A Royal Match or a Royal Mismatch?

Here is a screenshot from a common ad of Royal Match.

Royal Match, if you’ve got a smartphone you’ve probably seen an ad of theirs at least once. Royal Match is a smartphone game that follows a king in the progressive restoration of his castle via matching tiles. The concept is very common, you complete a level of some sort of tile-matching or block-breaking and in return progress in the storyline of the game which is often the restoration of something or someplace. The smartphone game market is overflowing with options for consumers and since so many of them follow the same format, it is difficult for companies to cut through the noise and have people recognize and know your brand and/or its applications. However, Royal Match has cut through the noise, they’ve cut through the noise so much that they’ve actually become the noise. Royal Match didn’t just become a part of the marketing white noise we are used to but rather an annoying and jarring noise that becomes more infuriating with every encounter. So infuriating in fact, that even some reviews on the app store are not about the app but just expressing annoyance over the frequency of their ads and misleading nature.

A screenshot of the actual game

Most mobile app games that are free to download have pop-up ads that generate their revenue. It’s a reality that most of us have accepted despite how annoying it can be. However, it would seem that companies are taking it too far as customers become overwhelmed with the amount of interruption in their playing time for ads, so they delete the application from their phone as it causes them more of a headache than it’s worth. In this case, the companies at least get some profit before customers chose to delete the app but for Royal Match people are already annoyed with them without having yet downloaded the game.

An overview of the app’s ratings on the App Store.

On the app store, they’ve got a 4.6 out of 5 star rating which is pretty good but when you begin reading reviews, you see a very different story.

So what went wrong? Royal Match made two detrimental mistakes that gave it its current reputation; the frequency of its ads and the image painted through the ads are what harmed the reputation of Royal Match. 

It seems unlikely their marketing strategy is paying off if the ads aren’t being well received. So then why spend so much money? What is their plan, if any? Truthfully, I can’t say because I don’t know. Maybe they just wanted the most amount of mobile ads? Or maybe they just wanted to be easily recognizable without the years spent on building loyalty and reputation, no matter the cost? I don’t know but hypothetically speaking, if they wanted to salvage their brand image, they’d need to do the opposite of what they’ve been doing, stop advertising completely. The consumers need to forget Royal Match and let go of the irritation and anger they harbour towards Royal Match. During this time, some serious rebranding needs to be done. Royal Match was developed and published by Dream Games, which according to the app store, they’ve only got one other app, Royal Kingdom, which is essentially the same game. If Dream Games wants to become more profitable and well-perceived by the general public they need to move on from Royal Match and Royal Kingdom because no matter how long they wait or how much rebranding they do, consumers will subconsciously carry those old biases and Dream Games will never reach its fullest potential and Dream Games will never reach it’s fullest potential. Dream Games needs a new game that is different from its current two. It can remain a casual player puzzle game, it just needs to present itself differently from the block-matching, kingdom-restoring format it is used to. Once it has developed a new game or games and enough time has passed (likely years) they can begin publishing ads to the public. That being said Dream Games can’t make the same mistakes again. So their ads can’t be too numerous and must realistically display the game, unlike their previous ads. As seen in some reviews people felt their advertisements misled them.

What else do you think Royal Match can do to help improve their brand image? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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