Match Factory's Shop: Royal Match, Divided by 10

I played Match Factory (Peak) for two days, up to level 35, only to look at the shop. Every screen below is from an EU account, prices in euros.

The first thing you notice is how familiar it looks. Bundles on top, coins below. One bundle scaled up five times. "Popular" and "Best Value" ribbons on the bundles and none on the coins. A 7-day pass for €9.99. Time-limited rewards everywhere. If you've opened Royal Match's shop, you've seen this one.

And then the coin packs turn out to be Royal Match's coin packs with one zero removed. That part is fine. What happened to them in euros is the interesting bit.

About the game and the shop

Match Factory is a 3D match game: you tap items on a pile, they go to a 7-slot bar, three identical items clear. Fill the bar and you're "Out of Space". Levels have a timer.

The economy is simple. One currency (coins), five lives (one refills in about 30 minutes), six boosters. Four boosters work inside a level and two are used before it starts.

The shop is a single vertical feed. At level 5 it has 6 bundles and 6 coin packs. On day 2 a Starter Sale and the Factory Pass appear at the top. When you run out of coins inside a level, a shortened shop pops up over the board.

Up to level 35 I didn't see a single ad, and there's no Remove Ads product. Like Royal Match, it looks like an IAP-only game.

1. Shop structure

The order is right: time-limited things first, bundles as the main conversion target, coins at the bottom as the utility section. This is exactly Royal Match's layout.

What's missing:

• A free reward in the shop. Nothing to claim, no reason to open the shop unless you need something.
• Anything between €1.99 and €7.99 on day 1. The first purchase is either 100 coins or a €7.99 bundle.
• A contextual offer on the fail flow (more on that in section 4).

2. Coin packs

Two broken steps:

Critical 500 coins for €9.99 is worse than five packs of 100. Five small packs cost €9.95 and give the same 500 coins. The bigger pack has no reason to exist.

High 2,500 → 5,000 is a dead step. 83.4 and 83.3 coins per euro. Double the money for zero extra value. A player who would have bought €59.99 has no reason not to buy €29.99 twice.

The top of the ladder is fine: €99.99 gives +99% over the base, well above the 40% you'd expect from the largest pack.

Where this came from: Royal Match ÷ 10

Put Match Factory's packs next to Royal Match's euro prices and the pattern is obvious:

Same six steps, exactly one tenth of the coins on each. Same top two prices and the same bonuses on them.

The three middle prices are different in euros, though. And the coin amounts weren't touched after that.

In the US store Match Factory's second pack is $8.99 (£8.99 in the UK), so it gives the same +11% as Royal Match. It breaks in euros only: €9.99 in Germany and France. My guess is that euro prices were set separately (or converted by the store) and nobody went back to the coins. That's a guess. What I can see for sure is the result.

To be fair, Royal Match has a flat step too: 5,000 and 10,000 coins both give +11%. Match Factory fixed that one by moving the €14.99 price. And broke the one next to it.

3. Bundles

From Master up it's one bundle scaled: the same six boosters, ×1, ×2, ×6, ×12, ×24. Pro is the odd one, with a different mix.

What a booster is worth

The game sells boosters for coins, always 3 at a time:

One of each costs exactly 400 coins. That gives a clean way to value every bundle in the game's own money:

Bundles beat coin packs at every price point. That's the right direction, since bundles are where the shop wants you to go. But the scaling has the same problem as the coins:

Content should grow faster than price, so every step up feels like a better deal. Master → Mega and Ultra → Giant give exactly what you pay for, no more.

Medium Giant is a decoy. €89.99 at 109 coins per euro, then €10 more gets you Legendary at 161. Nobody should buy Giant. Its job is to make Legendary look generous, and it does that well. I'd still give Giant a small edge over Ultra, because a decoy that's also a flat step makes the whole upper ladder look careless.

Coins vs boosters

The other way to read a bundle: value the coins at the coin pack of the same size, and see what's left for the boosters.

Mega, Ultra and Giant are priced on one rule: €0.42 per booster on top of the coins. Someone built that carefully. Which makes the €9.99 coin pack look even more like a currency accident than a design decision.

High Pro Bundle at level 5 sells boosters you can't use

At level 5 every booster in Pro is locked: Fan opens at 7, Icegun at 9, Firework at 11, Sandglass at 13. A level 5 player paying €7.99 gets 200 coins they can use (€3.98 at the base rate) and 8 items with a padlock. The shop doesn't show the padlock.

Master and Mega have the same issue, smaller: 2 of 6 booster types work at level 5.

By the way, the game gives you 3 of each booster for free when it unlocks. So the first boosters a new player can use are free ones anyway.

4. The fail flow and the out-of-coins shop

This is where the shop meets the player at the worst moment, so it matters more than the main shop.

Fill the bar and you get Out of Space! "You Will Lose" a heart and a star, and a Clear Bar button for 100 coins. The first time it's free, with a pointing hand (a tutorial). Decline, and it's Level Failed, minus one life, Try Again.

100 coins is the magic number of the early game:

• Clear Bar: 100 coins;
• refill lives: 100 coins;
• the cheapest coin pack: 100 coins for €1.99.

And how many coins does a new player have? The game starts you at 100. After 21 levels I had 11. Levels give almost nothing, so the first Clear Bar is the whole starting balance, and the next one needs money.

Now the part I liked the least. Run out of coins in the middle of a level and the game opens this:

• Pro Bundle, €7.99
• Master Bundle, €9.99: 500 coins and 6 boosters
• 100 coins, €1.99
• 500 coins, €9.99
• More Offers?

