When Clash Royale was released in 2016, it was top-shelf Supercell: complex gameplay from the RTS, MOBA, and tower defense subgenres, distilled so you could grasp the basics in a matter of seconds, wrapped in a new competitive meta that rewarded both skill and spend, social systems that made other players fundamentally useful, and session design that kept players coming back for days, weeks, and months.

For the first year or so it seemed the Finns had really nailed it. The early player experience was a riot of unlocks, strategic twists and turns, and rapidly rising through the ranks. But as the shockwaves subsided, the grind emerged, and it became apparent that this was not, in fact, the perfect game. Deep vertical progression made experimenting with new cards prohibitively expensive, and anxiety around losing Trophies when using relatively weak new cards made the cost of failure even greater. There were chinks in the armor of converting player skill and power into progression, and so a kind of meta rot set in that meant players were wary of deviating from their tried and true decks. The team did its best to keep the gameplay fresh with the release of new units, modes, and social gameplay, but Clash Royale’s graphs are broadly characterized by a years-long decline, where Supercell’s other titles tend to settle into a steady baseline.

Fast forward to 2019: although the introduction of an industry-mandatory Pass Royale spiked revenue with the beginning of each new season, the macro trend remained downhill. September 2020’s second iteration of Clan Wars also saw a muted revenue response, and a rules refresh in November didn’t get much of a reaction either.

However, in 2021 the king of action strategy showed signs of a regal comeback, with a marked upturn in downloads and revenue that peaked - like calorie intake - at Christmas, and then fell - like discarded New Year’s Resolutions - with the tolling of the bell for 2022.

What did the team do to revitalize this aging title, why couldn’t they sustain the reinvigoration, what else might they do to avoid further lurches towards irrelevance, and what can other studios learn from their efforts? Let’s take a look.

Polishing The Crown Jewels

Clash Royale limped into 2021 with all-time low revenue performance, but it went on to celebrate its 5th birthday in March with the release of Magic Items, a set of new resources conceptually lifted from Clash of Clans.

These gave the player more agency over leveling specific cards rapidly and also allowed them to bypass Gold costs and chest wait times. The inclusion of inventory limits guaranteed players were compelled to use said items in order to avoid waste and ensured they couldn’t stockpile them. Generally speaking, the March update was about facilitating targeted progression, giving players more opportunities to be economically optimal, and increasing the scope of meaningful rewards in a way that countered some of the frustration of randomization.

Collectively, these items had something for almost everyone: early- and mid-game players enjoy a burst of precise power gain, and elder players — who, anecdotally, aren’t limited by cards but rather by Gold — appreciate the opportunity to sidestep the arguably extreme upgrade costs at the top end.

As can be seen in the chart above, Magic Items kicked off a bull run that peaked in June with the next substantial update: a sweeping competition refresh that introduced an extended Trophy Road, additional arenas, and a rebalanced Season Trophy reset scheme designed to improve the fairness of matches and incentivize reaching higher ranks. This revised ruleset kept the good times rolling, with each season seeing a healthy monetization uptick.

In October, the game saw another major update — arguably its biggest content shakeup in years — with the addition of Champions, a new rarity of card with active skills that players could pay Elixir to initiate, such as The Archer Queen whose "Cloaking Cape" makes her invisible and jacks her fire rate. These manually triggered abilities were a first for the game, adding a new layer of skill and real-time tactical decision-making, which Supercell cleverly allowed all players to trial via Special Challenges.

Bundled with this disruption of moment-to-moment play was an increase to the maximum card and player level, which is pure power creep and therefore potentially quite frustrating because it worsens the gap between top-end players and everyone else, but at least it gave elder players another mountain to climb. Neatly, reaching the new maximum King/Princess Level also guaranteed the player one of the aforementioned Champions.

Additionally, this October update saw Supercell accelerating the progression of high-level cards, requiring fewer dupes and less Gold to upgrade them, and compensating players for any cards they’d already spent. This, combined with more generous Gold rewards and temporarily halved upgrade prices, caused a frenzy of upgrading, downloads, and spend that peaked at Christmas — and has dropped sharply since, but we’ll get to that.

When it was riding high on revenue, the boost was the combination of not only a major increase in downloads but also an ARPDAU lift that held till around December and fell off with the new year.

Supercell had found a way to monetize more efficiently, with some players spending 50% more than before or after this 10-month period (see the graph of iPhone US ARPDAU above, for example). We believe this is largely due to players pursuing upgrades for cards that were previously inconvenient or too expensive. Sadly, the uplift wasn’t sustained.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

2022 has been a year of monarchic woe, at least as far as the royal coffers are concerned. This is likely a hangover from the debauchery of late 2021, as well as the absence of tasty new content.

A substantial update in March was focused on allowing players to cosmetically flex their veterancy via Card Masteries — per-troop metagoals that allow players to pimp their cards and earn bonus currency — as well as profile Badges that surfaced player lifetime achievements.

This update was accompanied by a gradual decline in revenue, as well as a marked drop in downloads where it looks like the UA budget might have been cut from levels established in October 2021.

As always, the ghost of IDFA haunts these numbers. ATT wasn’t on a majority of iOS devices until Q3 of 2021, when we see a downloads downtrend in CR. The huge Champions update in Q4 likely outperformed any headwinds seen on the UA side, but without a similarly notable update this year — plus the challenges of targeting high-quality players — CR’s installs started to drop. The story doesn’t revolve purely around game updates and UA budget, but they’ve certainly played a part.

