the bonus multipliers that I thought would be great to apply to match three. So, change how we do obstacles, change how the levels presented to players. So, it's adds variety every time. That's more of it. It's like how do you take other things from other genres? to do genre mixing all the time that I haven't seen and that I'd love to see.
I kind of have a push back on that one because like I agree the amount of innovation that we see on the match market is extremely low and it's really like what is the largest you know like latest significant innovation super

light bulb. So, it's been a while since we've seen a really significant like innovation in the match three space, but this is what players want. Like if you try to be super innovative and if you try to come up with like extremely different or new things, you're probably going to go for a more like niche part of the market that is going to increase your CPI that is going to decrease your like sample size and it's going to get harder for you to execute those innovations especially with a like market like mesh tree where user acquisition cost is like already through the roof. I think each new piece of innovation to the core mechanic I'm talking about the like core mechanic innovations I think are going to just decrease the amount of like mass market that you can reach or that you can acquire especially in the short term where you need to kind of like see if the game is going to stick or not
maybe but at the same time I feel like that type of the fear of going too niche is what prevents the innovation happening at all and therefore we get

more of the same I've barely seen any innovations in the engine itself?
No. Match villains does something, right? Doesn't the the fish the fish give two like they create
two every time you do it or there was a golden there was a golden or whatever, right?
And like I was going to mention match like that that is the most innovative match three game as in terms of the core mechanic. But how successful have they been so far? Not much. Like we're going to talk about Royal Kingdom today. Royal Kingdom has a very little amount of innovation, like very very little amount of innovation. It just uses the Royal Match core engine and like a slightly different bonus level structure and just like surface level live up event differentiations and do you prefer to be Royal Kingdom or do you prefer to be match villains in this case?
Just a a quick rerun in like King history or whatever. So you got Candy Crush, right? And then you've got Candy Crush Soda. Candy Crota had innovation.

It was the fish. The fish weren't in um candy. And we all agreed.
And the gravity.
Yeah. Yes. And and the other gravity and multiple levels and stuff like that. The multiple rooms in gravity were actually probably negative. The fish were probably positive. But it actually didn't make any difference. It wasn't as big as candy and didn't exceed. If it had been made by a different company, under a different brand, would have been better than it was under Candy Crush. That's pretty complicated. I mean, it's hard to know, but that I think that's an interesting question. I mean, the the next game is Candy Crush Jelly, and there's innovation there again. This time, it's a PvP level against an NPC. The idea originally was, I think, to have a lot more PvP stuff in it, but it couldn't get in there. But that innovation was negative. I don't think it narrowed it or made it more niche. I think it just wasn't as fun. I think it's like sometimes you put some innovation is as fun. I think the snitch like being double, it's all right. it doesn't really matter that much. But keeping the super color ball so I can

turn two colors into the helicopter things that's fun and it's a lot of feedback and it allows me to beat levels really quick and the fact that they've like make it a loss aversion thing increases the likelihood that you spend and I mean it's just a more tied together to the actual economic loop.
Yeah, agree with you. Jelly was released before Matchmaster. So Matchmasters could I mean let's just I'm playing hype way before. Right. So then you it could have been that Matchmasters took that mechanic and said it's close. It's close but it needs to be against another player and the Matchy engine needs to be overly simplified. Right. So it's not that Jelly didn't quite land it, but there was an interest there.
This is another I don't know how far we go into this, but like innovator in dilemma. I mean the innovator's dilemma inside companies and whatnot. But the problem is if you're making Candy Crush jelly inside of an organization that has already massive hits, then you're like, you try to do something completely different and when it doesn't quite work, the answer isn't tear it apart and

try again at the very difficult new thing. The answer is just move back towards the main, you move back towards the regular [ __ ] and then it's not as good as the original and then you close it down. I mean, that's what happens.
The thing that we haven't spoken about
agree on that
is is meta, right? Like cuz at the same time that soda and jelly were coming out,
fish, homescapes, Dcapes, like that's the thing that made a difference. I remember when the plays games come out. That was terrifying, man. That we could see it like eating up the market share and we were just like, "Oh my god, we're going to get killed by this thing." That was innovation. It mattered.
There's also the market timing aspect of it as well. I think this can be a nice future episode topic in itself like is it the right time to like do a match threeway and like going towards all that innovation tangent. Anyway, talking about King Games, I think this is a nice way to finish the news section. Farm Saga officially hit $2 billion in lifetime player spending. The game

