Naavik Pro often likes to meticulously pick apart the huge industry success stories, and with good reason: analyzing the best is a great way to learn, and hopefully to emulate what helped them win. But it’s critical to also look at the unfortunate didn’t-make-it titles that litter the app stores in order to steer well clear of the mistakes they made. This essay is an example of the latter, and its focus is Catalyst Black.

Super Evil Megacorp exploded into the public eye back in 2014 with the announcement of Vainglory, taking the Apple stage alongside the iPhone 6 to become the first high-profile mobile MOBA, years before Honor of Kings and Mobile Legends hit the scene. Despite garnering critical acclaim and showing promise as an esport, Vainglory’s complex gameplay presented a cliff-like learning curve, and a lack of in-game communication methods severely limited teamplay – a critical shortcoming in the MOBA space.

Those all-important downloads and revenue figures never took off in the way the developers hoped. Super Evil Megacorp’s CEO, Kristian Segerstrale, has said, “We ended up creating for ourselves quite a heavy, costly infrastructure to run the game.” Presumably if the revenue was rolling in they would have been able to maintain it, but Segerstrale has also been quoted as saying that as developers they have “deliberately chosen from the start to almost be the caricature anti-monetizer” – an honorable path to take, but where does it lead?

Fast-forward to 2021 and Super Evil Megacorp secures more time in the spotlight of an Apple keynote presentation, showing off their new “battleground shooter”, Catalyst Black, as part of the iPhone 13 announcement. In development since 2018, this title promised to take the lessons learned from the much hyped (but ultimately unsustainable) Vainglory and put them into practice.

Much like Vainglory’s positive critical reception, Catalyst Black sports a Metascore of 79, with reviewers describing it as “smooth, stunning, fast-paced, and most of all, extremely fun”, and lauding the fact that its in-game purchases “aren’t necessary to enjoy the game”.

So how has Catalyst Black fared since launching worldwide in May 2022? What does player spend look like in the 2nd title from an “anti-monetizer” studio? And how did they capitalize on the knowledge gained from Vainglory?

We’ll answer the performance questions with a quick data review.

In The Black?

Catalyst Black was in soft launch from mid-2020 until it launched worldwide on May 25, 2022. Sensor Tower classes Catalyst Black as a MOBA, but since it actually describes itself as a “battleground shooter” it’s very removed from the heavy team-based strategic gameplay found in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang or League of Legends: Wild Rift.

Moment-to-moment, it’s more of an action game, with high movement speeds, almost constant shooting, frequent dodge-rolls, and much less of the synergistic ability use and cooldown timers found in other titles in the subgenre. There are few games like it, which is certainly a point of interest – is this blue ocean waiting to be plundered, or have other titles tried and failed to turn this style of gameplay into a successful F2P product?

Although they’re not perfect comparisons, Brawl Stars and Tanks a Lot are fairly close in terms of gameplay and level of complexity. We’ll look at how Catalyst Black compares to both titles.

When comparing installs over the first 3 launch months, Catalyst Black is not only far behind Brawl Stars, but also pretty weak versus Tanks a Lot’s performance. There are few big caveats here though:

1. Both Brawl Stars and Tanks a Lot were launched during times when store featurings actually used to have a significant downloads impact, and Catalyst Black does not enjoy a similar environment today.
2. Struggling to compete with Brawl Stars is understandable, given Supercell’s extremely high profile and marketing muscle.
3. In a post-IDFA environment, Catalyst Black doesn’t have the luxury of running highly targeted UA campaigns, which is almost a requirement for scale in the genre they’re competing in.

While the games’ revenue graphs look pretty similar to the above downloads graph in terms relative performance, it would be more important to look at Revenue Per Download (RPD) to get a sense of monetization efficiency. We take in only the iOS US numbers in order to get close to an apples-to-apples comparison. For the first 90 days the RPD looks as follows.

Here Catalyst Black outperforms the competition early on, but it soon almost plateaus. This indicates that if players are going to spend, they spend early, but they don’t continue doing so. In other words, it’s quite clear that Catalyst Black has a lot of work to do on its meta game and live operation tactics. Brawl Stars shows a different trajectory, with repeat spend leading to a steady upward climb and a relatively healthy LTV curve. That said, it was still interesting to see Catalyst Black performing better than Tanks a Lot on a RPD basis.

