Puzzle Monthly #4: $60M Marketing, $65M Revenue, What Happened to Good Job Games?

Speaker A: But I mean, if you just somehow, like, I don't know, sliding doors, Gwyneth Paltrow, like, all of a sudden the game was there, you know, on fire. Today my goal is as many, as many. LAURA LAUGHS I want as many. LAURA LAUGHS as possible today. Then I don't think there's. I mean, it's in the DNA of the game and I mean, here's what you get down to. What's the actual problem? Uh, what is the problem with it? And I mean, why is, uh, Royal Match doing something better? And I mean, that's what we got to dig into. I mean, in my opinion. And I mean, if we look, I mean.

Speaker B: Welcome to Puzzle Monthly, your favorite podcast for everything puzzle. I'm your host, ac, Chief product of SIR at Rotate Lab and consultant and right hand deconstructor of fun. Today, as always with me, I have

Speaker C: Laura, Laura working at Minecraft, but very love puzzles to death.

Speaker D: Puzzle Queen. In fact, uh, my name is Tom Storr, Experimentation Group.

Speaker B: And of course David.

Speaker A: My name's David, former poker player and, uh, extreme Puzzle Puzzle list. Nice to be on. Yes, let's do it.

Speaker B: All right, today's topic is we're going to cover Good Job Games. And the word on the street is that Good Job Games are running out of money at the moment and we're going to try to understand what's happening with their current title Match Villains. And actually we're going to start back from how they were founded and like what games they worked on. And we're going to try to understand if they are actually in trouble with Match Villains or if Match Villains can actually be like a, uh, potential match to hit in the future. So we'll see everything about that. So share my screen.

Speaker C: So we've created a deck for y' all for those that are, that are watching with video. You'll see some great slides.

Speaker A: Wait, did you make this by hand or is this, was it Fable? Did Fable make this?

Speaker C: No, I made this by hand.

Speaker E: What?

Speaker C: I know things line by line.

Speaker A: Wow, such a craft oriented, Impressive. Very impressive.

Speaker C: I'm a deck making product manager.

Speaker A: Excellent.

Speaker B: And like Laura said, uh, for the ones watching the episode in YouTube or in Spotify, I guess you can also do that. You can see the, uh, presentation as we speak. So when we look at the timeline of Good Job Games, uh, the company that we're going to talk about, uh, from out of Turkey, uh, they were initially founded by Il Carolu and Nazem Akmandil, uh, bought, uh, a, as far as I know they both come from quite like a rich uh background, rich history from a financial perspective. So they didn't raise any outside fund and uh, they entirely self funded Good job games. When they first uh founded the company initially of course a gaming company being founded in 2017 they were focused on hypergasual games and they had a lot of hypergasm uh megahits back at the time with the 3D in the name of their title. Games like fundraise 3D, colorfield 3D, colorblind 3D. Just like add 3D uh at the end of the game and you would probably end up at good job games like play uh store or app store page. And about like two years after their hyper casual success kind of like sustained them uh for a while they launched Zanmatch, uh which was their first foray into the casual puzzle space which, which also I think uh was a kind of a uh forward thinking move back at the time because like in 2021 launching a casual puzzle game from a team that didn't have any previous uh puzzle title or like puzzle experience I think was quite forward thinking. The game uh made quite a success. They actually about one or one and a half year uh later they sold the whole game and the studio working on Zenmatch to Moon Active for like estimated approximately between 100 to $150 million. Uh and like Moon Active took the game and also uh, they owned the studio that works on the game back at the time.

Speaker D: So I want to.

Speaker C: Sorry, let me jump in one thing. I want to, I want to. That moment was really important because they were, we were. We had these amazing puzzle games except there was. It felt like there's always a lull in puzzle. There always feels like a lull. So there's not a lull in Solen. Someone comes out with something new. Now this with Zenmatch I remember distinctly because I was still working on casual puzzle games at that point. Everyone was like, it was like the Gold Rush tile Match Mahjong. They have something that we're missing something if we're not in that space. And that's when you start to see. So as a just as a note, tile busters by spike games which um, uh which also came. I think they actually came from peak. But um, that game came out a year later. So this space was like red hot. Everyone was super excited. It seemed like an easy way to mix match three mechanics that were so successful into something that wasn't match three. So it was differentiated. I felt like this literally was a Gold Rush at that point.

Speaker B: Yep. And I think Dave's not. I think they were able to sell Zem Match at its kind of peak because once they sold the game to Moon Active, uh, and just let's take a quick like look at the next slide because it's going to show that once they sold them Match to Moon Active the game really didn't go back to its like glory days, to its previous days ever. And like it's still probably, it's still a uh, uh, like relatively sizable puzzle title. But uh, after Good Job Games sold the Zam Match to Moon Active the game didn't have its like previous performance after that. So maybe that gold rush uh analogy also makes sense from that perspective that Good Job Games was able to exit Zen Match before it became like before the market became too crowded to make the game more profitable in the long term. And after uh they sold they exited zanmatch, they exited the other other like they had the Hyper Casual part of their business and Zenmatch uh up until 2022 and they first sold Zenmatch to Mulective and about a year after that they sold their whole Hyper Casual portfolio to a subsidiary of Azure Games. And Azure Games was a uh, very prominent Hyper Casual publisher back at the time. And uh, they acquired the whole Hyper Casual type uh portfolio from Good Job Games which had uh, more than 2.5 billion downloads back at the time with like uh, more than 35 games in that portfolio. And they basically in like in the span of one year they basically exited the both parts, both halves of their whole portfolio of their whole business and they had a clean slate to focus on whatever they want to do basically because like you sell the them match for more than $100 million. And the hyper Casual portfolio, we don't have the exact numbers but I'm guessing it's not like a very small number either. So they had. Yeah, even.