launched way back on Facebook.
Yay, Laura.
There's just to give everyone listening context, I worked on that game for almost five years. So, I love that game. I think Farm Heroes is a wonderful game and I'm so happy to see it's reached another milestone.
Yeah, the game reached the $1 billion milestone back in 2019 and now we are in 20 26 and 7 years after it reached the $2 billion milestone. I think a few days ago, one of the Scopic co-founders said that 80% of their revenue comes from players who have been playing their games for like over a year. I think this is yet another like example that if you have an existing game that already has like established the DAU baseline and it's already successful and running on the market, you already have the upper end against new games and that upper end is getting larger and larger as we like move through and it's getting harder and harder to release a successful new hits.

Although we are seeing like games like hexosort or pixel flow or magic sword here and there they are getting like fewer and fewer. I think this is another example that far guys the game is still kicking after 11 years after its like initial launch.
I saw an amazing graph quite recently of the revenue per download over time from Royal Match, Gossip Harour, Connor block Jam, Scruden, Maddic Shaw. Royal Match at like 2,000 days still growing. It's just insane, man. Like, they do a great job.
Yeah. And so, let's shift some gears. And since we mentioned Pixel Flow,
wait, AC, one quick thing. So, you said this is maybe not the right time to release match 3. I think it's the right time to release a good game all the time.
All the time.
That is it is the wrong time to release a [ __ ] game all the time.
Okay, that is 100%. The thing is the bar for releasing a good game that has a chance to succeed in the market is soing

high with match three that it doesn't make sense.
So the problem is when you say the bar is high then people try to polish it and make it as nice as royal match. That's not a bar. That's not a high bar or a low bar. It's the wrong bar. I mean make something that's different and it's interesting and if you get over that bar and make it good then it's fine. I mean, you can I think you can make a way worse match three with some new innovative thing in it and it might be really popular. Will it get the royal match players to play? I don't know. Probably not. You know,
will it get people to stop wasting their lives on TikTok? Maybe. I don't know. Make something new. You can't make something that looks the same as something that already exists. But otherwise, you should make a new thing.
I totally agree. I understand your point. But the thing that I'm trying to convey with that this is not the right time to do a match three is the size of your bet when you try to do a successful match three game is right now like uncomparable to any other like genre that you might enter right now. So if

you're not at a freedom financially just like supercell it doesn't really make sense for you to make that in the match three space. That is what I'm trying to get at. Like from a financial perspective, it's not really the best time to bet on a match three game.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's get let's get technical on it. Let's get technical on this for a second. All right. So, the reason you mean this is because let's say I'm going to make a game and it looks a lot like Candy Crush and it works just like Candy Crush. Now, I want to market it.
The problem is that Candy Crush is already getting the installs of the people that want to play Candy Crush. So if I make something that's kind of like Candy Crush, like Candy Crush jelly or something, my cost per acquisition, you know, per install is going to be higher than Candies. So now what happens is my retention is going to be slightly lower.
My cost of acquisition is going to be higher. There is a non-existent profit. So like I'll never be able to scale it. Also, Candy Crush or Royal Match or anybody else can just decide I'm going to spend more money this time and I'll push a little bit of my profits down the road, give up some of it, but that raises costs for everybody and then

there's no way to get it. Yeah. Okay. So, if you're making something that a Candy Crush or a Royal Match player looks at it and says, "Yeah, this looks like something I'd play because it's a lot like the thing I already play." They'll try it a little bit and they'll leave and you'll have a very hard time and it'll be very hard to like compete against their marketing, etc. Okay, we're in agreement there. Yep. The mechanics of it. If you make a match three that's like I'm not saying you should make an 8-bit match three, but you make an 8-bit match three that looks completely different. All the royal match people don't want anything to do with it. It doesn't look like anything they want to play. Maybe there's a different audience. I mean, it's not really about match three or non-match three. It's about like going up with the same product against a giant that already exists. But if you want to do something else with match three, maybe you should try it. I just don't know what that is, but do something else. One of the things which really worked for them is that they had this new game play and so it made UA that much easier because people were like
new thing let's go.
Yeah,
that was a segue. [laughter]

