As early as March last year, the Turkish game company Dream Games received $50 million in Series A financing, setting a record for the highest Round A financing amount obtained by a Turkish company, and their only match-3 game product, Royale Match, was also officially released on the day of the investment, which can be said to be a win at the starting line.
Relying on a game to get a huge investment may not be a particularly new thing in the game industry, but if you have been relying on this game for investment, it often means that the company has unusual excellence, and Dream Games obviously meets such conditions.
In June 2021, three months after the release of Royale Match, Dream Games raised a further $155 million in Series B funding, and by January 18 this year, the company raised $255 million in Series C funding, with a total valuation of $2.75 billion. This round of funding was led by Index Ventures, with the participation of Makers Fund, IVP, BlackRock, Kora and others.
Dream Games has raised $468 million so far, and its workforce has grown from 30 to more than 80, and is expected to increase to 120 this year.
Winning at the starting line may not be enough to describe Dream Games' situation on the match-3 track, but what makes GameLook more curious is why Turkish companies can frequently gain capital favor, and what is the secret of Dream Games' growth by relying on only one star product to "fight the world".
Turkey: The "Fertile Land" of Casual Games and the "Silicon Valley of Mobile Games"
To some extent, Turkey is like a "fertile land" for casual game developers, giving birth to several excellent match-3 game developers, and its games have also achieved a double harvest of word-of-mouth and business. The most high-profile Zynga acquired Peak Games for $1.8 billion, and Peak Games is also a game company from Turkey, which owns two match-3 products, Toy Blast and Toon Blast, and maintains more than 10 million DAUs.
There is also a few days ago, the Turkish game company Spyke Games, which received $55 million in seed round financing, also relied on a casual game to "break through the rivers and lakes", and also broke the record of the Turkish corporate seed round funding run by female CEOs.
As Güven atak, founder of the GARDEN CITY University BUG Lab in Istanbul, puts it: "In this era of economic downturn, developing casual games has become Turkey's 'American Dream'. This may also be the reason why the Turkish game market has always been characterized by "lightweight".
In Turkey, developing casual games has become a way of survival for many young people, and low labor costs may be a major possibility for Turkish game developers to be widely favored by capital, on the one hand, game development is attractive to teenagers, on the other hand, as atak puts it, "multinational companies pay wages in dollars, they can spend more money, because the exchange rate makes labor cheaper." ”
However, it is worth noting that neither Peak Games nor Dream Games has fallen into the volume of casual game development "inner volume", in the previous interview with the founder of Rollic, a small game manufacturer compiled by GameLook, he said that the workload of making such games is large, and it is necessary to continuously prototype production, "The most important thing is to find new trends in 2022." For this, we need to do mass production. ”
Dream Games, which revolves around a piece, doesn't go crazy for prototyping, but strives to create a boutique. As Soner Aydemir, former product director at Peak Games and founder of Dream Games, put it: "We plan to address players' pain points in existing games... We'd rather have people play a game for ten years than release a new game every six months that quickly loses interest. ”
Delete the complexity and simplify, and create a player experience with high quality
The determination and mature business model of boutique creation may be the main reason why Royale Match has been able to compete in the match-3 track, but if it returns to the essence of the game, it can be found that Dream Games focuses on the careful polishing of the player experience at many levels of the game, and strives for excellence in the details.
First of all, at the visual level, "Royale Match" is "concise" in terms of color display, block layout or background, etc., without complex decorative effects, but it will not make GameLook feel monotonous, and the operation of eliminating blocks is very good whether it is an animation effect when moving or the display of value-added props.
In the actual experience, GameLook also found that "Royale Match" can be operated when eliminated, in most elimination games, if a move triggers multiple linkage effects, it is generally impossible to make any movement before the chess surface is completely stopped, but "Royale Match" allows players to operate here, such as clicking to trigger the effect of value-added pieces, etc., bringing a sense of quick knife chopping and chaos.
In addition, the biggest feeling that Royale Match brings to GameLook is that it is more like helping players complete the level than using complex playthrough conditions and requirements to overwhelm the player, which is reflected in the speed of its operation prompts, sometimes a little observation of the card surface, the operation prompts will appear quickly, far faster than other match-3 games that GameLook has experienced.
It is worth mentioning that there is only one kind of gold coin in the game's pass currency, which can be obtained through in-game purchases in addition to the bonus of extra steps after completing the level. Whether it is some effect props in the game or the "five more steps" after the specified number of steps in the level, they can be purchased with gold coins, which greatly reduces the sense of redundancy brought to the game due to different currencies.
It can be said that whether it is a visual style or a game experience, "Royale Match" starts from the principle of "deleting complexity and simplifying", with the player experience as the core, almost a return to the basics of the match-3 category, although there are elements similar to the decoration of "Dream Home", but this is not the main content of the game, most of the time it is more like a "desktop background".
In addition to the regular levels, there are also some special levels in Royale Match, such as time limits, gold coins, etc., which further expand the player's playing experience and make the playing process full of small climaxes. In addition, at the level of game operation, the activities of Royale Match are very rich, not only will there be resident activity content, but also include limited time launch activities, but also carry out routine activities outside the game on Facebook, and give away in-game props and gold coins to participating players, continuously promoting player activity.
Royale Match also has some social gameplay, in addition to adding Facebook friends, you can also form or join the in-game union, you can also participate in King's Cup "union war" to get more in-game rewards.
As an article on DOF stated, "Everything Royal Match does isn't new — because most match-3 games are built on top of each other — but Royal Match creates a better player experience than the competition." ”
Compared with the integration model of "match-3 +", Royal Match is more willing to work in the original category, and it may also provide some reference for the match-3 game track. Subtract on the game and add on the operation. At present, this model can not only leave a good "first impression" for players, but also promote players' motivation to play through uninterrupted activities, improve game retention rates, and then promote the game's paid conversion rate.
epilogue
Sensor Tower showed in the previously released data that Royal Match achieved very good results as soon as it was released, once achieving the number one growth in the category, and generating nearly $100 million in revenue within five months of launch, becoming one of the best-selling mobile games in 2021.
As the largest segment of the European and American markets, the three-match puzzle game with a market size of more than 3.7 billion US dollars often appears in the list of various games, and it can be said that the match-three game market still has great potential for development.
However, in the face of the current mature game market in this category and the fact that many head products have a solid position, how to create differentiated products is naturally a problem that companies that want to enter the match-three track must think about, and "Royal Match" starts from the player experience level to create long-term operation boutiques, which is undoubtedly an excellent example.