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    Clash Royale Alternative viewpoint on you shouldn't hate Clash Royale and Supercell

    March 14, 2021
    Clash Royale: A Most Ridiculous Duel!

    Clash Royale Alternative viewpoint on you shouldn't hate Clash Royale and Supercell

    Alternative viewpoint on you shouldn't hate Clash Royale and Supercell

    Posted: 14 Mar 2021 04:08 PM PDT

    Hey folks,

    I'm not working on Clash Royale or in Supercell, but I am a game lead myself so I wanted to offer an alternative point of view on what's currently going on with Clash Royale. That's likely going to be an unpopular opinion here, but I'd share anyway. I'll go over several things that people mention quite a lot nowadays and try to make a reality check.

    All of the following is based on information available in public domain and is only my opinion. On some points you can look at it as fact check, on others it's much more subjective.

    Sorry if there are grammar mistakes or if I repeat myself, I don't want to double-triple check everything I wrote here🙂

    ​

    The game is dying/everyone is leaving

    I looked over MAU (million monthly users) that are available to public (it's only estimation), so while the actual numbers are probably inaccurate, you can see how it evolved over time.

    It says that there are 32 million players who played the game in February and already 35 million players in March.

    For the reference, the highest peaks were May 2019 (73 million) and March 2020 (67 million). The first is likely related to a big updated released in April 2019 with Trophy Road, new cards and new game modes. The second is related to COVID as all games got more users playing their games.

    If you look at Clash of Clans, while at peaks it had around 90 million players, currently it plateaued at 45-50, so half of it. Pretty similar situation to Clash Royale.

    I'd say the rate of people leaving the game is definitely higher than desired starting from March 2020, but objectively the game is really far from "dying" and "everyone is leaving", it has a HUGE active community and even more people will come back if the game will start getting updates in the right direction.

    Supercell only cares about money/Tencent owns Supercell and they want revenue

    Supercell is a company of unique culture where teams make all the decisions concerning their games, so by definition Tencent has no power over the decisions that are made inside each of the games.

    The CEO of the company has many talks where he says again and again that the culture of hiring and empowering smart people is the main goal for the company.

    While Supercell is a business and they need to make revenue, they believe that teams come first and the games are made to be played and loved by players, not to squeeze money out of players.

    Supercell decided to let the game die/They already made a billion so they don't care

    That just doesn't make sense and honestly naive. It's in nobody's interest to let a game that makes so much money just die.

    Other games could make more and they are always working on new games, but Clash Royale as mentioned above has a huge players base who are still enjoying the game.

    Team doesn't care about the game/Drew doesn't care

    It's true that some people may get tired from working on the same game for multiple years. In these cases people switch to other teams and new blood replaces them.

    Believe me, as you all love or loved Clash Royale at some point, there are MANY developers that love Clash Royale (me included) that want to work on it to make it better and make you players happy.

    There's just no way people who went to work to make games and then joined the company, which is the most passionate about the games, then don't care about the game they work on.

    Team wants to make the game better, but "someone higher up" gives them other orders

    As mentioned previously about the culture of the company, nobody gives the team orders.

    The game lead works together with the team to find the best solution for the players and the game.

    Everyone wants to work at Supercell because that's what they aspire to - game's first.

    Supercell doesn't want to grow the team because they don't care about Clash Royale

    They don't want to grow the team FAST, that's for sure. You need to be very careful who you hire, so they have necessary skills, they fit the company culture and that they're actually passionate about Clash Royale.

    At the same time, they don't want to have big teams because it then creates a necessity of reporting structure and creates layers inside the team.

    Supercell wants to keep their teams flat and give everyone full ownership of their work and opportunity to own the game vision altogether.

    From what I've seen (the positions they open) they do hire some new profiles to the project, specifically they had a Community Manager position and they are actually looking for a new Game Lead right now.

    CR team doesn't speak with the community

    This one I have mixed feelings about personally.

    I think one of the reasons is that they only have Drew and he might be involved in many initiatives besides simply talking to the community.

    The other reason could be that the interactions that Drew did have result in a more negative discussions rather than when he doesn't.

    Probably the right strategy here is to release a good update to get some positive momentum going, hire a new game lead and start introducing him to a community, hire another community manager so there's more capacity to handle such stuff.

    I'm more on the side of the transparency from developers side, but guys, look at the posts here, every 2nd thread openly and personally attacks developers saying that they have no idea what they're doing, that they don't care, etc. etc.

    Imagine they start being transparent with you - will you empathize or will you scream you want good updates no matter what?🙂 You have the right to demand that as you're are players and you want your game to be fun, but it's just a difficult situation to handle either way.

    Brawl Stars team cares about their game much more/does more things

    I think Brawl Stars still is in their "golden age" as everyone still enjoys the core game and main progression - as they did in Clash Royale 2 years after its release.

    It's always easier to come with something impactful when your game is still young rather than it has aged and you have many people at the end of existing content.

    The other factor that Brawl Stars is definitely better at just as a game is that releasing more content makes it cooler as new brawlers are fun, and give you a progression path from the beginning to enjoy when getting a new card in CR gives you nothing until you level it up.

    Then of course when everyone enjoys your game, it's easier to build a community and communication that kind snowballs into something big and positive. Also count that their game lead is quite public and proactive + they have 2 community managers.

    ​

    Why don't they roll back to CW1?

    Pretty sure the easy answer is that technically it's extremely challenging to roll back to a such old version of a certain feature while keeping all the rest of the features in their current state. Probably it's so unpractical that it's easier to develop the same thing from scratch.

    But do you really want to wait several months of development to come back to CW1?

    The way they probably see it is that CW2 has some flaws, but long-term they will be able to build a better experience on top of it and with less time investment than try to revert to CW1 and then what?

    ​

    Why don't they focus on doing "X, Y, Z" right now to make the game better?

    I'm pretty sure they realize that the game is not in the place where they want it to be same as you realize that you don't enjoy it as much as you'd like.

    However, the right thinking right now is to think how to make this game lovable by everyone in 2-3 years, build the strategy towards it and move there step by step making the game better and better.

    If they fall for going for "quick wins" right now that community justifiably demands - then they will not move towards the long-term vision and you will not love the game yourself with all the quick fixes.

    Unfortunately, if you don't enjoy the game in the state that it is right now - the only thing you can do

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