Boom Beach: Frontlines (BBF) is a new and innovative twin-stick online shooter from Space Ape Games featuring novel and satisfying core gameplay. Unfortunately, the longevity of the experience is undermined by a weak meta design that runs out of steam after a week or two.

In this essay, we investigate how the game is performing, where its strengths and weaknesses lie, and what we’d do to help it reach its full potential.

BBF is a collaboration between Space Ape Games and Supercell, the latter of which owns the Boom Beach IP, along with 62% of Space Ape itself, as of 2017. Space Ape adopted Boom Beach and built a game in a very different genre, maneuvering it from build & battle deep into shooter territory. It’s interesting to see one studio take another studio’s IP and make a game out of it, especially when Space Ape isn’t wholly owned by Supercell. That said, Space Ape appears to have a similar development approach and philosophy to Supercell. They both operate small, independent teams, and they both seem to celebrate project cancellations, based on this cute infographic from their website:

At the core, BBF is a team-based twin-stick shooter that leans heavily on distinctive class-based combat and territory capture mechanics, with vehicles, power-ups, and very light base-building elements thrown in. It plays like a cross between Brawl Stars, Team Fortress 2, and Battlefield, with just a touch of Kingdom Rush.

BBF has been in development for five years at this point. According to game lead Nick Mansdorf, Space Ape was already working on a WW2-themed prototype before the IP was attached. Boom Beach (BB) is a smart choice to act as a vehicle for this type of gameplay, because the primary player action is shooting, and the IP neatly facilitates this. The Clash universe has much more clout, but it wouldn’t have worked as well because of its focus on melee combat.

There are a lot of shared units and concepts between BB and BBF, but the core gameplay itself has very little crossover. The fact that BB is a fairly hands-off RTS and BBF is a direct control action game means it’s unlikely for players to make direct comparisons between them. This allows BBF to stand alone as a game that's thematically tied to the IP but can largely forge its own path in terms of how units behave during moment-to-moment play.

The meta layer that wraps around BBF’s meaty core involves the familiar card-based upgrading system popularized by Clash Royale, along with player level-based card unlocks and a session control mechanic that ties directly into the “Beach Pass.” The IP has infused not just the types of troops you can play as, the power-ups you can activate, the vehicles you can drive, and the turrets you can build, but also the island-themed “base” and metagame overworld that represents the player’s growing power and progression.

BBF has been soft-launched in Canada since October 2021, and it has expanded to 19 other territories — including Italy, Turkey, and the Netherlands — in late July 2022. Space Ape has made numerous core and meta changes during the soft launch period, including adjusting the main Conquest mode from being 9v9 to 6v6 (a sign that it’s willing to deviate from its vision of BBF as “a game about big teams [and] epic battles”). It’s also experimented with new game modes and added progression to “buildings” — proxies for metagame features — as well as adding lots of new cards.

We imagine (and hope) that this appetite for substantial change is maintained as soft-launch continues. The company is definitely onto something with BBF, but we don’t see it reaching the same heights as Supercell titles without seismic shifts taking place.

Some titles excel in core gameplay and are weak in meta, while others are the opposite. The true gems — games that grab players and don’t let go, resulting in sustainable businesses for years to come — have both. We’d argue that BBF is currently in the first camp. Its greatest strength is an approachable, new core action gameplay, but its progression and monetization systems are far too loose to keep the player engaged and spending.

Before we dig into an analysis of the game’s design, let’s briefly review the numbers.

Quick Data Performance Review

To establish how well BBF is performing, let’s compare it against two different sets of titles:

1. Other Supercell releases, as Boom Beach is a Supercell IP, and that always impacts the metrics positively.
2. Other titles in the online twin-stick shooter subgenre.

Since BBF is still in soft launch, ideally, we’d gauge it against the other titles during the same phase of their development. We’ve done this in all cases where it was practical, and in cases where it wasn’t, we’ve just used the most representative data possible.

Conventionally, soft-launch is focused on retention initially, so that’s what we’ll look at first. We’ll also just take in figures from Canada, since Supercell games routinely soft-launch there, and we want an apples-to-apples comparison. These numbers are taken from Google Play. Note that these metrics might not match up with the developers’ internal data, since data.ai can only generate estimates. Regardless, the same algorithm is generating these retention numbers for all titles, so we can draw some reasonable conclusions.