Looking only at downloads and dollars gives us part of the picture, but taking in retention helps to round out our understanding, as it’s arguably a good method of assessing the quality of the player experience itself – if players don’t like the game, they’re going to churn, leading to weak retention numbers.

Since App Store data wasn’t available, we took a look at US Google Play figures for each title in Q2 of 2022. Ideally, we would also align these retention figures by global launch data, but that’s not possible, so we’ve chosen to look at the quarter in which Catalyst Black launched, which should yield the most representative data.

Note that these are just estimates and should be taken with a grain of salt. Catalyst Black’s D1 of 39% is OK, but a D7 of 7% is certainly not. That means a D7/D1 relative retention ratio of ~18%, while the benchmark is more in the 40-50% range. Brawl Stars has a D7/D1 relative retention ratio of ~57%. This just further underscores our previous point about Catalyst Black having a lot of ground to cover in terms of improving their meta game and live operations tactics. There’s clearly not much here to hold players’ attention, even in the short- to mid-term.

Finally and on an ARPDAU basis, Catalyst Black is actually performing relatively similar to its competitors over the first 90 days. While the ARPDAU baseline is slightly lower than that of Brawl Stars, it’s quite clear that low mid-to-long term retention is the key issue for the game to fix at this moment.

All in all, this is surely not the explosive global launch the developers would have hoped for given Apple’s backing — 5 years of development and 2 years spent in soft launch. So what was it about Catalyst Black that led to such numbers? It makes sense that the studio’s “anti-monetizer” attitude might lead to weak dollar values, but presumably they’d be hoping for high install rates and solid retention as a counterbalancing consequence. So why aren’t players sticking around?

Top 3 Things Catalyst Black Does Well

In this section we’ll take a quick look at the top 3 things Catalyst Black does right, then we’ll cover its 3 biggest mistakes, followed by our top 3 takeaways and recommendations for improvement.

#1: A Highly Polished Product

Catalyst Black is an undeniably slick production, with a fully voiced tutorial, striking visual style, awesome VFX, great character design, and countless little details. You can tell this game is a labor of love. And while that polish does go a long way in a highly competitive mobile gaming market (not to mention a highly competitive genre with Brawl Stars in the mix), polish is still the icing on the cake. The cake of course is the core and meta gameplay.

#2: Solid, Original Action Gameplay

The particular brand of isometric shooter gameplay found in CB is novel, deep and entertaining enough that you could imagine playing it for quite a while. It rewards skill, but you don’t need a huge amount of dexterity or precision to succeed. You can simply hold the fire button, or you can take more direct control and pick a specific direction to fire in. There’s nuance to be had in timing your ability usage, dodge-rolling out of danger, and making sure you have ammo for your heavy weapon. Oh, and going full beast mode is awesome!

That said, the gameplay here isn’t that much more deep that Brawl Stars, and the number of buttons on screen and inputs required is much greater – there are 6 on-screen buttons in Catalyst Black, vs 3 in Brawl Stars – so there’s room for refinement, especially if greater accessibility is a key goal for the project. Nonetheless, the moment-to-moment play comfortably holds its own.

#3: Drop-in Multiplayer is Great for Session Times

The longer modes in CB can be joined even when they’re already underway, allowing players to easily join on friends regardless of match state, and reducing possible matchmaking friction.

Further, some game modes – such as Eventide – give rewards based on score per minute, allowing players to play for as long or as little as they like, and receive proportional benefits accordingly. This also ensures players aren’t punished for entering a match part-way through. Games of this nature generally tend to have long session times, and sometimes to their detriment – and so CB’s solution for the same is a smart one.

This is in contrast to other online games where the teams are locked once the match starts, and leaving a match generally harms the playing experience for those left behind. Of course, either approach has its pros and cons, but CB’s low-friction angle is noteworthy and has clear benefits in terms of facilitating short matchmaking times, flexible session length, and fluid social play.

