Today, we look at how the enshittification of Royal Match continues apace.
Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of pop culture history that interests me that doesn’t quite fit into the other features.
A while back, I wrote about how Royal Match had become a major challenger to Candy Crush Saga due to Royal Match simply having the novel idea of not making the game an increasingly terrible experience for its players. At the time, though, I noted that Royal Match had not yet been enshittified (enshittification is when a product gets slowly but surely worse as the company tries to make MORE money than it already was, as capitalism can’t be “make a goodly steady amount of money,” it has to constantly be about making MORE money than you did the previous year, etc.). I acknowledged that it was clearly only a matter of time, though, as MOST products go through enshittification (look at your “Smaller price for the same price…for your health!” Snickers candy bars as a somewhat random example).
A few months back I noticed the first sign of slow enshittification, as Royal Match was following Candy Crush Saga’s annoying trick of having back-to-back extra hard levels, but only labeling ONE of them “extra hard” so that you’ll be more tempted to use up your boosters on the levels (you’ll be frustrated at doing poorly on the “normal” level, so you’ll ultimately use your boosters, and go to the next level and…”shockingly” it’s another super hard level!).
Remember, the key to these games making money is getting you to buy boosters.
Obviously, though, to get you to keep playing the game, they also give you opportunities to WIN boosters, and you get gold coin rewards when you win certain levels. Again, though, they want you to BUY those gold coins and boosters, so just recently, they introduced an absurdly big HALVING of their rewards.
They do a bi-monthly contest where you can collect “cards,” and if you get them all, you get some boosters and a bunch of gold coins. Along the way, as you collect the cards, individual sets get you various prizes.
Well, starting this time, all of the rewards have been cut in half for each set. Not only that, but you also get LESS cards from the various card rewards they hand out. So you get less rewards for collecting cards, and it is harder to collect cards.
Plus, when you would pass a hard level in the past, you’d get 100 gold coins. Now you get 75 gold coins. If you passed a super hard level, you would get 150 gold coins. Now you get 100 cold coins.
I won’t front, the game is still enjoyable enough that I’ll keep playing, and while I’m pretty darn far in the game, I’ve yet to hit the Candy Crush levels that I hit when I was very far into that game where you CANNOT win without boosters. I have not yet hit those levels in Royal Match, but I am sure they are coming. Until then, I’ll keep playing, as it is still a much better playing environment than Candy Crush Saga.