Let’s take a look.

Unfortunately, BBF’s retention curve is worse than all Supercell titles we’re comping against. The D1 of 45% is very respectable, but from D7 onwards it’s relatively bad news. This doesn’t bode well, especially if big brother Supercell is looking over Space Ape’s shoulder.

If we look at BBF’s retention performance against other titles with similar twin-stick shooter gameplay, we can see that it sits at the bottom of the pack here too.

Note the exceptional long-term performance of Brawl Stars, which has a higher D90 figure than even the D30s found elsewhere in the subgenre. What’s critical to note is that Supercell has proven that a very strong retention curve is possible in this subgenre, and BBF isn’t replicating it. We would partially attribute this to weak metagame systems — a hypothesis that is borne out by our anecdotal experience with the game and the analysis of its progression design found below.

Retention is a critical indicator of player enthusiasm for the experience in the long-term, but modest retention isn’t necessarily a game-killer if the audience is consistently spending. To get a sense of BBF’s monetization efficiency, we’ll look at its Revenue Per Download (RPD) first of all against other Supercell titles. These figures are taken from Canada and Google Play, with the timeline aligned by launch (as is standard for RPD).

Alas, 13 months into development, BBF ($0.99) can’t compete with other Supercell releases, most notably Clash Quest ($2.24) which was killed not long ago. If we take a look at BBF’s RPD curve, we should get a decent understanding of how players spend throughout their time with the game. We can see a modest level of initial conversion, followed by an almost immediate plateau and negligible growth overall. An exciting early value proposition isn’t panning out into a healthy longer-term LTV.

We all know that Supercell has mastered the art of getting players to open their wallets repeatedly over time, so perhaps this is an unfair comparison. How does BBF compare against its subgenre kin?

Here again we can see that BBF is underperforming. Where Brawl Stars, Zooba, and Tanks a Lot all show steady LTV growth, albeit at drastically different rates, BBF flatlines.

The picture this data paints is of a game that’s struggling to compete with the excellence of Supercell’s titles in terms of both long-term engagement and LTV. Meanwhile, although its retention figures are roughly in the same ballpark as other successful online twin-stick shooters, BBF is unable to hit more than one early home run when it comes to keeping players spending.

It's debatable how deep into the soft-launch process BBF is; perhaps the team is still focused on improving retention and hasn't yet started to optimize for monetization. However, the fact that the game recently expanded to 19 more territories suggests it’s aiming to get statistically-significant conversion data, since looking at a small cohort is notoriously unreliable. If Space Ape Games is truly allowing the BBF team to exercise independence, as it claims, then it’s likely allowing continued exploration of the game's potential and leaving it to the team whether or not to swing the axe.

All this begs the question: would Space Ape be willing to go worldwide with merely middling retention figures and weak monetization performance? Further, if Space Ape did want to launch globally, would Supercell stick to its values regarding autonomy, or would it demand the same ultra-high performance of its satellite studios as it does its own teams? The fact that Boom Beach is a Supercell IP surely muddies the waters.

Speculation aside, let’s jump into what BBF excels at, because — despite the quantifiable doom and gloom — there’s plenty to celebrate in the core gameplay.

Top 3 Things Boom Beach: Frontlines Does Well

A quick disclaimer that most opponents we faced appeared to be bots (likely because there aren’t enough concurrent players to fill games), so our core gameplay conclusions should be taken with a grain of soft-launch salt. With that aside, what’s the first thing BBF gets right?

#1: Nuanced Class-Based Combat

BBF’s core gameplay is a compellingly tactical flavor of team-based twin-stick shooting, leaning heavily on very distinctive classes — with radically different movement speeds, weapon ranges, and roles in combat — to create plenty of opportunities for smart moment-to-moment mid-battlefield decision-making. It helps enormously that each class is visually distinct and easily identified, enabling the player to rapidly read the action and react accordingly (unlike in Catalyst Black).