Top 3 Things Catalyst Black Gets Wrong

#1: Monolithic Character-agnostic Power Design

With Catalyst Black, Super Evil Megacorp made the interesting decision to monetize only power; a dramatic step in the opposite direction of the purely cosmetics-based model of Vainglory, and likely a very conscious decision to avoid the difficulties they faced when scaling up content production for their first title. As Segerstrale said: “We learned a lot from the complexity and the difficulty of map and character creation”.

CB’s power-based monetization is distinct from almost all other online action games, which typically sell skins in order to avoid accusations of pay-to-win. The fact that CB’s business relies solely on selling competitive advantage is risky enough, but it’s a potential game-killer when you consider that the design of power and player capabilities – and upgrading and the associated economy – are not completely optimized.

Super Evil Megacorp made much of the fact that players can fine-tune their loadout, experimenting with 7 different gear slots to craft the character of their choice.

Since SEMC struggled with designing and rolling out new characters in Vainglory, it makes sense that it chose a more freeform, player-defined approach for CB. Superficially, this seems like a win-win because it saves on development costs while empowering players to tweak their build to perfection, but the downsides are significant and numerous.

First off, you can’t glance at a character on the battlefield – either friend or foe – and immediately know what they’re capable of. Each character is a mishmash of seven different largely invisible pieces of gear, and each gear piece is upgraded to an unknowable level of power, so you don’t know how fast they can move, what range they’ll engage you from, or how much they’ll hurt when they hit. You can’t rapidly assess the threat presented by any given opponent, and in the chaos of combat, that’s seriously problematic.

While you can see what primary weapon a character is carrying, the characters move quickly, the weapons are comparatively tiny, the visual design of the weapons themselves isn’t super-clear, and they’re only one slice of the power represented by any given player. It’s often the case that you only find out which weapon an opponent is carrying after they’ve fired, at which point you’ve likely already been shot.

Since each character doesn’t have a clear or distinct role, the scope for meaningful synergy between the different members of a team is compromised – your teammates are there, but you can’t readily rely on them for anything in particular, and vice versa. In an esports context where the teams are pre-formed and carefully coordinated, there’s certainly scope for this kind of synergy, but your average player won’t be able to tell one teammate from another.

Compare this to Brawl Stars, where every character is visually distinct, their unique gameplay capabilities are inherently tied to their appearance, and the moment-to-moment action is all the more exciting and easy to read as a result. Knowing what any given character is likely to do – and what you should likely do in response – is much more accessible.

Crucially for SEMC’s bottom line, this piecemeal mix-and-match approach to power design also means that players have much less incentive to upgrade any gear that they’re not actively using – which is likely to be most of it – since doing so serves no purpose. Further, a newly acquired Epic piece of loot is often less powerful than an upgraded Common, meaning the player’s excitement at the sparkly new rare thing is massively diminished by the fact that using it would actually harm their chances of winning.

Plus, any powerful piece of gear can be used in any circumstance, which means every upgrade contributes to a universally available, central pool of power that can be used to solve any gameplay problem the player is presented with. Sure, sniper rifles are good on large-scale maps and shotguns are good in tight ones, and some game modes lend themselves to use of particular weapons, but level design and mode are the only vectors the designers of Catalyst Black have to encourage the player to invest broadly.

Compare this again with Brawl Stars, where each character is its own site of progression that contributes to a highly visible and rewarding “Trophy Road”, making every single one inherently worthwhile playing as and upgrading, both for gameplay variety and baked-in systemic/economic reasons. Not only that, but for matchmaking purposes each brawler is a separate entity, meaning players can rest assured that switching to a newly unlocked and non-upgraded character won’t see them facing off against much more powerful opponents.

I could go on about how broken Catalyst Black’s power design is – how its monolithic nature means the gap between the most and least powerful players is enormous, how the only way they can make money from elder players is via power creep, how both of these dynamics threaten the game’s matchmaking viability, and how it makes no sense that they show the selected character on the main menu because it has nothing to do with the player’s power or progression state – but suffice to say this deeply flawed foundational piece of power design is probably enough to gravely impact the previously showcased mid-to-long term retention curve, while capping the ARPDAU ceiling and thereby ruining the game’s future prospects.