Speaker C: Yeah it was an undisclosed, undisclosed sum. So it was private sale. We have no idea. It wasn't. It's not public information. But this was their second exit. I can't stress that enough. This was their second exit. And it goes back to the whole question of that we're covering now. Are they running out of money? We this two exits. It's hard to say but let's. Yeah, it's a question we're going to try to answer.

Speaker D: I think the other interesting thing at this point is like if you look at the frequency of releases up until I think it's like 2022 they're releasing quite frequently and then it's like they sell these two properties, cash in and everything goes quiet until Match Villains drops. So you obviously had like uh, quite a high convincing conviction that this was the thing that they wanted to do.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And before they actually launched Match Villains they launched another uh, puzzle title uh named Wonderblast which was a uh, like a foray which was a experiment within the blast space. And uh, as we mentioned I think before in the previous episodes, episodes like in several previous episodes entering the blast space in the last five to six years, uh, never like uh, concluded with a positive result for any uh, company or any team uh so far. And M. Wonderblast was no exception as well. The game really didn't do well. And if we were to uh, look at the numbers here, you really have to squint to see Wonderblast which is this like thin layer at the bottom. And the game really didn't do uh, anything meaningful especially for a team like Good job games size. And they recently exited Wonderblast as well to another Turkish developer, uh Fugo Games. And uh, they are, I don't know if they are trying to scale it or just run it profitably but they don't own Wonderblast anymore either. And then we come to the uh, meat of the uh discussion today. Launching Match Villains which was launched in 2024 which was quickly followed with a gigantic uh race. $83 million race which of course like if you're going to build a Match three title and if you want to scale it further of course you need the backing of a large war chest so that you can uh have the leisure of acquiring those users and testing

Speaker C: things, trying new things and channeling my inner, inner crests. The it was the 80, 83 million was divided into two, two different parts. So 23 million was a seed round uh backed by Menlo Ventures and Arcadia. And then the second one was 60 uh million series A, also Menlo Ventures and Enthos Capital with Bessemer uh Venture Partners participating. So it was two different. While it was 80, 83, 83 million in total. It was two different funds.

Speaker B: Yeah. And as you can see after the launch of Match Villains it's like reached the size of uh, uh the peak of let's say Zen Match back at the time. But right now the game uh, is not at a very like a consistently high performing level. And that's exactly what we are going to try to discuss later in the episode both through the gameplay side and through the more of like uh, numbers side to understand uh, what is Happening with Match villains and uh, what we think can actually fix it in the long term. But to understand the kind of the long term culture and history of the game development side from Good Job Games, maybe we can also uh, briefly talk about the previous titles that they worked on and that they actually exited and Design Match, uh, as we mentioned is the first one that they exited and which was as Laura mentioned which, which created this whole like uh, buzz of yeah tile Match is going to become the next like merge. It's going to become the number two in the puzzle space which I, I was also kind of a part of that crowd as well. I was also quite impressed with how Zen Match was like performing and scaling and also from a gameplay perspective, uh, how many different kind of like design layers it was uh, proposing or it was providing uh, to players. And to be, to be frank, that Match definitely was a great uh, title and also an innovative title which you know they had this like two uh, like two halved levels. You needed to first like finish the first half and then go to a more like difficult second half which kind of created maybe this like FOMO impact because like you already passed the first half and you want to finish the level after that point. And they had other kind of like tweaks with how they designed the levels as you can see how they kind of hid certain items and how they progressively let you uh, understand and like discover the whole level by itself. Which I think is also is still being followed by the hybrid casual market. Because if you play games like Color Blockchain for example or even like Pixel Flow, you're always given this static game like game level. The level design is always the same and you're trying to kind of like discover it and memorize it and understand which kind of moves are going to be your, to be to your favor and then move, move through uh, accordingly. So I think from those perspectives Zen Match was quite uh, innovative and um, rememberable but memorable. But I think the end result with ZenMatch was that as we also, as I also mentioned, good job games built a great tile Match game and then they were able to exit, exit it, sell it at the peak of the game and just like move on with their lives uh, to build the next casual puzzle title in their portfolio. Uh, wonderblast. I think Laura, you have more to talk about. Wonderblast, Eiffel Tower, iconic Tower of London,

Speaker D: historic, the two Towers, simply epic.

Speaker B: But none of them tell you anything about mobile app intelligence downloads, revenue, active users and my personal favorite weekly cohorted Retention. Get the real story, get the real data.

Speaker D: Get Sensor Tower today.

