Supercell explained some of the thinking behind several major Clash Royale updates that caused community uproar today at Gamescom Dev.
Playing on some of the more extreme feedback the Clash Royale team has received recently, game design lead James Back declared: “At the end of last year, we killed Clash Royale”.
He also admitted that, after several months of fierce, negative player reaction, Back sat at his desk wondering: “How did we misjudge this so badly? Like, how did we get this quite so wrong…?”
Game design lead Back and community manager Emilia Russell then talked through some of the game updates that caused the player discontent, and what they learned from it all.
First, there was the removal of the Season Shop. Back said this was perfectly logical; it “was only really benefitting like a small core of players,” he explained. “A lot of our players didn’t even know that it existed.”
And actually, the changes Supercell made to help more players get the rewards that were previously tucked away in the Season Shop worked, said Back. “This was, in the end, a beneficial change for players,” he continued. “The engagement numbers back this up too. So in April we had more players coming back, and they were playing the game more often.”
And yet, as community manager Emilia Russell explained, it caused real discontent among those hardcore players that were using it, resulting in a flurry of negative comments and even a dip in the game’s star rating on Google Play, as it was effectively review-bombed by disgruntled players.
“Despite the fact that more players were benefiting from rewards over time, the individual player experience was still affected,” Russell explained. “And that broken trust and the negative sentiment that followed carried with us through every update over the rest of the year.”
Back believes that Supercell had not explained the change and why it was happening clearly enough. “If players are really attached to something that you’re confident is unhealthy for the game overall, that could be actionable feedback…even if you’re going to go ahead with removing that thing, maybe try to create a loud positive experience with the change, give whatever is going away a big send off, make an event out of it, and make sure that players are excited for what’s coming next.”
Russell explained a little further: “make sure that you talk about [changes] with your community in a way that shows that you validate and you understand the pain points that they’re going through.”
She continued: “This is something that we didn’t really do well at the time, and it made the feelings of disconnect between the community and the team actually worse. And one other piece of advice I would give is don’t ever take your community by surprise, good or bad. It can be really hard to reframe a narrative once it’s set.”
But these lessons weren’t quite taken on board with the next major update, when Supercell added new level and Hero features. Again, they were added for what Supercell thought were good reasons – high level players were dropping off, and Supercell said that playtests were really positive for the new Heroes system. But players still didn’t like either new feature, said Back.
“We now understand a few things,” he explained. “Firstly, that our players will assume the worst when it comes to how hard it will be to acquire new stuff for your release…players will base their assumptions on our track record. Trust will take a while for us to build up, and it’s really easy to break.”
Russell added: “Major gameplay additions need a lot of buy-in from the thought leaders in your communities, and much earlier in the process as well.”
Supercell fixed some of the biggest complaints with the new level and Hero system by March, and in June, the team promised players it would not add any more card levels to the game.
“We’ve also made some major commitments and process changes to involve our community and our creators as co-collaborators and partners,” said Russell. “There’s so much value and knowledge from what they have to share with us.”
This arc neatly concluded with a third and final big community moment, the addition of Chaos mode in March 2026. While lots of new game modes have come and go, Supercell said, players really wanted this one to come back. So they worked on it a little more and brought it back sooner than they had planned.
To conclude, Russell stressed the importance of “knowing your community and being able to pick out the actionable feedback from all the noise” and “demonstrate how you hear the community, even if you can’t follow their requests exactly.”
Back also stressed the balance between listening to players and pursuing Supercell’s own goals: “It’s what the players do rather than what they say that matters most. But there are times when the things that we hear might be a shortcut to finding the content or changes that will make a real impact.”
In the Q&A afterwards, Russell said the Clash team uses Affogata for player feedback aggregation, as well as looking at its own native in-game reporting and feedback across social channels.
