Puzzle Powerhouse Royal Match Crosses $3B
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Goodbye Summer. Check out the full article for more insights.
Royal Match has quietly climbed the top charts in the last few years, becoming a major contender in the puzzle genre, and capturing millions of downloads and billions of dollars in the process.
This August, the title that's been glued to the top of our highest-earning games series reached a big milestone and got there faster than ever before!
Let's take a look at how Royal Match got to $3B of estimated gross revenue.
In case you're not familiar, Royal Match is a match-3 free-to-play puzzle game with lots of in-app purchase options.
The game was released in 2021 and its growth team hit the ground running, crossing 10M downloads in its first six months on the App Store and Google play.
Revenue took a bit longer to build up, but once it did, it didn't stop.
According to our App Intelligence, by April of 2023, Royal Match's lifetime gross revenue reached $1B (yes, billion) - 27 months (two-ish years) after its release.
More revenue meant more ads and with the sharp rise of downloads in 2023 revenue was rising faster than ever.
So fast that Royal Match reached $2B of gross revenue within nine months, in January of 2024. Three times faster than before.
But it didn't stop there.
The title just hit a new milestone - $3B of gross revenue, that's what players spend in the app and before Apple and Google take their fees. It got there just seven months after its last milestone.
At this rate, we may see another billion before the end of the year!
Royal Match's user base is diverse but is dominated by users in the US and India who make up roughly 14% of all nearly 300M downloads the game received since launching each. The only two countries to have a double-digit share.
Revenue, however, comes predominately from the US App Store, which explains Royal Match's absurdly high Apple Search Ads spend where it commands the highest share of impressions across hundreds of very popular keywords like "games", "puzzle games", and "free games".
Japan, the UK, Germany, and South Korea round out the five highest-earning countries for the game.
One important thing to note is that while revenue is on what looks like a meteoric rise, downloads have been less than exciting.
Our estimates show that so far this year, Royal Match's downloads dropped 58% after peaking in February.
The title ended August with 7.6M new downloads. The lowest it's been since March of 2023.
Don't be alarmed, however. Most apps and games are following a similar trend.
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The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
