Dream Games is opening the UA floodgates for Royal Kingdom

𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗢𝗠𝗜𝗖𝗦 𝗢𝗙 𝗖𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗜𝗕𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗭𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 & 𝗥𝗢𝗬𝗔𝗟 𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗗𝗢𝗠

Dream Games is opening the UA floodgates for Royal Kingdom, deploying significant marketing spend and celebrity-driven creative. This move reflects a familiar pattern: Royal Match itself required about two years to scale effectively. But now, the Dream Games UA team faces a new paradigm: how to optimally scale spending across two titles and manage new franchise-level LTV dynamics.

In the short run, allocation optimization is obvious as UA managers frequently “rotate” spend across channels within a day as CPIs spike with additional channel capital. The marginal game should function as a new channel of sorts to balance spend against ROAS. However, franchises also bring new modeling considerations.
The expected value of players engaging with both games simultaneously can be modeled explicitly as:

expected value,DualPlay = probability,DualPlay(LTV,old + LTV,new)

Here, the probability of simultaneous engagement represents the remaining LTV in the existing game for the ith player, and is the new game’s LTV for the same player. To justify dual-game investment, this combined LTV must surpass the potential LTV had the player remained solely in the original game. It is possible to decrease portfolio LTV by shifting players to a lower LTV game (my poor Squadbusters)!

Maximizing the probability of a combined LTV is a function that considers the genre margin or how similar two franchise games are. The closer they are, the more likely players are to play more than one simultaneously. While similar genres maximize the DualPlay probability, it comes at the 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 cost of portfolio diversification, which introduces more risk.

Companies are hedged only when selecting uncorrelated assets, and game genre fits the bill along some dimension. The relative strength of casual and the 4x genre reinvigoration in the post-ATT world is a good reminder of this. The reality, however, is that the standard deviation on return to a new genre far outweighs relatively uncorrelated genre portfolio assets. Dream Games building a 4x title is riskier than another match title.

A clear trade-off exists between maximizing genre margin to avoid cannibalization, maximizing DualPlay LTV, and managing variance to ensure stable returns.