Speaker A: Talk about Wonder Blast. I mean, do you know any other examples of people exiting, like selling a game? I mean, it seems like that's very rare. I mean, um, usually, you know, no. People buy the studio and stuff, but Peak didn't sell the game either. They sold. They. Yeah, they sold the studio. Right. They didn't sell the. But I guess Zenmatch was also like a studio. But this seems like. I mean, it's nothing you would have. I mean, um, you know, I haven't heard of that before. Just like selling just a game.

Speaker C: Only when companies are trying to sell overall or they're trying to shutter the studio. Sometimes I can see them selling a game. In certain cases they've sold a game out. When they're literally trying to close a studio or they're trying to earn back money from whatever. But no, usually if the, if the company is going to continue. Oh, oh, I thought of one. Um, Niantic sold Pokemon Go Disco.

Speaker A: Yeah, but they didn't buy all of Niantic.

Speaker C: No, I'm pretty sure they didn't. I, I thought they just did here.

Speaker B: And this like, the same happened with Peak through their like traditional portfolio as well.

Speaker C: It's. They bought their games business. So the scopely bought, um, Niantic's Games business in 2025 for 3.5 billion. So it wasn't.

Speaker A: I don't know. Yeah. And I mean, what else is there besides their games business? Like their map. The map tech or what is it? Did they not take shared tech or what? What did they not take?

Speaker C: I feel like Niantic always wanted to be if. I remember writing about the CEO of Niantic saying that he, he wanted to be an AR company that focused on getting people outside. I remember reading something about that. So I can see in that case. Yeah, maybe game games were a way to deliver that message. But I feel like if I read between the lines, it's probably not what he wanted to do with his company or how he wanted to shape, how he wanted to leave the world.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's Niantic Spatial, the technology platform. Niantic Spatial basically spun off from the acquisitions.

Speaker C: Yep. Is that. Oh, you're right, you're right. The non video game division was spun off into a separate entity called Niantic Spatial.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but like, if you're talking. Talking from like a single game acquisition perspective. Yeah, that's true. Like even the Peak example that I'm giving is more of like the board game division. And they all. They sold the whole division similar to the Niantic situation. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker C: Okay, so Wonder Blast.

Speaker B: Yeah, moving to Wonder Blast.

Speaker C: So Wonder Blast was um. So for those that haven't played it, it wasn't out for too long. You can play it now. But um, it is and I classify it as good. Jobs games attempt to do what Dream did for Match three except in Blast. So it was a Blast style game. They had a little uh. The Wilson family was building out Wonder Ville and that was. That represented the meta. And I think there's two interesting parts to Wonder Blast at uh, Soft Launch. I covered this in twig 256. It ran. It was looking for a USP to find how can we make a. How can we make a name for ourselves in Wonder Blast by offering the player something different. Which I love that. That's noble. That's what everyone be doing. What they did was that they removed the line Blast initially and they had a uh, propeller Fish engine into Blast which is typically used in Match three. We know it and love it. From the fish that were in Candy and then Candy Crush Soda. Um, and the. What was so frustrating and what the problem I like that they tried to solve is that if you go back and play Toy Blast Tomb Blast, you can't choose the direction of the Lime Blast you get when you make one. And I, I imagine if I was sitting in that room with them, they're probably like ah, all right, how do we make this better? Because you can't control it. Let's give the players more control. Now I don't think that as much as I like the idea, um, I don't think it probably didn't stick because in a live build that was released later, I think it was 2024, um, about a year later they brought Lime Blast back and they removed the fish and propellers. Because going through my old notes I was very confused. It's like I don't understand wait, what happened with fish? Why. Why do I have conflicting information? I didn't have conflicting information. And it was that they changed it. Um, and then if you flashback go all the way back to that time, Time Blast also came out in that same era and they were also Blast Game, hence the title. And they kept the fish propeller approach. So was there something there? Probably. But Wonder Blast didn't um, keep it. When I looked at the data initially for this game it had a weak uh, revenue uh, per download versus other UK titles. I believe I played it in their UK soft launch which is Why I was comparing it to UK titles, it was not a good sign for scalability early. So as much as I liked the idea and liked the direction, I didn't have high hopes that it was going to scale. Now there were some other issues with it design wise. The Specials are the beating heart of these games. Like they can make or break whether you win. And they had a couple things that didn't quite land in terms of when specials would drop into spots that would create, that would disrupt creating other specials. Um, and that I feel like that is something. If you want to innovate in that space, you got to be super careful. Um, and we can talk about. I was looking when I was playing Match Villains. There's something. We can talk about it then. But um, when you deal with Specials you got to be careful. So Wonder Blast, I'll keep it short because it just like, you know, kind of it was a short lived game. It's still live, but relatively short. Never, never really got to scale. Um, I'd say it was a case of it kind of was stuck in soft launch purgatory. It was mechanically inventive but it just couldn't clear the uh, revenue per download and the general KPI bar I think to justify scaling um, the. Let me see. Yeah, I think that's. I'll leave it at that. We can dig into some of the other, other questions around design choices as we get into the last game and then look at all three as a whole. But I liked Wonderblast. It's interesting but I think it didn't quite hit if my um, estimated hypothesis of be the Royal Kingdom for Blast.