Critical Two products for €9.99, one right under the other. Same 500 coins, but Master also has 6 boosters worth 400 more coins at the game's own prices. The €9.99 coin pack is in the most important spot in the game, and it can only sell to a player who doesn't read the line above.

High There's no offer made for this moment. It's the regular shop, trimmed. The first thing a frustrated non-payer sees is €7.99. The €1.99 option is there, but it's 100 coins, exactly one Clear Bar, and you're back at zero after using it.

5. Special offers

Starter Sale

On day 2, after level 22, a popup: Starter Sale, €1.99, 95% OFF, 3-day timer. Inside: 200 coins, one each of Vacuum, Spring, Fan and Icegun, plus 1 hour of unlimited Sandglass, Firework and lives.

This is a good offer. 200 coins + 280 coins of boosters = 480 coins of value for €1.99, 4.8 times the 100-coin pack at the same price. By level 22 every booster in it is unlocked. It sits right above Pro in the shop and makes Pro look weak, which is what a starter should do.

Two problems:

Medium "95% OFF" doesn't add up. 95% off €1.99 means the bundle is "worth" €39.80. At the base rate, 480 coins are €9.55, so about 79% off. It only reaches 95% if three hours of unlimited stuff are worth around €30. Players don't do this math, but a label that's off by a factor of four trains them not to trust labels.

High It arrives on day 2. On day 1 the out-of-coins shop starts at €7.99. A player who gets stuck on day 1 and leaves never sees the €1.99 offer. I'd show it at the first real frustration point, and Match Factory has a clear one: the first Out of Space with less than 100 coins.

Factory Pass

Also on day 2: Factory Pass, €9.99 for 7 days. 8 lives instead of 5, a golden name, a gift for teammates, and a premium track of rewards. The duration is on the screen, which is good. It's the same idea as Royal Match's Royal Pass, at the same price.

8 lives instead of 5 is the strongest perk here. With a 30-minute refill it's an extra 90 minutes of play from a full stack, every day of the week. I didn't get to see the whole reward track, so I can't put a number on it.

6. Free coins: Key Challenge

The main source of free coins isn't levels. It's Key Challenge, an event with a 1-day timer and a 35-step track. Keys sit on the board as items, you collect them and they count when you win.

1,000 coins on the last step is 10 Clear Bars, or the coins from a €19.99 bundle. The track is built so the reward that matters sits on the last step, and the number of keys per step grows (1 for the first steps, 5 a bit later). One day for 35 steps is the kind of goal that makes unlimited lives and boosters worth something. That's how a 3D match game should push spending: through a goal the player already cares about.

7. UX and overall design

What's done well:

• The layout is clean and proven: timed offers, bundles, coins.
• One currency, clear prices, clear booster names with one-line descriptions on unlock.
• Free boosters on unlock (3 each), and a free first Clear Bar, so the player learns what they're buying later.
• Lives from teammates are stored and spent when you want ("Use Free Lives"), so the team softens the lives wall.
• The Factory Pass shows its duration.

• Mega, Ultra and Giant follow one pricing rule for boosters.

• No ads up to level 35: the shop doesn't have to compete with rewarded video for the fail screen.

Problems:

8. Recommendations

1. Fix the euro coin ladder. Two ways:

• Go back to Royal Match's euro prices: €8.99 / €17.99 / €34.99. The ladder works again (+11%, +11%, +42%), but the €14.99 step goes back to Royal Match's own flat step.
• Or keep the prices and change the coins: 500 → 600 at €9.99 (+20%) and 5,000 → 5,500 at €59.99 (+82%). Then the ladder goes 1.00 / 1.20 / 1.33 / 1.66 / 1.82 / 1.99, and every step is better than the last.

The second one is cheaper in revenue and doesn't change any price. Then check the same ladder in every currency, not only euros and dollars.

2. Remove the €9.99 coin pack from the out-of-coins shop. Put the Starter Sale there while it's active, or a dedicated "stuck" offer at €2.99 to €4.99: coins for two or three Clear Bars and a couple of boosters that are unlocked at the player's level.

3. Show the Starter Sale at the first real frustration point. The first Out of Space with less than 100 coins is a clear trigger. Keep the 3-day timer.

4. Build Pro from unlocked boosters. At levels 1 to 12, swap Sandglass and Firework for Vacuum and Spring. Or show Pro only after level 13, when the current mix makes sense.

5. Give Giant a reason. Either a small edge over Ultra (6,000 coins instead of 5,000 puts it at 120 coins per euro with the boosters) or drop it and let Legendary stand on its own.

6. Make the starter label honest. "×4 value" is close to the truth and still sounds great.

9. Conclusion

Match Factory took a proven shop and economy and did most of it right: the layout, the bundle scaling, the booster pricing in the middle bundles, the event that hands out coins. The damage is in the euro coin ladder, where three prices changed and the coins stayed. And it shows up exactly when a stuck player opens the out-of-coins shop and sees two €9.99 products, one strictly worse than the other.

If they fix only one thing, it should be that screen: take the €9.99 coin pack off it and put the Starter Sale there.

Copying Royal Match's economy is a pretty safe bet. Just after you change a price, somebody has to redo the coins. In every currency.

Michael Khripin has spent 25+ years in online games: LiveOps, monetization and production, including Wargaming R&D and LiveOps on Hero Wars Mobile at Nexters. Author of Game Shops: Ultimate Guidelines. Runs New Perk, a game shop and LiveOps consultancy.