Royal Match's incredible gamification & retention strategies

Read Time: 5 min

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A few days back, my sister tells me she was playing this amazing game and couldn’t stop playing it. The first thing she wants to do after coming back from work and finishing her chores, is play that game.

In fact, she even recommended I play the game too! I agreed. It took her a while to get me to play it because I am not a big fan of games. I hadn’t even asked her anything about the game. She did tell me you can build areas and must save the King. I had a distinct picture in my mind which, I must admit, got me a bit excited.

Very well, I open PlayStore and search for the name. That’s when I notice! Ugh! I immediately text her, puzzled, “This is the one, right?”. “Yup”, she goes. “It’s a match-3, bro!”. “You seriously recommending me a match-3 game at 23?!”

“Oh come on! Just try it. You’ll love it, please”. I agreed after a good amount of convincing and all the rant on age is a no-bar for playing games.

Back to PlayStore. I read the name again, “Royal Match”. 50 million downloads? I click Install and wait.

Fast forward, and I start playing. Like any other match-3, the levels are super-easy with a bit too many moves. With each level I complete, I get a star and some coins. I can use these stars to build game areas step-by-step.

So I have to spend my stars to progress in completing the areas! Okay, I have 0 stars again because I placed the curtains and it cost me 2 stars. Just 2 more levels and I can have 2 stars to place the tables.

5 to 6 levels down, the game now slowly transitions from super-easy to easy. I now begin to find myself slightly dependent on the power-ups.

You can either win power-ups or create them on your own for example, matching 5 in a row creates a Light Ball, and the like. The typical match-3 behaviour. Well, I start to like the way it is helping me progress faster.

RM doesn’t want me to take the game for granted or that the game is just too silly and there’s always a win! This is because the feeling of achievement only comes when there’s scope for failure.

I now find myself trying to level up quickly to see what step I can unlock. But wait! Next up is a King’s Nightmare level! This is a level where you cannot use power-ups you won and have a time limit. You have to save the King from whatever mishap he’s in.

At about level 15, with harder games, I unlocked the King’s Cup challenge. You have to play as many levels as possible to earn cups. There’s competition among all the players in the game. When the competition ends, after 1 day, you earn power-ups!

At level 21, I unlocked Teams! I can create and join any team. I can also request lives from my teammates! Moreover, I also unlocked an inter-team challenge, Team Treasure!

The last thing that caught my attention was the time-limited power-ups. In many challenges, I won time-limited power-ups. Soon as I won them, I felt an intense pressure to keep playing before the power-up timed out. Fear of losing something important set in! Impressive.

The gamification strategies Royal Match has used can be used as benchmarks by product managers to implement similar strategies into their products. The overall experience is quite interesting along with high-quality graphics.