Speaker B: Yeah. So let's talk about the last game is Match Villains. And I'm going to share the like a gameplay uh, recording of that. And I think Tom can take us through what he thinks about the game and how innovative it is and if we think that innovation is actually hurting Match Villains to us, like to an extent.

Speaker D: Yeah, 100%. So I mean listen to you talk about uh, Wonderblast, Laura. It's like the perfect. You can see how it segues really nicely into Match Villains because it's kind of what they've tried to do with the game. Right. So for me at least I think there's, there's two main differences between Match Villains and Royal Match Number one is the um, level of polish. Like they introduced that kind of uh, cinematic type of um, animation between levels and for live ops and stuff which now Royal Match themselves are doing. Uh, and like putting a lot of attention into the other thing, and it looks amazing. It looks fantastic. And the other thing that they're doing, or at least at launch, an interesting thing they were doing was introducing the. The gameplay felt very different. So they had different kind of innovative types of blockers. Like every Maps three has, uh, you know, the crate and uh, I don't know, mine's going completely black. But like, you know, all the kind of classic kind of, you've got to hit it with a blaster, you've got to hit it three times, that type of thing. Whereas Match Villains has got blockers which kind of like interact back with the pieces. So there's like the police dude, which kind of like jails your power uh, ups if they get too close to it, and lasers which, uh, beam across the board. And if your power ups kind of drop down onto the laser, they get vaporized. So it kind of, it was introducing something genuinely different to the game, uh, which I thought was really interesting. Um, and kind of. I don't know when, when it first came out, I played it a lot and I was super impressed by it. I think over time it. Things have got. Like talking to you earlier on Laura, it sounds like kind of early experiences got a lot more kind of pressed. Like they've tried to make it a lot more difficult, which is kind of, you know, suggesting that they're kind of moving towards trying to monetize more aggressively. But also I find when I play it, it's so much heavier on kind of messaging. Like between each level there's a massive gap where you've got meta, meta, meta, meta offer, uh, pay for this thing. 199, 999 like it. I feel like they're kind of. It feels like they're kind of like turning all the knobs at the same time to be like, quick, can we, can we turn it up? Can we get more money out of this thing? Which is interesting from a gameplay point of view, I think. Other couple of things which are quite interesting is kind of looking at the data before, um, the podcast, um, you can, if you look at downloads by market, you can kind of. There's a clear point where up until the first raise last year, they were clearly pushing on downloads in the US and you could see actually were coming along quite nicely. And it all looked pretty promising. And then once they'd done that first raise, I think around that point they did a global launch. Uh, and actually the US downloads dropped off quite a lot. I don't know whether that was a strategic decision or whatever. But then Once you hit August and they did that big raise, the 60 mil one suddenly like the global downloads kick off again and there's a massive spike but us never really picks up. So uh, and it all drops off like massively once you get to. Is it like January, February, uh, this year. Which is also just before these two completely like slightly weird Match Villains sub brand games came out. So there's. What is it? I have to quickly look at my notes. There's. There's Match Villains Police Escape and Match Villains Spook Escape and they're both very like hyper casual type games. The Spook Spook Escape one is like almost like a mini game from within Match Villains, uh, and kind of interstitial ads.

Speaker A: It is, it is a mini. It is a mini game.

Speaker D: No IAP and it's kind of like I don't know, I'm scratching, you know, look, looking at the evidence in front of me, I'm like scratching my head at exactly what's going on but it doesn't look good.

Speaker C: So I'm gonna jump in. I played, I think this is one of the first times I've played Match Villains. I remember looking at it and then I really gave it a proper play yesterday which means I'm in the download cohort for now. I. My first thought getting to. I played through level 63. I started to get squeezed for running out of moves, noticing a visible increase in difficulty starting level 25. And my first thought was they are trying to get the payback period faster than two years. That was my first thought. I was like there's no, there's no way to. There's no reason to make it that hard. And that's not usually what, what these games do. This is very slow ramp. Get people falling in love with your mechanics, get them to understand the usp. Keep them as long as possible because the longer they stay the longer, the higher chance they will pay and they will uh, they'll stay in your game forever. Right. And I felt like they were going counter to that.

Speaker A: I mean it is a very different. There's two different modes, right? I mean we talk about it but like if you're playing like a lot of, a lot of casual, a lot of games that came from sort of hyper casual that do hybrid casual now you could fail pretty early. Like some of those games are hard. At level six you're failing and you're sometimes failing a lot, you know. So it is kind of hard to tell which. What is the right uh, what's the right balancing and I mean I think probably if you, your gut on the hyper casual thing is to hit, fail earlier, show ads earlier, get your, I mean if you're, if you're running a hyper casual to hybrid casual game, you're looking for 50 row ask by day seven or something depending on what it is you're doing, you know, which is not what Match three is. But why is Match three like that? I mean is Match three like that? Because it's, Match three is actually now just a sponsored event for Meta and Applovin to make money. Is that what the, I mean that's the, that's what's actually happening. I mean you look at paybacks on those things, you got a two years payback, you're basically an app loving subsidiary. Um, which is fine. I mean that's nice I guess I hope you get a good pension plan and buy some stock or something but it is a very, very difficult way to run a business.