Let's
going to say that was a wonderful segue, Tom. [laughter]
So shifting gears and using that segue to tie it back to that pixel flow colon that we talked about last episode. There was this game that we mentioned, Color Blaze shooter, the quickest Pixel Flow clone that launched like about a month after Pixel Flow started scaling. They got pulled from both App Store and Play Store a month ago. And actually shortly after we recorded our first episode of Puzzle Monthly, [snorts] they had like the same visual style, the same everything with Pixel Flow. And it was just like a onetoone copy with the game. And the important thing that I want us to discuss about this today is the timing is actually what makes this quite interesting because Scopi announced the acquisition of Loom games and Pixel Flow thereof on the 19th of February and like shortly after that less than two weeks after that the largest copycat the largest Pixel Flow clone gets pulled

away from App Store and Play Store. So my question to you is, is this the start of a new trend with like the hybrid casual puzzles being more regulated and being put under like a more scrutiny or is this just a one-off thing that Scop just like after the acquisition they kind of flexed against the rest of the market and told everyone to stay away from their like turf,
right? be I reckon definitely like I feel like they've got their new toy. They've got their kind of like legal team and they're just like, "Guys, back off. Warning shot fired. Leave us alone. We want to make some money. Stop taking it away from us. Thanks. Spy."
I had to figure out what the differences were cuz I did not get a chance to play Color Blade Shooter before it was taken down. So, the summary articles I found to try to research it and watching some videos, it looks like it was a onetoone copy. It was the same mechanic, the same visual style, same core loop, and like

where is the line, right? So, I understand why Scope wanted to take it down. They basically made a clone and what parts of the game are protected? What are those? What are they copyrighted? What are they what is trademarked by the company? And so, I understand I feel like and also we should be pushing. Again, this goes back to the whole debate we were just having. Do different things. If they had made three or four changes to this, like colorblaze shooter had some sort of different mechanic, that would have been a not as clear-cut of a case in my opinion.
I did some similar stuff like digging around trying to find out about this particular case cuz I had the same question. I was like the industry is based on copycatting. So where like how did they do this? And apparently there's a thing called trade dress I think it is where obviously we know you can't kind of trademark a game loop. So that's why there are so many match threes. That's what match 3 is. It's a bunch of studios making the same game and then there are so many of them that we gave it a name. That's exactly what it is, Laura. Is that if something could be reasonably

considered like confused with the original version because it looks so similar, then I think that's getting into the legal side of things. But then the platforms themselves obviously have rules against copycatting. And given that I think I found that the ammo bear studio is like 50 people, you know, Scopia are going to have much better contacts, much better legal team. It would be easy for them to be like, "Hey, here's the rule. This is the why reason why these guys are breaking the rule. Can you stop them doing it, please?" The other interesting thing that I found which kind of like slightly reinforces the story was I was looking at their revenue for the whole studio and it's literally like nothing nothing nothing enormous spike like [laughter] 10x 20x which immediately then dies down like interesting interesting case study but I don't know I think it's a blip. Speaking of copycats, I wish they had just like

they they called it color cat shooter and instead of the pigs, they made them cats and they meowed every time they fired. Instant hit and different.
You can't you can't believe how you can't believe how many cat themed Pixel flow clones are already on the market. Like there are Yeah, there are already [laughter] like a bunch of cat cat themed like Pixel clones in on the market.
Yeah, we were talking about the mechanics, right? The reason the cat thing doesn't work because it looks different and it's not a meaningful enough innovation so nobody cares. And the one that looks exactly like it, people mistake it for the thing, so it makes money and that's the only way to do it. But like if you play a bunch of sedukco,
then every once in a while you get this thing that looks exactly like the suduka you're playing and it says update now and you click on it and it's a different soduko. And that that's just so sad. But I mean that's a that's a legitimate thing. So, I mean, sometimes doing the actual thing exactly the way it is is a way to get money and the other way, you know, and then, you know, just changing it to cats gets you nothing. So, you got to go further.
Cats with lasers. No, just kidding. [laughter]