If you see a bunch of enemy vehicles and buildings, you spawn as a Zooka and take them out with her bonus damage. If you see a friendly minigun-toting Heavy running into battle, you might choose Medic to reinforce them.

Use of simple but very effective cover and flanking mechanics adds another layer of tactical maneuvering. It would have been all too easy for Space Ape to overcomplicate or under-communicate these gameplay elements, but it’s absolutely nailed them.

#2: Tight Primary Game Mode

Elegant design is also evident in the main game mode, which features simple win and loss conditions that are clearly communicated and an exciting overtime ruleset that leads to some absolute nail-biters. The rules even smartly accommodate cases where one team is completely dominating the other, ending the battle quickly in favor of the crushing victor so that everyone can get on with their lives (and quickly queue for another match).

#3: Spicy Variety of Core Ingredients

BBF’s core gameplay isn’t just about picking a troop class and wading once more into the fray, as there are several other elements rounding it out. Players gradually earn Munitions points during the match, and they can spend them on power-ups (Heal, Shield, Airstrike), vehicles (Tank, 4x4, Mega Critter), or base defense turrets.

This is clever not only because it gives players interesting decisions to make around spending Munitions, but it also provides for tactical versatility, e.g., a lone and otherwise helpless but quick-thinking Medic can jump into a vehicle and turn their aggressors into roadkill.

From the ever-crucial business perspective, this variety of combat potentially means the player has to invest in a large number of different ingredients in order to maximize their chances of succeeding. Theoretically, that means significant spend depth, but we’ll get to that…

Top 3 Things Boom Beach: Frontlines Gets Wrong (and Recommended Fixes)

#1: Cards Don’t Have Baked-In Meta Systemic Value

Each card the player gains has tactical advantages in combat, but there’s nothing in the game’s system design that makes unlocking, using, and upgrading cards the optimal thing to do. The problem here is that newly unlocked cards feel largely optional, and that has all sorts of problematic implications for the player’s desire to keep progressing, their enthusiasm for the contents of loot boxes, and their inclination to spend on upgrading.

Note that Space Ape has attempted to make the unlocks feel valuable and necessary by attaching specific vehicles, power-ups, and turret types to each battle. If you don’t have the relevant card, or you haven’t upgraded it, then your contribution to your team is compromised. However, this is diluted because other members of your team might have the required unlocks.

The effectiveness of this approach is also undermined by the fact that the player isn’t informed which cards will be used in each battle until it’s already started loading, so there’s a punitive quality to the requirement, as though the game is saying, “Too little, too late!” and there’s nothing the player can do in the moment to address it.

BBF would really benefit from giving the player a clear and obviously beneficial economic reason to use and upgrade each card. Brawl Stars is an example of such a system, where the optimal way to advance along the Trophy Road is to use every brawler, and per-hero rewards are another reason to invest widely and deeply. Such an approach relies on juicy carrots rather than punishing sticks, and it embeds the incentives deep into the heart of the metagame.

#2: Piecemeal Progression Structure

As the player levels up, they steadily gain access to more than 70 unlockable cards, level by level.

Superficially, this sounds like a solid method of retaining players via mid- and long-term goals, but the system trips over itself in a few key ways.

First, since the cards the player has access to are tightly controlled by their player level, the contents of each gacha box are largely a known quantity. The effect is that the randomized rewards are rarely exciting or surprising because they simply cannot contain the promise of a thrilling leap in power. This kneecaps the compulsion of opening more boxes, which means the core rewards system is compromised.

Compare this against Clash Royale, where new cards are unlocked in batches as the player reaches each new arena. This doesn’t create as strong a compulsion as a “true” gacha game like Puzzle & Dragons or Marvel: Contest of Champions — in which a lucky box opening can be an exhilarating experience that catapults the player’s power level far ahead of where they were expecting to be — but at least there’s a decent set of cards within which the player can “get lucky.”

The key difference is that the progression structure in BBF leaves very little room for spikes of excitement when receiving randomized rewards, because the degree of randomization is so very narrow.

Second, XP can be gained by simply playing the game, and so leveling up isn’t contingent on either competitive excellence or economic investment. Sure, winning means you progress faster, but as long as you keep playing you will eventually get access to everything.