But then you encounter the…

#2: Toothless Upgrade Economy

In many games with power-based monetization, a combination of gear fragments and soft currency are used to create economic tension that makes the player really value the rewards they’re receiving. Eventually, with sound balancing, the economy applies sufficient pressure to the player’s power progression that the best way for them to excel at the game is to pull out their wallet. This approach relies on each element of the economy having a distinct role, a clear source, and a tightly controlled inflow rate.

Catalyst Black takes an entirely different tack. While soft currency (“Dust”) can be spent to upgrade any given piece of gear, simply playing the game earns those same upgrade fragments for the currently equipped gear, and the amount of upgrade fragments that can be earned through regular play is uncapped. Yep: the player can earn an unlimited amount of valuable power, in a targeted way, just by playing the game. One would think that’s a great retention driver, but the lack of friction in power progression is clearly hurting the game’s retention curve. Not to mention how being able to earn unlimited power through grinding can negatively impact ARPDAU in a power-based economy.

Additionally, every time you open a loot box, you’ll receive upgrade fragments for various randomized pieces of gear. And – you guessed it – you earn free loot boxes over time, and from playing matches. This creates a confusing economic dynamic with lots of overlap, where time played = soft currency = loot box contents = gear XP.

A separate layer of power progression comes from duplicate pieces of gear, which can be infused to increase Star rating and unlock perks. Surely this process requires soft currency? Nope.

The value of soft currency is significantly undermined as a result. Although it is useful, since the grind-based power gain is slow, it’s far less desirable than in games where soft currency plays a clear and vital role in the economy. Here the most common reward the player receives, and arguably the foundation of the game’s economy, is just another way to accomplish something that can be achieved via multiple other paths.

The above decision-making seems like it might be the result of an “anti-monetizer” design mentality, where the player is able to move freely through the game’s power structures without being pinched or hitting a paywall. This is a respectable aim, but the net effect is that rewards don’t have much weight or substance, which in turn means every aspect of gameplay that yields those rewards – match completion, progression, periodic re-engagement – is much less satisfying. This would ultimately harm retention, which is ironic given that’s presumably what they were optimizing for in the first place.

Did you notice what that soft currency is called? “Dust”. This brings us to our final criticism of Catalyst Black.

#3: Clever Lore Over Convention and Comprehension

SEMC has consistently prioritized “interesting” over “obvious” with Catalyst Black’s world and game design. The name of the game itself is a prime example. It’s distinctive and it sounds cool, sure, but what is a “catalyst black”? What does that term mean to anyone? There are a thousand wildly different possible interpretations. When a prospective player hears or sees that name, what experience do they imagine they’ll have if they download the app? They might envision anything from a deep 4X space strategy game to a dystopian cyberpunk RPG, and many other things besides.

Why is this a problem? Take hypercasual games as an example of the benefits of having a brain-meltingly obvious connection between the name and the primary gameplay activity. An ad for “Fill The Fridge” or “Pull the Pin” leaves only so much to the imagination, and so the player can opt into that experience with a reasonable degree of confidence that they’re going to get what they came for on the other side of the “Download” button – and this has profound implications for discoverability, CPI, and retention rates. Sure, there are plenty of ads that misrepresent the gameplay, but at least the game name means something – you can judge the book by its cover.

SEMC’s commitment to unconventional naming extends to:

• The economy, where soft currency is called Dust, a gear shop-specific currency is called Quint, and the hard currency is Marks.
• Chests, which go from Moon to Star to Astral.
• Gear, where weapons are called anything from Northern Warmth to Impact Conjugate, and a trinket might be Reckful Circlet or Yurtak Wraps.
• The overall power metric, which is called Might.

Unusual lore-driven design choices extend to the visual design of weapons, which also bear the mark of prioritizing originality over rapid understanding. This is arguably the greater design sin, since most players likely won’t pay much attention to the names of weapons, but an assault rifle should look like an assault rifle.

So why does all that matter? The first thing that will break a player’s desire to continue playing a game is a lack of comprehension. Self-determination theory explains that competence is one of three fundamental psychological needs, and knowing how things work and what to do next is absolutely critical for players to feel a basic level of competence.