I'm curious if Rolex is going to go after all the color block gem clones because like there are a bunch of one to one clones on the market or sucrum is just like there are one to one clones of sucrum as well on the market that made some pretty like significant revenue. So tying it back to that question I also think that this is just just a blip. I don't think the market is going to be regulated anytime soon and like this is just kind of a flex from Scopi just a one-off thing to I don't know courtesy of Scoply if you are if you get acquired by them I guess [laughter]
if it's close to it and money not going up then like you know whatever doesn't matter I think probably it's got to do with how much money the thing makes I don't think it's got to do with regulation or anything I mean like yeah lawyers are big companies we'll see if money goes up if money goes up some lawyer will call you and it'll stop.
Yeah. Yeah.
The color block jam case is interesting because if you play enough color block jam, I kind of want to know who's played

more color block jam. Me or Laura?
I don't know. Have you played much?
Really?
No. You?
Yeah. [laughter]
Yeah. I got I mean I'm like I got a good you know I got
Okay. Yeah.
55 like you know [laughter]
I got hooked on Hexaort and Magic Sword. I got hooked on those sort games. Those I was in like the 600s in those levels. Those games. I mean, magic sword's fine, but like water sort, like I spent so much time on water sort. I'm in the thousands. I don't know where, 2000 or something like that. Way too deep into it. But anyway, so what I was going to say about color block jam is one of the best things about it is the admonetization is almost only full of color block jam alternatives. That's like all of the advertisation. And then if that's true, then think about this. in your business plan you should have. We get big and then people clone it and they spend ads spend money on ads inside of our game. So the cloning funnel is part of your ad monetization plan. Yeah.
And you have to make it good enough so that the players are not going to be

lured away from your the ads of your clone.
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team behind Royal Match Candy Crush and Garden Scapes. Laura and I wrote already like two deconstructions on it back at the time. One at its initial soft launch and one right after they had this like big overall. So we already have some history with the game. When it first launched it was like a pretty different product. It had PvP boss levels a bit like the monopoly go you know destroying other people's or players like ste. It had a similar kind of feel into it and it looked more midcore adjacent and it didn't really stick and by late 2023 about like 9 months after its initial launch the updates completely stopped and in April 2024 one year after its initial launch the game had that huge overhaul. They wiped all player process and basically they relaunched the game. And with this relaunch, they had this new meta which was like much more conventional. They had the PVP swapped out for this PVE fight against the

villain called like dark king. You you are now seeing this dark king like every 10 levels as like a bonus dark dark king type of level. And our read at the time was that it was a step in the right direction. But Laura and I had a kind of like a differentiation in terms of what we thought about the game. Laura thought it was going to like make it big. Not necessarily as big as royal match, but she thought that it already had the makings of Alaka hit game. I was more skeptical and I think Laura was the correct one on this one. The current performance and it's like trend is showing that it's going to become larger in the near term. The important numbers behind the game is that since going globally in November 2024, like the game the revenue has been on a consistent upward climb. As you can see about 5 months after the global launch, the Royal Kingdom had this huge celebrity campaign with like you name it, LeBron James, Jimmy Fallon, Kevin Hart, they

had this whole like MBA ad placements as well and downloads just like went through the roof. And with that, of course, the revenue also followed. And they had been second downloads and DAU since that time. And last year, they finished in the top 10 of puzzle games with like over $300 million in revenue as you can see from here. So they finished in the top 10 puzzle games. And right now for 2026, they are making well over $30 million per month. They have garden scapes already on their corros. I think the interesting question here is not that it is it going to surpass garden scapes because it's already going to I think surpass it until the end of the year but do we think it has the potential to rival Candy Crush with the current performance or with the like current features or what do you think the game needs to have to get to the candy crash level which is like more