Interestingly, the Card Masteries update received more reviews than any other update in 3 years, and they were disproportionately positive, too.

Maybe this was always intended to be a crowd-pleasing update, in which case Supercell definitely delivered, but it offers a cautionary tale: giving players what they want doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll pay you for the privilege.

Or perhaps the team is running out of ideas…

Clinging To The Throne

Taken as a whole, the CR team’s efforts throughout 2021 seemed intent on delivering a few things:

• Making it easier for players to upgrade the cards of their choice, presumably in order to make the cost of switching strategies less prohibitive, encouraging varied card investment.
• Making matchmaking more fair and seasons more competitive, perhaps with a view to keep high-end players more engaged and spending on Pass Royale each month.
• A shot in the arm for endgame moment-to-moment play with Champions, giving Supercell another angle via which to introduce new troops.

Arguably, each of these changes is really just tinkering around the edges of a game that some say has felt stale for a long time. The fact that these additions haven’t increased the baseline indicates they were band-aids that failed to address the underlying symptoms of the game’s decline. Supercell has comprehensively solved the problems that contributed to players fearing experimentation, but they still haven’t provided a good enough reason to bother putting on their lab coats and mixing up a new deck or three.

It’s interesting to note that Clash Royale’s Game Director and main Community Manager both moved off the project near the start of 2021. This is pure speculation, but perhaps high-level plans were put in place, which were executed over the course of the year, and now the long-term flow-on effects of the changing of the guard are finally being felt. Has Supercell internally lost faith in the idea that CR can continue to be meaningfully built upon and reallocated resources accordingly?

The major goals the CR team has announced for 2022 smack of a lack of ambition and indicate the game might soon be taking a slow, pleasant walk into the sunset:

• “Adding more ways to progress and more rewards to earn
• More customization and personalization
• Improvements to current features”

Doesn’t exactly get the blood boiling, does it?

Checkmated?

Despite years of updates, it feels like Clash Royale’s problems today are the same as they’ve been for a long time:

• Elder players don’t have a compelling reason to switch up their decks, and they have plenty of reasons not to.
• Since most matches are 1v1, the competition outcome is binary, which means losing can feel brutal, and failure is often a function of whether your deck happens to be strong against your matchmade opponent’s deck, and if you’re lucky enough to have the right counter in your hand at the right time.
• Adding new card designs into the mix is incredibly difficult because they have to be different from, and balanced against, every other existing card.

Any meaningful solutions to these enduring issues are likely to cause short-term pain and gnashing of community teeth, but if they could be comprehensively addressed, then both Supercell and the player base would be looking at serious long-term gains, in terms of revenue performance and gameplay variety, respectively.

Don’t get me wrong: Clash Royale is still a brilliant game. The core is so good that plenty of the people playing in 2022 installed it back in 2016, and it’s now a daily habit, a staple entertainment snack with spicy challenges on rotation, and a reliable social connect. But the live ops beast is ever hungry, and some game designs are very difficult to extend indefinitely. Is Supercell being precious by leaving the fundamentals alone, or would making the structural changes needed to really shake things up break the magic at the core? Put another way: if the golden goose's eggs aren't quite so shiny or numerous anymore, do you risk trying to bludgeon it into a diamond swan?

If Supercell were keen to try and pull a phoenix, here are some quickfire ideas that might deliver on the promise hinted at above:

• A high-risk “Draft Match” option in the Trophy Road that requires players to choose from a specific subset of cards, with dramatically increased rewards for participation.
• Experimenting with a half-time tactical decision point that enables players to switch out up to three of their cards, and maybe knock out one from their opponent’s deck.
• A daily goals feature (which seems insane to suggest in 2022, given how well established they are) that would heavily incentivize using, and therefore upgrading, a wide variety of units, with each day’s economic progress largely contingent on completing the set of goals. Note that these used to be part of Clash Royale but were removed at some point.
• Entirely new game modes and card types that create a new parallel metagame and compel players to have more than one main deck. For example, Islands mode, featuring troops that swim, which — along with flying units — are the only ones that can reach specific points on the map, rendering ground-based units without ranged attacks worthless.
• Introduction of sets and formats, a la Magic The Gathering or Hearthstone, which allow the developer to release heavily themed, neatly self-contained and synergistic volumes of content, the collection of which is made semi-mandatory by changes to the competition format that make new cards both competitively and economically optimal.

Perhaps Supercell still has some aces up its sleeve. We’re keen to see how the rest of 2022 plays out for this venerable strategy title.

A Royal Send-off

Watching arguably the world’s best mobile studio breathe new life into one of its darlings and then observing it fade away again has lessons for all of us:

• The more expensive you make it for players to execute a strategy, the less likely they are to pay switching costs.
• Players will welcome changes that make it easier to get what they want, but if what they want is only a small fraction of what you’re selling, the benefit of the changes will be narrow.
• Being more generous might make players happy, but it won’t help your bottom line, which is ultimately what matters when trying to fund sustainable, quality live ops.
• You have to break meta eggs to make a fresh omelet — or in other words, if your game feels stale and people are starting to leave it on the shelf, you’re better off aggressively pursuing a positive future than clinging to the dysfunctionally limiting past.
• The decisions you make when laying the foundations of your game will influence your options for years to come, so take the time to make them robust!

Hopefully, this analysis of Supercell’s efforts will help you understand the complex challenges every team faces — and solutions they might bring to bear — when trying to continually evolve a successful live game.

A big thanks to Thomas Baker for writing this essay, and to Eva Grillova and Helo Yoshioka for their input! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.