Speaker B: Yeah, but I think it's also like because of the long term retention potential of those games like if I have a game that has uh, like I don't know, 15% retention at day 700 something, I'm just making things up. I have the luxury to just like uh, postpone the payback, just push the payback period so that I can bid in a more uh, free manner for user acquisition and I can afford that. Maybe in Matchville's case the long term retention was not providing the uh, strong enough, was not providing the target KPIs to them. So they were trying to pull back the payback period. If like Laura's theory is like wrong. Uh, true in this like case.

Speaker A: Yeah but I mean imagine what you have to do. You have to launch a game and you have to start buying like one and a half year paybacks while you have 30 day retention and you got to start modeling that out and guessing it. And I mean you can do some models and I've seen some really complicated models made by some really wonderful people and then I asked a 7 year old to draw it with crayon and the 7 year old beats him sometimes. So I mean you know it's not, it's like, it's very, very hard, it's very very hard to predict what's going to happen on day whatever, you know, 700. So I um, so I mean it is a difficult thing that you're trying to do. You're basically building something expecting to be very hot and then hoping that model holds. And when you find out your model doesn't hold, what do you have to do. It's very hard. It's very hard. And I mean two year payback and you know Google and Apple fees like this is hard. Anyway, my point is I think it's a natural reaction to try to pull it forward. Um, I'm surprised that more companies are, aren't aggressively trying to figure out how to pull it forward. And there's two ways to pull it forward. Right. The one way is doing stuff with the game. The other one is with targeting and that's what Applovin does really well is with targeting. So they're targeting done so well that you can get the payers but the problem is you got to pay for them and then that pushes it back out again. So.

Speaker C: Oof is right. I will say one thing I liked about Match Villains. I did like the game. The game I thought was it's a very solid game. I loved the element of uh, luck they added with the golden, the golden fish. It's not a fish but the golden fly. Yeah that part was.

Speaker A: Except it doubles in order.

Speaker C: It doubles it and I mean they do that in most match three games. That's usually a pre level booster. It's you know you get two fish for every one fish you normally would get. I love that they made it an element of surprise in the, in the engine and that type of co innovation is what I'd love to see more of and I wish they leaned more into that. How do you add random elements of chance to match three that can, that can either help or not help your board. Um, but that's my own personal musings for the, for the studio. I'll, I'll one day start.

Speaker B: But um.

Speaker C: That laser you mentioned, Tom, I hate that one, that one and. But I'm glad they did it because it's something different. It's kind of punishing and mean but at least they're, they're, they're looking I think in the right places to, to basically push change for the match three engine.

Speaker D: Right. I mean I, I really liked it because what it does particularly when you combine it with the kind of like uh, jelly style thing you end up having like a kind of actual strategy for. It makes sense to clear the lasers first because that's messing me up. I'm going to get rid of that. Then you have to clear the other blockers and then if you've got the jam you've got to spread across the level. It kind of splits everything into net rather than just like I'm just going to blow shit uh, up and finish as quickly as I can. It's more like a slight element of strategy and phasing across the level. So it kind of breaks it down into different parts. Kind of like. Yeah, it's different. It's a little bit more satisfying. It makes you feel like 10% smarter. I'm into it.

Speaker B: Yeah. So maybe David Dav, since you like talked about those uh, pushback periods and the difficulties of living with the high like two back two year playback periods in Match three so far. Good Job Games has these like two exits that we talked about and they have like a quite like decent uh, match three game with match villains which uh, generated like $65 million of revenue so far, like in about two years. I guess. Like despite that, we're talking about all these like problems with the uh, aggressive like uh, level funnels. They had their download mix kind of like scubing towards tier 3 countries which might suggest the game like adding more in app ads to its like mix. Like why do you think this happened for like in Match Villains case and maybe tying it back to a previous uh, episode. Do you think if Match Villains, the example that you mentioned, if Match Villains and Royal Kingdom was to switch places, do you think the same. The thing that is happening to Match Villains right now would happen to Royal Kingdom as well?

Speaker A: Sorry, wait, do you mean um, if Match Villains is launched first and Royal and M. Royal Match, that Royal Match could be struggling. Is that what you mean?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker B: If Match Villains was launched by Dream and Royal Kingdom was launched by Good Job Games, do you think Match Villains would be in the same spot right now? Or do you think it would have a uh, different, like, kind of like trajectory?

Speaker A: No, same spot. I mean the problem is in the structure of the game. Not the uh, not the publisher or whatever. But I mean, I guess if it had been done there, it would have been led by different people and would be different Satori.

Speaker F: It's the Japanese Zen Buddhist term for sudden enlightenment. That flash where everything clicks. We're told that Heroic Labs team had theirs when they realized that most studios run live ops like a horoscope. Vague kind of generic. Same advice for everyone. So they built Satori. Real time experimentation, player level personalization events that actually respond to player behavior. Say sayonara to your old liveops stack and konnichiwa to Satori from Heroic Labs

Speaker A: opinion. And I mean if we look. I mean, yeah, but, but I mean if you just look at it like just that thing, the. The Polish level is unbelievable. In this game. It is out of this world, I mean, everything is maxed. Everything looks awesome. The video things, the characters. I mean it's, there is. Everything is so maxed. It's just unbelievable. And so, I mean, I. One of the most interesting question question is, did the max not only not help, but did it hurt it? Is it too much? Is it like, you know, I mean, does it, does it take away from the focus of the experience?