than double in its current performance. So, one thing that for those that are listening and not watching, the charts are provided by Sensor Tower. And what's notable is the big change between 2026 and 2025 is World Kingdom, I believe, went from 8 to fourth.
So, question of the hour, will it outperform Candy Crush? I mean, Dave was shaking his head. I'm with Dave on this one. I don't think it's going to outperform Candy Crush.
And it's pretty clear what I think anyway. [laughter] It's an obvious no. Let's look at this a little bit because I'm the business numbery guy on this one. I think the one of the interesting things is look at downloads. If you took a look at Candy Crush and you said how much are paid and how much are are organic. I'd say less than 50 are paid. Like 50 is probably organic or maybe it's a little more than that. Royal Kingdom those 28 million installs, [clears throat] I'm pretty sure they're all paid. I mean, you know, maybe 10% is organic or something like that, but it's not much.
So, if you just like charge them for those 28 million downloads, then I think the game is probably like underwater. I mean, it's it's probably not profitable. And I mean of course long-term retention

they'll make money or whatever. Row match is of course profitable. So I mean just looking at this year Scapes is also running some UA but it's probably also organic. So these two things are like over the hump the three top games. Homescapes is also and Fish Dum is also these are profitable things. They're kicking out money. Brook Kingdom isn't. I mean what happens to midterm retention and stuff? What happens when they turn off the UA faucet? How much will it stick around? And I I think you can probably imagine it's going to stay around where it is. I think they're probably like it's probably maxed. I think this is also one of the reasons why it's hard for anybody else. The ones that are trying to come up, you know, match Billions, you know, Piggy Kingdom, the other games that are trying to fight their way up right now. The market is tough because there's a couple big spenders still play is willing to spend and doesn't need to answer to any public markets and I think it's true for Royal Kingdom as well.
So, the marketing campaign they had that AC new nickname I I now I get it. I mentioned that thing must have Yeah. cost of a small fortune. And then I wanted to see what the estimated ARPA

was based on that starting with the campaign to see if they actually are earning enough revenue per download to offset how much it cost to bring a user in which is quite expensive. So we look at what I pulled January is the full year 2025 to present their estimated ARP Dow was 65 which is low. That is that is low. Now granted I know most match three games have a two-year payback window now. So we haven't two years put you know the start of the campaign puts it at 2027. So hard to say, but I struggled to see it increasing so much to to pay off that campaign. And I agree with you, Dave, to grow the the organic so that it's it becomes this cultural phenom phenomenon, right? That's what Candy Crush did. Candy Crush came household name. It's like when you call tissues Kleenex. It's like when you call plastic wrap saran wrap, right? It is referenced in movies. It is referenced in pop culture. And that is to me what the what a successful organic campaign looks like. And Royal Match also, I think, had part of that as well. It's also referenced and people know it. Like you can talk to about an average Joe on the street and they'll know what royal match is. Royal Kingdom I don't think has I'm

not sure that campaign has got there for them to get the to get it to that to get it to that place where they can ride the success wave without having that marketing spend which yes I agree with you is probably putting them underwater. So,
but a counterpoint to that is like what we were saying before is that these games monetize over time, right? And and actually the games that have been out for the longest time have what was it AC you were saying that Monopoly go 80% of their revenue comes from players that come from players that they've been for over a year.
So then presumably that would be the case for Royal Kingdom too, right? like over time you would expect them to get more efficient with their installs because they're building these layers of players over time that continue you once you you know you don't have to pay for someone to real game twice right like if they're monetizing after 5 years that's all gravy
the organic installs argument from David I think is like yeah quite valid because yeah you if you're royal kingdom you

have to pay for like 90 plus% of your installs probably which changes the whole dynamic of the business. But like does that mean that royal kingdom is a net negative for during games? Do you think like they are kind of like as a result they are just like in a worse shape because like there is also the cannibalization part of the picture like if Royal Kingdom never existed do you think with the like potentially increased performance from Royal Match do you think Dreams would have been in a better place? So, if you look at revenue per download and you look at the twocapes schemes, Candy Crush and Candy Crush Soda and Royal Match and Royal Kingdom, it's pretty interesting. Royal Match is like 45 bucks. Crazy high. This is US only. 45 bucks. Candy Crush is $26. And then Scapes, both Escapes games and Soda are at around $20 and Royal Kingdom is at 12. You could argue that this is a better curve than a lot of the other games, but it is not a better development than Royal Match.

