📡 1. Royal Match 🚀, 2. Jam City SPAC Cancellation, and 3. Your Dumb Idea!

Games Radar Thursday!

Jul 29, 2021

Happy Games Radar Thursday,

Here is an I. game alert, II. word on the street, and III. question to consider this week…

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I. Game Alert

Whenever some game exec says “You can’t compete in genre X, it’s too crowded and competitive” or some other broad generalization, the answer should always be that it depends.

Too many game studio leadership teams make decisions based on a really stupid notion of viewing opportunities as operator and execution agnostic. “Oh well we tried that before, it didn’t work” or “How hard can it be to make that game, let’s have Bill do it” or some other such nonsense.

The fact is, successful outcomes depend on the operator and the execution. Tencent is one of the companies that understand this the best. In fact, sometimes they will pick an opportunity space and then have up to 3 or 4 different teams build the same game. From those teams after their games launch, they will consolidate around the winner from whoever executed the best.

Royal Match = Great Operators and Execution

And in the hyper-competitive and very mature Match-3 game genre, we have yet another example that the operator and execution counts. Dream Games’ Royal Match just could be the best Match-3 game on the market. They have executed ridiculously well and they have proven no market is safe from a badass team.

As of today July 29, 2021, the game sits as the #27 Top Grossing game according to AppAnnie. Just below Toon Blast and Gardenscapes and higher than Netflix!

As reported in TechCrunch:

Dream Games is based in Istanbul, Turkey
Founded by alumni from Peak Games
Recently raised $155M in a Series B valuing the company at $1B co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund
According to Soner Aydemir, co-founder and CEO of Dream Games: “We spent so much time on tiny details, so many tests over several years to create the dynamics of the game,” he said.”
It’s not clear how long the game was in development but according to Crunchbase, the company raised its initial Seed funding in November of 2019.

II. Word on the Street

As many of you have already heard, Jam City recently canceled its $1.2B SPAC that would have made the company a public entity. In a press release dated July 23, DPCM Capital did not provide details for why the deal was terminated.

Overheard on “the street” why the SPAC got canceled:

“They couldn’t get their PIPE done.”
“No one bought those crazy projections.”
“DPCM tried to renegotiate price but JC didn’t want to renegotiate.”

Note: I am only the messenger, and just relaying speculation of what’s being said on the streets.

III. Question For You

Conventional wisdom vs “Dumb Ideas”.

Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One, suggests that the biggest opportunities are “secrets.”

Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected.

He often asks the contrarian question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

The biggest opportunities left in gaming will be hard but solvable problems against opportunity spaces that defy conventional wisdom.

Andrew Chen also wrote very eloquently about this concept in his blog post “The Dumb Idea Paradox” In that essay, he has a great articulation of the concept below:

Key Question

Let’s bring this back to gaming. In the very competitive and difficult gaming industry in which we operate, what is the “dumb idea” or secret that few people agree with you on… but is actually true?