Every design choice that causes the player to pause and frown instead of ploughing ahead and engaging in the part of learning that online competitive video games are actually about – gaining skill and mastery – is another churn point. Choosing an “interesting” world with cool names for things at the expense of maximizing retention seems like dubious prioritization to me.

Given the game’s weak performance post-launch, I suspect the developers might now agree.

Other Noteworthy Issues

The scope of this article can’t cover all of the concerns we have with Catalyst Black’s design, but here is brief analysis of a handful of other areas we felt were ripe for improvement:

• The absence of a competitive metagame layer, which leads to a lack of mid- and long-term goals. Clash Royale-style Arenas or an MMR-based ranking system – with accompanying seasons – would likely result in much stronger retention and conversion.
• The social UI/UX, where friends have to be manually added via a Friend code, the player isn’t told when their friends come online, inviting online friends to a party isn’t prompted, and party members’ avatars aren’t shown on the home screen (and nor are their gear or power score).
• Overly complex mode design, such as Hydra’s 3 separate and parallel victory conditions, each of which has their own internal mechanics (e.g., capture a shard point, collect the shards it produces, carry them back to your base). This mode unlocks relatively early, and – anecdotally, based on feedback from multiple players – it’s often hard to tell why you won or lost, and what you could have done to improve the outcome.

Top 3 Takeaways

What would we recommend readers learn from the above criticisms?

#1: Encourage Diverse Power Investment

If your game’s business depends on selling power, be sure to structure the game, its sources of power, and its power progression such that the player is required – or at least very strongly encouraged – to diversify their investment in order to succeed. If the player can just use the same giant hammer to smash every nail the game throws at them, they’ll do it, and they won’t care about or spend on all the alternatives.

In the case of Catalyst Black, this could be applied by changing the structure of the game so that there are clear character classes, each with a distinct role on the battlefield, visual style, and set of gear. This could be paired with a progression structure that meant playing a variety of classes was economically optimal. This would keep the game’s signature loadout customization – on a per-class basis – while also giving players a reason to value a wide range of things, and potentially spend on them. Additionally, this class-based power structure would likely be cheaper to create content for than the hero-driven design – which SEMC found so onerous in Vainglory – so the ongoing development cost would still be mitigated.

#2: Keep Your Economy Clean and Tight

Every currency and economic entity should have a clear and distinct role, it should come from a limited set of sources, and its availability should be tightly controlled. These are the mechanisms by which you will guarantee that the player values the rewards they’re earning, and also the principal elements of an economy that can be optimized in order to make spend appealing.

Catalyst Black could utilize this by:

• Eliminating or heavily capping the play-based earning of power
• Making it so soft currency spend is required in order to utilize gear upgrade fragments that are earned from chests
• Charging the player to infuse duplicate gear items and increase Star rating

#3: Comprehension is King

In the early game, minimizing friction and maximizing rapid player comprehension is critical to minimize churn and maximize retention. If an element of the game does what it looks like it will – if it has high affordance – then the player will understand quickly and be that much more likely to keep playing. Utilize conventions wherever possible, and only ignore them if you have a damn good reason.

This could be applied to Catalyst Black by revising the name and appearance of almost every basic element – from the currencies, to the weapons, to the name of the game itself – to be more intuitively and immediately understandable. Sure, “Gems” as the hard currency is boring and cliche, but at least people will get it.

Conclusion

Super Evil Megacorp’s Catalyst Black is a polished, interesting, and ambitious online action game that gets a number of key things right, but a bunch of critical things wrong. Many of its issues stem from a desire to avoid the mistakes made by the developer in their first title, but you could argue the pendulum swung too far the other way, resulting in a different kind of dysfunction. Other problems result from an apparent disregard for the designs featured in many other successful mobile games. Maybe all of this was also fuelled by SEMC’s need to greatly differentiate itself from major genre incumbents like Brawl Stars, but there is always a balance to be struck between differentiation and best practices in an established market.

By examining its shortcomings we can hope to avoid the same fate. Hopefully this mini-deconstruction will help you do just that!

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.