Speaker D: You know, I think, I mean, I think it's too much. There's too much. Like when I play it now, I don't know what's important anymore because there's just stuff going on everywhere. We, we, we actually worked on a game, uh, once where we kind of hit that point. It was crazy. We kind of like we're turning stuff up and up and up. And then one week we, uh, did a release and everything just tanked because there was just too much going on. You know, too many explosions, nothing without kind of like the point of maxing stuff is to emphasize it and draw a, uh, player's attention to it. Like, this is important. If everything's maxed, then nothing's important.

Speaker B: Do you mean the Polish level insight, like core gameplay, or the like, number of events and how they are like, provided to the player, or do you mean like bots everything?

Speaker D: The latter for me. Meta.

Speaker A: I mean everything.

Speaker D: You mean everything?

Speaker A: I mean everything. But I mean, I mean, I don't know, there's like, there is maybe visual fatigue with this, like, I'm almost watching a movie. Like they're like running and there's car chases and there's like things flying at me and I'm like, can I get popcorn and relax or do I have to do something? What is going on? There's so much going on. So much going on.

Speaker C: You know, so you're think.

Speaker A: I mean, if I was too much

Speaker C: going on and that is why this game is not.

Speaker A: I mean, I, uh, think the real. I mean it would be a really fun experiment. I would love to see the results of like, let's make this thing extremely simplified and find out if it's worse. My guess is it would be one of the favorite. I mean, we've run this experiment so many times. You take away all these art things that somebody's pressed like crazy and the metrics don't change at all and you realize you spent two years, you know, hammering things and polishing and none of it mattered. That I think is the most likely outcome. But then you could focus on what does matter.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yes, yes. This is where Laura and my Venn diagram. That's where, that's where they pass. It's all about gameplay.

Speaker C: It is all about gameplay. There was one thing you said, uh, A.C. about your question. I can't picture Dream ever making a game like this. And because of how the mechanics were done. If I remember when I covered, when I covered the original um, Dream Royal Match, it was one of the most actually they ended up making changes to it but it was one of the most. Let me have the players back in all, in all areas of the game. I felt like they played hundreds of hours of Match three games, looked at them, decided oh, this feels punishing. This feels punishing. It was probably in the backlog of those games was yeah, let's fix it. But it's not super important. I don't think we're going to, I don't think necessarily it's going to move the needle. That's fair. But then Royal Match was the solution to that. They basically saved all the puzzle. They saved the special pieces when they dropped down. So in the original Match three games, sometimes when you would, you would get spawned in for the uh, winner win streak, they would spawn in places that would take away from your ability to make a special naturally in the level. Those types of kind of. They're not and they're not done intentionally. There was no designer that said let me kill that level for players. It's not, not what I'm saying. It's about going back and refactoring. But when they, when, when um, World Match started, they fixed all of those small things that make that are like incremental by themselves but together form a very solid like defense for the player to have a higher chance of winning that I take as what they want. They, they wanted to make things that were genuinely fun for players. How do we make Match three fun with this? I, I do feel that while the obstacles are interesting, between the theme which is the villain stealing stuff and some of the punishing obstacles, I feel like that's not, to me it does not signify that the designers want the same, have that same kind of uh, adoration for the player. And that's why I could not picture Dream Games making this type of game. I think in my mind they're so different, uh, just in terms of, in terms of approach. You don't get those hard obstacles that feel punishing in Royal Match to like. I mean I wish, I wish my memory was this good, but I don't remember seeing them till like you're in level like 200. Like you're not. You're not seeing those. Those more tricky ones until you've really built a foundation of understanding how that game works here. They're very early.

Speaker D: Royal Kingdom does have those levels where you're fighting the, like, castles at the top and they shoot out, uh, those bushes, don't they? Uh, if you don't get them in time, they like.

Speaker C: True.

Speaker D: So m. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you on royal maps, for sure, but Royal Kingdom, I think, is slightly different, which is interesting.

Speaker C: Position itself that way. Right. It is made that way with the intention of. All right. This game is noticeably harder and it's going to be framed that way. Harder. Right. I feel like this one is, uh, Match Villains, and again, it is a good game, but I feel like Match Villains is. It doesn't. It's not the same type of positioning. There's no boss levels. There's no huge indicators that that's coming or that's part of this is weaved into the. Weaved into the fabric of the levels themselves, of every level in the game. I don't know, maybe I'm speaking out of my ass, but there's just a. There's. There's a completely. There's. I feel like there's just a different world. Kingdom lays it out very clearly for me. You are battling things. This is how this structure is going to go, whereas the obstacles, you don't really know. And so I guess I'm. Maybe I'm projecting how. How, uh, surprised. Surprised I was that they would build an obstacle that early sub level 100 that would basically destroy your specials. That, for me, felt incredibly punishing. Yes, there's strategy and I get it, but I don't expect that much strategy. Sure, they're villains, but the heist is only coming through with images. It's not. I'm not like, doing anything in the heist. It's not like I'm hitting a button, like, timing when I'm going to escape. It just seems like your average meta a little bit like, oh, oh, okay. Now instead of rebuilding something, I'm stealing stuff. But I don't know, that connection to me wasn't. Wasn't enough.

