Supercell's Puzzling Gamble, Scopely’s War on Clones, and the Royal Kingdom Problem
Turkish puzzle founders are closing rounds regardless of where they're based. Supercell is betting on a new puzzle title. Scopely is using its new IP to send warning shots to the clone market. And Royal Kingdom crossed $300M in 2025, but may be quietly eating its own portfolio.
All of the above and more were covered in the Deconstructor of Fun’s Puzzle Monthly.
The Turkish ecosystem travels with the founders
This past month, two Turkish teams raised from a strikingly similar investor circle.
Vento Games, based in Istanbul, closed a $4M seed round led by Makers Fund and Arcadia. The founding team comes from Peak and Fugo, two of Turkey's largest Casual Puzzle houses.
Cheer Games, an all-Turkish team operating out of Barcelona, raised a $4.5M pre-seed round, again led by Makers Fund. Most of their founders come from Applovin’s Lion Studios, where they shipped HexaSort, a hybrid casual puzzle that crossed $50M in IAP revenue.
Makers Fund was the original early-stage investor in Dream Games, which exited for $5B last year. Arguably, the fund knows what outstanding looks like from early on. As does Akin Babayigit, founder of Arcadia Gaming Partners, an angel investor into Dream Games and a co-founder of TripleDot.
Turkish developers and their games (most of which are puzzles) continue to grow in an increasingly contracting market.
Turkish puzzle studios have spent the last decade building some of the most downloaded Casual and hybrid casual puzzle games in the world. Focusing on a specific genre has created a talent pool, and that talent pool is now spilling across borders. Istanbul, Barcelona, London… Wherever experienced Turkish operators land, VCs seem to follow, and for a good reason.
From Time Blast to Super Work for Hire
Time Blast launched in 2024. It was one of the most visually refined Blast games ever made. It also failed because the Blast market had been closed for three years before it arrived. While the puzzle market grew through legacy subgenres like Match-3 and Merge and evolved with newer ones like Match 3D and Sort, Blast failed to keep pace. The most recent Blast game to cross $40M in lifetime revenue was Penny & Flo, which launched in 2020. The market took a nosedive from the beginning of 2021 and never fully recovered since.
Playabit, the studio behind arguably the best Blast game that didn’t make it, is now building a Match-3 for Supercell: Hay Day Match. This is Supercell's second Hay Day puzzle attempt, following Hay Day Pop, which had strong polish and a weak meta.
Hay Day Match is entering the Match-3 category, where user acquisition costs reaching above $30 per user in the US create a super high barrier to enter. It’s the same category where the most innovative recent entrant, Match Villains, is still struggling to convert differentiation into revenue.
More than anything, this looks like an IP play. Supercell is betting that the vast audience who played Hay Day will convert into Hay Day Match players at lower CPIs. There is precedent for IP-led games working in adjacent genres; Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire both found real audiences. But in Match-3 specifically, there is very little proof that IP alone can carry a game.
Playbit is still faced with the same dilemma: innovate too much on core mechanics, and you narrow your addressable market. Innovate too little, and you are competing on spend against players who have been buying this audience for a decade. It will be interesting to watch how Hay Day Match performs in the coming months.
Read our deconstruction of Time Blast
Read our deconstruction of Hay Day Pop
IP enforcement moves with money, not policy
Color Blaze Shooter was a one-to-one copy of Pixel Flow and the most successful Pixel Flow clone until recently. After a significant revenue spike, it disappeared from both stores shortly, coinciding with Scopely acquiring Loom Games. Everyone asked the same question: Is this the start of the “Clone-pocalypse” where one-to-one clones can no longer survive?
This was not a platform crackdown or a new regulatory stance. It was a message. Scopely acquired an asset, identified the most damaging competitor, and removed it. The rest of the clone market is still running.
In fact, Color Block Jam, one of the most successful Hybridcasual Puzzles ever, has countless one-to-one clones generating real revenue right now. Color Blaze Shooter being shut down doesn’t mean they are all in danger.
Clone Wars within the Hybridcasual Puzzle market will continue ever more fiercely. The real question is, do clones simply promote the biggest game? Just like advertising a Coca-Cola rip-off makes me just want the original drink even more.
In a performance marketing-driven market, however, that Coke analogy doesn’t fit perfectly.
It certainly holds true for the biggest games like Candy Crush or Royal Match that actually have a brand identity. But not so much for a game like Pixel Flow that has just been out for 6 months.
Royal Kingdom's past and future
Royal Kingdom finished 2025 with over $300M in revenue and is making $30M-plus per month in 2026. The celebrity campaign, including names such as LeBron James, Kevin Hart, and Jimmy Fallon, drove a visible downloads spike that is still paying dividends. The game jumped from eighth to fourth in top-grossing Match-3 globally.
The numbers tell a different story when you dive deeper. Royal Match sits at $45 per download in the US, while Royal Kingdom is at $12. Of course, these are two games at different points in their journey, but that gap is not a content gap. It is a retention and monetization efficiency gap that a celebrity campaign cannot close.
The harder question is cannibalization. Royal Match's most engaged players are the most likely Royal Kingdom players. If those players are generating $12 in Royal Kingdom instead of $45 in Royal Match, Dream's portfolio is not growing. It is redistributing from a higher-value product to a lower-value one. Then again, there’s nothing new here. Clash Royale revenue per download is smaller than that of Clash of Clans. The same applies to every subsequent Candy Crush iteration.
Talking about Candy Crush. It’s not just a game. It’s a cultural reference. Royal Match is becoming one. Royal Kingdom is still in the phase where spending drives the number. When the spending slows down, what the game earns on its own will matter a lot more than it does today.
