Congratulating Dream Games on the launch of their second game, Royal Kingdom

After much anticipation, today marks the global launch of Royal Kingdom – the second title from Dream Games following the company’s hugely successful hit, Royal Match.

I have been playing Royal Kingdom since the soft launch and have beaten the Dark King over a hundred times, and am looking forward to beating him many hundred more. A huge thank you to Dream’s incredibly talented and driven team of 230 across Istanbul and London. Building and launching a game of this standard takes a hell of a lot of work – they’ve taken the quality and depth of mobile games to another level.

Where it all started

I first met the founders of Dream – Soner, Eren, Hakan, Ikbal and Serdar – in July 2019 following an introduction from my good friend Akin Babayigit (thank you Akin!). They had just left their prior company Peak Games and were looking for seed funding to build the best mobile casual puzzle game. We met in London and then Istanbul and made them an offer within days. In the end, they chose Balderton as an investor in their $7.5M seed round.

While in retrospect it was an obvious decision to back such an exceptional team, at the time it was non-consensus. Many VCs had lost interest in mobile gaming which they believed was becoming too competitive and too expensive in which to grow a new game. They were either looking at new platforms, VR/AR or had lost interest in games completely. Even if they were interested in mobile games they were looking for new genres or midcore, not another match-3 game.

My personal experience in mobile gaming, in particular being on the board of Wooga for many years, made me question this assumption.  This was a huge market continuing to grow where there was potential to build something next-level. After the deal was announced some VCs complained that a seed round this big was unhelpful when the typical games seeds at the time were < $2M. However this was what the company needed to be able to not worry about capital and focus on building an exceptional game.

Royal Match – a success story like no other

Soner and his cofounders put together a small, high quality team. One thing we loved about them was their focus on the quality and emotion of what they were building. Their biggest inspiration early on was from Pixar rather than any other games company. As planned, they focused 110% on building their first game.

Royal Match launched on schedule in 2021 and has been a fantastic success story since then. According to public sources, it has generated more than  $3B of revenues and 300 million installs. This compares to a $1.7B box office for the biggest movie of 2024, Inside Out 2. Royal Match has been a top 3 grossing mobile game for the last two years, bigger than Candy Crush, and continues to grow even at this massive scale.  According to Sensor Tower, 15 million people play Royal Match each day, and total time playing the game is more than one million years. 

Alongside the success of Royal Match the mission of Dream has been becoming clearer: to be one of the world’s leading entertainment companies, building loved characters and universes and focusing on the emotions they inspire. Adding Ed Catmull  the Pixar co-founder, as an advisor was an acknowledgement of this. I recommend “Creativity, inc” for anyone interested in the Pixar approach. At Dream’s Istanbul office they have their own cinema where employees can watch and rewatch the best movies for inspiration. Games are the clear focus but they also care deeply about the characters and everything around the game. The quality of the Royal Kingdom trailer above is evidence of this focus.

Royal Kingdom – expanding into new horizons

In 2022 the Dream founders started work on their second game. They wanted to remain in the Royal Match world but expand its horizons, add new characters and evolve the match-3 mechanic. 

The biggest innovation in Royal Kingdom is the ‘attack’ levels, which require a different and deeper strategy to beat.

The first soft launch of Royal Kingdom in 2023 was very good. Metrics were strong, the game looked great, player feedback was highly positive. However, after some months Dream took the brave decision to pull the game and work on v2. 

In v1 your attack levels were against your friends, and the team worried about the mixed emotions of this dynamic. In v2 you are attacking the Dark King and his various minions, all of which have their own way of making your life difficult. 

In this way your relationship with your friends and team-mates remains support and collaboration. This also allows Dream to make the attack levels more varied e.g. “Should I focus on stopping the penguin from dropping the snowball or go after the tunnelling snakes?”

Royal Kingdom v2 soft launched earlier this year and launches globally today. It introduces King Robert’s brother King Richard and his court. You get some sense of these characters from the intro video but I look forward to their characters developing further over time. In Royal Match you explore the rooms of a palace. In Royal Kingdom you explore and build districts of a kingdom and then kingdoms of a world. This much bigger game world has required a huge level of content creation and polish. The beautiful animations when you unlock new parts of each district take the Dream Games quality bar to an even higher level.  

We are looking forward to the success of Royal Kingdom and continued success of Royal Match. Dream Games is just getting started and we are very happy to be part of the journey to build the 21st century’s most loved entertainment company.