Speaker B: So, like, in your opinion, the polish in Royal Match or Royal Kingdom is for the, like, the core gameplay and for the player, but the Polish in Matriline is more for the looks and like, how kind of like polished it looks from the outside, not the actual. The like the experience itself all the time, at least.

Speaker C: The polish is definitely for the art on this. And they do a Good job. They do do a good job. But I don't think the. The small incremental designs are necessarily this. They didn't go as far. I feel like they wanted. They definitely wanted to challenge the player more than they wanted to, uh. More than they wanted to, like, innovate in ways that would elevate the type of gameplay we have in Match three without raising the challenge bar. Because there's ways you can innovate without increasing the difficulty.

Speaker A: Well, I think, uh.

Speaker D: The, uh, interesting thing, I think is it wasn't always, like, as pronounced as this. I think it's got more like this recently since we've had this kind of, like, story last year of doing a raise global launch. US didn't take off getting. Doing another raise. US still doesn't take off. And now it feels like they're trying to, like, crank it up and try other things to try and kind of like. Because this seems to be the issue, doesn't it? It's like they raise all this money, uh, but actually they can't get the revenue per down. They can't get the roas where they need to be because the country mix isn't right. And that feels like maybe that's what we're seeing now is like, shit, how are we going to make this work? Let's try this. And it does. It doesn't sound like you're convinced anyway, Laura. I mean, the metrics don't look great either.

Speaker B: Dave, before the episode when we were talking about, like, numbers and charts, you had, like, an interesting, uh, observation about the RPD numbers from machines and a couple of other games as well. Do you want to talk about that?

Speaker C: You're muted, Dave. We want to hear your voice.

Speaker B: It's gonna be a little.

Speaker D: What's happened.

Speaker A: Apparently, while you're doing the sharing, you're not allowed to unmute M. You have to do the sharing first. It's. You know, this platform is very specific. All right, cool. Let's take a look at this. So, um, sensor tower, uh, us, uh, iOS. So we got rid of, um. Don't need to mention him by name, but one of the great operators in our industry. Every time you showed him a chart would say, yes, David, but is this US iOS? Of course it is. Those who know, they know. Um. Oh, boy. Um, so we're looking at revenue per download for LMatch. And it's unbelievable, right? This is, like, very, very high and very good. I won't force anybody to guess, but, um, this is driven by, like, extremely good design. Um, the Increase here went up very quickly and you see a continued like increase as they ramp up on events. And I mean this is uh, very well done. Yeah. So we're going to add, let's add Royal Kingdom and uh, Royal Kingdom. You can see that even if we just take a look at like April and then what should we add? Add four months or something like that. So if we look at like August or, or is it something like that? So from, you know, nothing to 10 bucks after four months and here, uh, you don't like. I mean it gets to four months way later, you know, so slow, slower, ramp up. Um, still at a much lower level, uh, Royal Kingdom than Royal Match. What's driving the difference there? That'd be really interesting. Um, and if we take a look at Match Villains, it's uh, even flatter. There's something wrong. Not just the retention is probably great, but there's something wrong in how it monetizes. I mean is it getting the wrong. Is it not attracting the same users? Is there something about the puzzle purists that love Royal Match and when they play Match Vines they don't get the same thing? You, uh, know, I don't know. An interesting one to compare it with is Piggy Kingdom, which operates at a lower level. The total revenue is lower, but the revenue per download has just been increasing, increasing steadily. And they're doing just whatever they're doing. They're doing a great job with it. Uh, it's pretty impressive.

Speaker C: We should cover Piggy Kingdom next. Why?

Speaker A: And maybe we should. I mean look at this, look at this install base. So like much tighter install base. Really looking like they're just aiming at the players that are going to monetize well and getting them and not involved in the, you know, I mean, drag out who's going to kill who give all of our money to Applovin first Battle. That's going on here. That's what it looks like to me.

Speaker B: That's an interesting picture because like we're always talking about new games should come up with like new twists and they need to innovate to be successful, etc. But PG Kingdom is a very, very close follow of Royal Match. Like it's almost like a clone of. It's the most successful roller match cologne. I would say it's the most successful roll match cologne. And like, although we're always talking about the like benefits of innovation and that's how you survive in the market, the charts, the chart that you are sharing, it tells me otherwise. Like you don't at least for Match three. For Match three, what this tells me is you don't have to like, you don't have to necessarily innovate to be successful. You can just run and execute.

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Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, let's say this, if you clone and execute properly, you might get a profitable product. It'll probably never, it'll never be bigger than the first one and it probably won't be that big, but you can build a manageable business. If you're going to innovate and try to go after the big guys, you need to figure out what you're going to innovate on. And I think here, Royal Match innovated on the core and on the. What they presented and what they didn't present and made it very tight. And they improved on Candy Crush, they improved on Guardscapes, and I mean it did very, very well. Um, and the question is, what did Royal Match? What did Match, uh, villains do? And if it was just on the level of polish, we're going to ramp the level of polish so it's twice as high as Royal Match. I mean it looks like that's not a valuable, not valuable. And I think we know this in mobile games, like, just improving polish a ton isn't going to be the big breakthrough. And I mean, maybe on other games, I don't, I mean I'm not a, I don't play first person shooter, so I got no idea. I play puzzle games. That's what I do. But I mean the, the, I mean, also a good example, um, Gossip harbor versus Love and Pies, which you covered last time. Gossip harbor is not. And a massive improvement in polish. It's the same. It's the same. As a matter of fact, it's almost a perfect example of what a not optimized one looks like versus an optimized one. It's just optimized. The Events, there's ton more events. There's way more action going on. And so the revenue is like way higher. But it's not on polish, it's not

Speaker D: the UX polish, it's the systems polished is what differently.