Clash Royale’s arena-based card unlock method has its flaws, but it undeniably encourages the player to reach the next arena in order to access its associated unlocks. Of course, reaching each arena is a function of skill + power, and in cases where the player doesn’t have the skill, they can purchase the power. BBF lacks this drive to progress and the associated power-purchasing to accelerate said progression, because all you need to do is simply keep playing.

Finally, the path from gaining a level and unlocking a new card to actually using it is often so long and obscure that the two events feel largely disconnected (see the diagram below). You just end up playing matches and exploring islands, and occasionally you get a new card to play with, but the player’s capacity to reliably formulate goals around any of it is pretty weak. It all feels quite loose and fluffy.

We would recommend chunking and tightening this unlock structure so that:

• The player unlocks new cards in sizable groups rather than one by one so that each box opened contains the thrilling prospect of relatively rapid advancement.
• The player has to play skillfully and/or spend to progress and access new cards.
• The connection between the player’s actions and gaining access to new cards is more direct.

#3: Generous Session Control Makes for Weak Re-engagement

BBF features a session control system where players can earn up to 200 Stars from playing battles, and those Stars feed directly into advancing the Beach Pass. We assume that Space Ape was looking for a way to drive conversion to the Premium Beach Pass by making it one of the primary reward mechanisms, and here it’s arguably succeeded (although the box contents themselves aren’t very exciting, as discussed above).

The issue is that making the most of the session control and claiming the associated rewards feels like work. Upon returning to the game, the player isn’t greeted by the excitement of a box that’s finished opening — such as in a chest slots system — they’re confronted by the prospect of playing battles to use up their Stars, and only then can they claim their rewards. This is a far less immediately gratifying experience.

Further, Space Ape has tuned the Stars system to give players lots of freedom around when they use them. It takes over 2 days for those 200 Stars to completely refill, at which point the player has enough Stars to play ~30 battles (assuming a 50/50 win rate). In theory, this means the player’s time and agency are respected, but it anecdotally feels like there’s a lot of grinding to do, and no particular time at which you should do it. The net result is a weak compulsion to re-engage.

Giving the player an exciting reason to return at a specific time is the essence of re-engagement design. With BBF’s session control, Space Ape has engineered a system where there’s often nothing immediately rewarding waiting for the player when they tap the icon to boot the game up, as well as the general sense that there’s no real urgency.

We have to respect the fact that it was trying to respect the player’s time and agency, but there are marked downsides to the design it’s laid down to achieve those goals. Giving the player too much freedom can harm retention. We recommend reducing the maximum number of Stars the player can stockpile such that they’re compelled to return on a daily basis. We would also like to see the addition of milestone rewards to the Battle Pass, with timers attached. This would give the player more reasons to watch the clock and more instantly gratifying bursts of rewards upon returning to the game. Additionally, the milestone rewards would spice up the Battle Pass and increase goal density.

Other Noteworthy Issue: Lack of Competitive Drive

BBF features an almost nonexistent competitive Leagues structure. The player’s advancement through leagues isn’t communicated, isn’t rewarded, and doesn’t appear to have any real significance. This might be a quirk of being in soft launch, and perhaps it’s near the top of Space Ape’s backlog.

Compare this against Zooba, where each new League multiplies the player’s box rewards (as well as unlocks new characters). This clearly aligns the player’s intrinsic competitive motivations with economic incentives, gratifying that drive to keep winning and climb the ranks (and therefore encouraging spend).

Conclusion

Space Ape has built something refreshing and original at the core of Boom Beach: Frontlines, and we’d love to see it succeed. Of course, the problem with creating something new is you create new problems to solve along with it. Hopefully, the team can find strong solutions to the issues described above.

Assuming Space Ape holds itself to the same high standards that Supercell does, we would expect it to make significant structural changes to the game before worldwide launch in order to capitalize on the potential of the core gameplay and the IP it’s attached to. If Space Ape doesn’t shake things up and drastically improve the metrics, Supercell might be compelled — against its values of team independence and empowerment — to step in and make some hard decisions in order to protect Boom Beach and its well-deserved reputation.

A big thanks to Thomas Baker for writing this essay. If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.