Supercell wants to evolve Clash Royale into a strategy game platform, and will start by adding Clash Mini into the game in June 2025.
Speaking at Roviocon Google 2024 yesterday, Clash Royale general manager Aleksandar Markovic said that Supercell has been looking at the success of Fortnite, Roblox and League of Legends and wants to add new experiences into Clash Royale in a similar way.
The first big step towards that goal comes in June 2025, when Clash Mini will be added into Clash Royale as a major new game mode. Clash Mini was previously an autochess-like game in its own right which entered soft launch in November 2021. Supercell announced in March 2024 that Clash Mini was being withdrawn as a soft launch game, but will return within Clash Royale.
Markovic also said that thinking of Clash Royale more like a platform also means potentially adding new twists and modes to the game made by other teams within Supercell, and even external developers.
The Clash Royale general manager explained that he likes to think of the game’s many character cards as a set of toys that can be used to play different types of strategy games. This idea came about after Markovic’s team saw the game start to decline in player engagement and revenue in 2022, bottoming out in early 2023.
In 2021, Clash Royale had launched new character types, cards and magic items as well as making a number of systems changes. The flurry of new content saw revenue spike as Supercell re-engaged lapsed players, and also added new players from new markets.
The Clash Royale team spent much of 2022 thinking about what worked so well the previous year, says Markovic, and tried more system changes to try to replicate that success. Those efforts culminated in what Supercell literally called the ‘Update for Losers’, in which the battle pass system and pricing was changed.
It did not go well, and the team didn’t add any “gameplay novelty” into the update either, says Markovic. “So we not only had some of the lowest KPIs ever, but also the reception was really bad.”
“We spent a lot of 2022 trying to emulate these system changes that we thought worked well [in 2021]. But then we said ‘hey, what if we got it wrong all along?’ What if it was the other stuff?” The team realised that it was the volume of new content and the associated ‘gameplay novelty’ that powered the game’s stellar 2021, not the systems changes.
But they weren’t capable of maintaining that kind of pace, so Markovic says he asked his team to take existing game content and “make that really, really exciting”.
Card Evolutions were born as a result, which take a familiar character and add extra powers or new behaviours. This meant the team could increase the production of ‘new’ content while also re-engaging some lapsed players.
The Card Evolutions feature doubled the amount of ‘new’ content Supercell was releasing in 2023, and this year it has been adding a new Card Evolution every month on top of new Champions and Star Troops. “We not only regained some of that player positivity, we actually managed to actually double the top line,” said Markovic.
At the same time, League of Legends, Fortnite, Roblox and EA’s sports games had also inspired the Clash Royale team to turn it into a platform of sorts. The first test of this approach was launched in June this year in the Goblin Queen’s Journey update, a new game mode.
“It actually went pretty bad,” said Markovic. “It didn’t live up to expectations…but at the same time, we actually learned a lot from it, and we understood a lot of our preconceptions about how players want to consume content and how players want to consume novelty. Some of these things were maybe not exciting enough, and it perhaps was a bit too close to the core Royale experience”.
As a result, the team now plans to add Clash Mini into Clash Royale as a new game mode in June 2025. It could also add new gameplay modes suggested by other teams within Supercell and even external developers, added Markovic.
“We think that can teach us even more about what the appetite is for novelty, and how far we can push this idea of Royale as a strategy hub experience”.