Speaker A: I think it's system execution. Because I polish you, it's execution.

Speaker D: Yeah. What I'm saying is like, it's, it's the stuff that you don't. You can't, you, you can't pick up Gossip harbor and be like, you wouldn't unless you knew. It looks so similar. But the thing which is different is the thing that you can't see is the thing that you can't actually copy because it's, you can only like infer from what's there, what you think is going on in Royal Match or whatever. But you actually have to work that out for yourself as a company. Like what actually works for your players.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, if you're going to go after something, you can either go after something that is not optimized yet and take your knowledge and optimize it. Um, and if you're going to go after the big ones, you got to go after them with a real understanding of why you think you can serve this customer base much better than.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Than the way the incumbents do.

Speaker C: Amen, Dave. Amen.

Speaker D: So what I mean, I got like, how does this net out there? Are we just saying that Matt's feelings is just kind of like been a big swing and a miss and that. That it's just kind of is never going to make it and it. And if so, what. What's the kind of implication from that? Is there an implication?

Speaker C: Well, it's not a home run, but it also wasn't. I don't know enough baseball terms. They didn't miss. They didn't miss hitting the ball. And the, the, the hitter, the one with the bat wasn't hit by the ball.

Speaker A: Oh, my God. That's fine. If you get hit by the ball, then you get on base, which is all you want to do. This is terrible. Edit this out. Uh, God, this is awful. What happened? The ball and the hitter with the. The ball. Hitter.

Speaker D: The batter.

Speaker A: It's a batter, right?

Speaker C: I mean, I think. Yeah. Is this going to be there? Well, here's the question. I, I still can't figure out. And maybe we figure this out by, you know, in the last couple minutes or not. You know, the whole rumor is that they're running out of money. Do I think they can. I wish I. If I could see a balance Sheet I'd be able to answer. We all would be able to answer it. But is is can this game again? The lifetime revenue of um from Sensor Tower for Match villains is about 65 million and that's what over now, almost three years. I don't know what their studio costs are. I don't know. I mean the UA costs. Well, the UA cost alone would be quite tough, but is this going to dig them out of the hole? I don't know. I don't know what. I don't know how m. How open they are to changes. I don't know how they could change it at this point. Should they? I guess, yeah. Dave, what do you think? How do you think they can. Where do you think their status is now and do you. What do you think they can change to make to get them out of it, if anything?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean they've probably spent $60 million in marketing in the U.S. you know, if not more.

Speaker B: I don't know.

Speaker A: So I mean, I, I don't know. One of the things I think is really interesting is the um, uh, you've got the, the uh, you've got the um. There's like a. There's a. Basically they're taking a couple of the live ops and turning them into games. And this is the Pixel Flow, right? This is where Pixel Flow came from. It was a. So it's like following another trend. Can we grab these small things and actually turn them into something and see if we can? Um, I think that's pretty, pretty interesting. Um, it probably says like, are they running out of money? I mean like you said, they own only they know and whoever their backers are. But uh, I don't think this looks like any sort of like desperation attempt. It's probably like, hey, let's take what we've got and try to find a place that's more fertile and a better place to uh, a better place to spend our time rather than going to war. Um, I'd also say that maybe the worst time to launch it and I mean you can see this right here. I mean look at this. It's absolutely wonderful. One of the worst times to launch. If you'd asked me, if you'd only show me these top two lines here and you said when's the worst time ever to launch a match three. I would have been like, let's say November 2024.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's also true. That's also true.

Speaker A: I mean probably the numbers got doubled and I mean we know this, this is old. You know, old stuff, but, like, when there was nothing going. I mean, Candy Crush is like such a huge. It's a massive amount of organics. Like, you don't need to do anywhere near the same kind of marketing. And the companies that came after them, Playrix, um, you know, Peak, uh, Dream. Uh, you have to spend a lot of marketing money in order to compete with the big. The big incumbent. Um, and when you're doing that on top of an incumbent that's already willing to spend extra on top of what they're already spending, it's just a tough time. It's a tough time to go ahead on. Maybe not the right thing to do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: All right.

Speaker B: Should we call it.

Speaker A: Anybody want to play Taps on the. Or what's the. You know, the thing that you. When they're dead.

Speaker B: The ultro.

Speaker D: The.

Speaker C: No, the Taps. It's like when. Um. Well, so. Never mind, never mind. I'm not even going to go there

Speaker A: for fallen soldiers or whatever. Yes, exactly. It's a.

Speaker D: Out.

Speaker A: Yes, please. All right, cool.

Speaker D: All right.

Speaker B: Anyway, thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye. See you next episode. Bye.

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