Mobilegamer.biz readers with a TikTok affliction are likely to have been served an ad for Piggy Kingdom, a Royal Match/Kingdom-inspired puzzler.
One Piggy Kingdom ad really caught our eye, though: it appears to be a straight copy-paste of a Royal Kingdom creative, but with Piggy Kingdom crudely dubbed over the top.
The ad has been taken down now, but we managed to record the footage here:
The game’s developer, Olleyo, appears to be spending plenty on TikTok ads, and Piggy Kingdom is also generating big revenue from a relatively modest base: Appmagic estimates that from a lifetime download figure of just under 1.8m, creator Olleyo has earned a fraction under $11.3m since the game was launched in July 2022. That revenue figure, as ever, does not include Apple and Google’s 30% so total player spend will higher.
Those estimates give Piggy Kingdom a high revenue per download average of $9.68 in Tier 1 western markets and $6.42 globally, says Appmagic.
Piggy Kingdom is made by Olleyo Studio, whose official website states that it is based in Singapore. There’s very little other information about the studio online, but we did spot a reference to German company Code Dish in Olleyo’s terms of service.
And we did manage to contact Code Dish VP of business Ben Lin. Lin runs Code Dish with another person, who Lin did not want to identify, and he did not wish to identify its investors. Code Dish is four years old and has acquired some indie development teams to build out its portfolio in the last few years, he said.
Lin said of the Piggy Kingdom ad above: “I was concerned about the recent ads. They were produced by one of our agencies, and we promptly removed them upon realizing they were inappropriate.”
“While mimicking successful creatives is a common practice in our industry, we are committed to maintaining originality and integrity in our work. Unfortunately, we frequently face challenges with other games copying our creatives and even our store listings.”
He also had this to say about Piggy Kingdom’s success to date: “Regarding RPD, I’d say it’s more about game quality and user acquisition. We are always striving to build a game with excellency that users love. User acquisition is also important that we pick the most suitable users for our game.”
Code Dish is also affiliated with Playflux, the maker of fellow casual titles Tile Family, Tile Match, Dream Mania and Colorscapes.
We asked GameRefinery game analyst Vy Hoang for her thoughts on how Olleyo has managed to monetise this game so well. She also highlighted its similarities to Dream Games’ Royal Match – and even speculated that Dream and Olleyo are linked, somehow.
“The two titles share a striking number of similarities,” said Hoang. “They each have an almost identical UI, see players collecting puzzle pieces, feature a simple renovation meta with no player choices, and have a nearly identical live events output. Piggy Kingdom has much in common with other Dream Games titles too, such as a kingdom view map that looks and functions just like the one in Royal Kingdom.”
“We’d go so far as to say that Piggy Kingdom has so much overlap with Dream Games portfolio that we almost wonder if the two titles are somehow related,” Hoang told us. “It could be that Olleyo actually serves as some sort of hidden testing ground for Dream Games, or that the studio has some former Dream Games employees on their team.”
Hoang says Piggy Kingdom saw a big download jump in January 2024, presumably a UA splurge, followed by a surge in revenue. By April 2024, the game had built a busy live ops schedule with multiple event types running simultaneously, she said.
Piggy Kingdom does show some differences to Royal Match, she noted. “Piggy Kingdom features simple narrative elements, with dialogue presented before and after completing an area, whereas in Royal Match, there is no narrative element at all,” Hoang continues.
“Additionally, Piggy Kingdom partly monetises its minigame event, Dice Madness, by offering a limited-time IAP bundle containing the event currency. Royal Match’s minigame events are not directly monetised at all, meaning the event currency used in these events is purely obtained by playing the core puzzle levels.”
“Another interesting fact is that Piggy Kingdom also features a permanent collection feature that adds an additional progression vector to the game,” continues Hoang.
“Oddly enough, this is very similar to a collection feature that used to also be in Royal Match where players collected various cards from events and chests by renovating areas, but was replaced in May this year with a seasonal collectible album event. If the two developers are related in some way, this could suggest that they’re testing out different approaches to see which is the most successful.”