It's performing worse. But directionally, you can say anyway that it's not increasing at the same speed as Royal Match. And probably what's happening is if you're moving players from Royal Match into Royal Kingdom and they're monetizing at a lower level in Royal Kingdom because what you'd expect is you're the most engaged super players that love Royal Match would also love to play Royal Kingdom. But if you're moving them over there and they're making you're making less from them, then you're hurting your your portfolio.
What if it's incremental? What if they're different? Because it is a different type of game, right? Like small small changes, but some changes. [laughter] In preparation for this, I played a ton of the game and was looking at data, looking at information on the live op calendar. I guess I played it when it first came out when it was quite a different game, but now it feels like very similar and compared the live OP schedules for Royal Match and Royal

Kingdom kind of almost identical. Royal match has got a slightly deeper bench like they've maybe got like 20% more different like events that they run, but actually they're they're very similar. They run at similar schedules. the similar kind of like goal types, competitive, collaborative, miniame, stuff like that. And also I kind of noticed that they've also started to adopt this match villain thing of a really kind of high class kind of very polished like interstitial screens in the meta with like the characters doing like fun stuff.
Those are crazy in match villains. Those are just crazy.
They're so good. I don't know how much they add though. Like it seems like I don't know. They look expensive. So the only difference is those kind of like PVE levels and I don't really like them. [laughter] Whenever they come up I'm just like h not again. It's kind of like it's a weird I don't get it.
It feels rather anticlimactic. But that

seems like the summary is we're in agreement. Probably not going to outshine Candy Crush anytime soon. Probably a little bit more cannibalistic than they would have hoped, but still it's still a money earner. It's still I mean we're still talking about this game has still brought in almost half a billion dollars, right? So anyone be proud to have those numbers. So this is nothing to you know turn our nose up at. Still impressive. Dream did a good job. I think the next question maybe we answer for another time is if if we were the CEO of Dream I think is it pronounced?
Yep.
I'd love to sit in a meeting and figure out what is he going to do with this? What direction is he giving the team based on this in terms of how this is going to fit into the Dream portfolio? What do they want it to do? Is they going to take a different direction for it? All right, I got a question for you. How about we switch so that Royal Kingdom is owned by Good Job Games that made Match Villains and Match Villains is owned by Dream.
And in that scenario where they release those two games, what are the revenue numbers?
I can tell you what I think. It would be $384 million for Match Villains and it

would be whatever the hell the Match Villains number is for Royal Match. I think that's what it would be.
It's the team.
No, no, no. Not the team. I mean, they get the team. [laughter] It's the finished games. exactly the state they are. They're just handed to the two companies at you like in one of these movies, Moment of Birth. You swap them in the in the hospital, whatever, whatever it is. Switch to birth.
I think the reason [laughter] that there's 384 million in Royal Kingdom is because they got the marketing money and they can spend it.
Whilst you were going through the data, AC, I was thinking of The Pit. You guys watch The Pit?
Yes.
Great show. It feels like Whitaker is constantly like doing CPR on somebody and whenever they stop
whenever he stops the line just flatlined and I was just looking at the [laughter] Royal Kingdom data thinking just give it up Whitaker it's over.
Give it
Royal Kingdom is three years ago 2023 April but you can take 2024 April

because it's the relaunch date. It's going to be more accurate with match. I need to check.
The original kind of question of this segment was will could royal kingdom ever overtake Candy Crush. I think that would be interesting like what would happen if like Dream Games is a much newer team like still like got years experience but they are like only focused on match three. They are maybe less than half the size of King. King has been about for like 20 years. They've changed ownership a bunch of times. They've got this like mega long tale of games beyond candy. Like everything kind of like falls away. Like even I was looking at the farm data and that is given I'm on you know this is deconstructed fun that is mice nuts and I don't know like it would be really interesting to see how it would compare to something like soda. like would it would they be able to to

kind of do something interesting? Would they take learnings from that and put it directly into candy and and kind of I think that that given the different kind of profiles of the team and different focuses that might have a more material effect.
Like that's a great point to wrap on. [laughter]
I think we're going to pick that match three topic up in a like later episode. But thank you for listening to the second episode of Puzzle Monthly. As always, any feedback, feel free to share it through Slack or LinkedIn or where wherever you can find us. And yeah, see you next month. Bye-bye.
Thanks, guys. See you.
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