Physics Will Escape the Puzzle Farm
I wonder if Turks walk around Istanbul, see kids playing hopscotch, and wonder if "we could attach a Saga wrapper to it?" Royal Smash is another answer to that question, but the bigger one is which of these hybrid/hyper titles will make it out of the "farm" system. Michail Katkoff is right that Pixel Flow will distort the system, especially when the evidence is a flat ceiling that looks like it's already been exhausted. We already saw Tile basically bust, Arrows had its moment, and 3D looks tapped at Match Factory's ceiling. Despite this, Royal Smash has key elements you look for in puzzle farm prospects.
The sauce is a simple casual input and low cognitive load. The next puzzle breakout hit is here, not in more chained-logic games like Twisted Tangle or Color Block Jam; both are enormously successful, but not at this scale.
Sort the genre by cognitive load: on one end sit the solver puzzles - the step-logic untangle-and-plan games that cost real cognitive energy every level. On the other end sits cascade logic: low-load, high-feedback games where the "systems" do most of the work. Modern match-3 lives on that end, where it's closer to a slot machine than a puzzle, with a planned cadence of fail states - and merge has drifted into something like idle. The winners suggest cascade and idle gameplay is what retains for years and what one- and two-year LTV cycles are made of.
Royal Smash's core is simple: a cannon, a limited number of shots, and a pile of physics-enabled junk to demolish. The genre front-runners are, naturally, Turkish: Royal Smash from Cypher Games and Smash Fest from Flow Games.
Many puzzle farm systems stop at stacking players because their stunted LTV isn't strong enough to bid at rising CPIs. Both games are now plateaued at about the level of Pixel Flow's all-time peak, so the curves aren't growing, but they're not collapsing either. Maybe there's an ads-driven F2P middle class after all.
At comparable launch ages, Pixel Flow had ~$1.50-$1.64 in revenue per download; Royal Smash is at $0.17; Smash Fest is at $0.26; and Pixel Flow has since grown to $5.32 over ten-plus months. (Sensor Tower excludes ad revenue here, so this is an IAP comparison rather than total monetization.) And there's some encouragement: Royal Smash's IAP revenue per day has grown every week of its run, even after downloads flattened.
I hope Royal Smash's greatest contribution will be F2P puzzle physics. See Crayon Physics at the iPhone's launch, and later "fake" gameplay that validated the approach. Yet no one has cracked sustainable level design. I'm 100 levels into Royal Smash; it still shoots one ball type, and the rare twist is a platter rotating in front of you. Match-3 spent a decade learning about blockers, seeds, goals, etc., so the physics version of that core hasn't been perfected. It's an open design space, and it looks like the Turkish puzzle pedigree will occupy it.