On November 21, Dream Games globally released Royal Kingdom. This is the sequel to the highly successful mobile puzzle game Royal Match, whose revenue exceeds $3 billion.
Royal Kingdom, like its predecessor, is a project in the match-3 genre. In this game, players also have to develop their own fairytale kingdom, only now it has moved to a new location according to the storyline. A significant difference is the introduction of PvE boss battles in Royal Kingdom.
The game has been in soft launch since April 2023 and has undergone several major changes since then. For instance, the first version of Royal Kingdom was more hardcore, featuring PvP levels and social casino elements, but Dream Games later decided to abandon some of these ideas.
Harshal Karvande, a lead game designer at Rovio Entertainment, believes that Royal Kingdom has the potential to eventually enter the global top 10 highest-grossing mobile puzzles. However, he fears that the new release risks "cannibalizing" Royal Match.
"The puzzle audience has decreased. Therefore, it's impossible for the scale-up of Royal Kingdom to not significantly impact Royal Match," Karvande wrote in the Naavik Digest newsletter.
Nonetheless, Karvande also recalled the experience of Playrix, which released a series of relatively similar games (Gardenscapes, Homescapes, and others) and successfully profited from them.
According to the analytics service AppMagic, during the 19 months of its soft launch, Royal Kingdom earned $14.86 million from IAP. This is after Dream Games paid mobile store commissions and taxes. Puzzle downloads by the day of the global release amounted to 5.9 million.