Supercell reboots Squad Busters today with a major update designed to add greater gameplay clarity, midcore appeal and also tempt lapsed players back into the game.
In a press briefing yesterday, Squad Busters game lead Johnathan Rowlands and marketing boss Rob Lowe told us:
- Squad Busters has now passed 60m installs
- The game and its marketing is now refocused on midcore players
- Would Squad Busters have benefitted from a longer soft launch? “Possibly”
- The Squad team did not ‘swap notes’ with the Brawl Stars team for this reboot, despite the latter game’s big comeback
- The celebrity-packed launch campaign, aimed at more casual players, didn’t quite work
- The core Squad Busters team is around 50, with most devs in Helsinki but a growing team in London plus staff in Shanghai
In the update going live today, Squad Busters players now pick ‘squaddies’ before the round begins, and there is one ‘hero’ character in each team to focus the action. Supercell has also added additional powers on cooldown timers to add to the sense of player agency.
Former Space Ape game lead Rowlands took over from original Squad Busters lead Eino Joas earlier this year, as Space Ape transitioned into Supercell London.
The below conversation has been edited for clarity and readability.
Have you taken inspiration from Brawl Stars for this update in order to turn around the revenue decline that you’re seeing?
Rowlands: In terms of specific things that they’ve done, no. But in terms of the ambition level, the risk, how they listen to their players, how they look for quality, how they want to surprise players and make major changes to the game, yeah, I think that has been an inspiration.
Lowe: One thing we’ve definitely decided to do is to have a more distinct target audience that we’ve been both building the game for and trying to reach from a marketing point of view.
You know, one of the mistakes I think we made with the launch of Squad was that we we felt that we had a game that could appeal to multiple audiences at the same time.
We felt we had this kind of bridging game that can bridge casual, midcore and even hardcore audiences. And they’re like unicorns – they don’t come around that often, and sadly the version of Squad that launched wasn’t one of those. And it maybe even fell between two stalls in that it had a control scheme that was more optimised for accessibility, but then the gameplay was quite intense.
And there was a lot of strategy in there, but you had to really persevere with the game to get to that strategy and depth. So we said, okay, maybe this isn’t a game that’s going to naturally be for a casual audience. We want it to be accessible for people, but let’s maybe focus on more experienced mobile gamers and build the game for them and market to them.
We’ve now seen Squad and Mo.co launch in unconventional ways, for different reasons. Does this reflect a new, looser attitude to launching games at Supercell?
Lowe: I don’t think it’s a new strategy for launching games, I think it’s our continued willingness to take risks. And it comes all the way down – or all the way up – from leadership, because leadership don’t really tell us what to do, they just support us.
All they ask is that we try not to make the same mistake twice. So we’ll continue making lots of different mistakes, whether that’s the way we launch or changing games or whatever, and hopefully some of those will turn into successes.
The mobile gaming market is quite mature now. So you have to do things that are much more risky to stand out. You have to do bolder marketing campaigns. You have to do invite-only launches. Sometimes you might take a shorter route to a global launch. And I’m certain that there will be games coming down the road from Supercell that might take more conventional approaches, and some that might take crazy approaches. And some of those will fail, and some of those will win. But what I can guarantee is that we won’t stop taking risks.
Given the scale of the changes you’re making to the game, do you think Squad Busters would have benefitted from a longer soft launch?
Lowe: I don’t have any regrets for launching it in the way we did…was the game launched maybe a bit too early? Possibly, but we could only get this level of learning by getting so many millions of players playing it.
We’re in a very fortunate situation that we can take this level of risk, and we have amazingly successful games that allow us to take risks on Squad. So would we have liked to sustain the scale from the launch of Squad for longer? Yes. Did it allow us to identify some of the core problems with the game and then fix those? Yeah, it did.
There’s things we never would have known if we hadn’t tried to do it that way. And all of our games have seen ups and downs. Some of them have come out the gate flying and then dropped. Some of them have had steady growth over many, many years. Some of them have started off slow and gone fast. And hopefully, with Squad, it’ll be one of those.
So if I can go back in time, would I do things slightly differently…maybe a few things? But I think what we did got us to where we are now, and the version of the game that’s coming out now is awesome.
There’s a big trend for celebrity mobile game ads at the moment – do you feel like you got enough visibility and ROI from your launch campaign, and are you now marketing Squad 2.0 in a different way?
Lowe: The launch campaign for Squad matched our aspirations for the audience. We wanted to do a campaign that reached casual, midcore and hardcore, and actually the live action campaign was built to target a broader audience.
The reason you do celebrity campaigns is to get the attention of an audience that wouldn’t ordinarily look at a mobile game advert, right? So the strategy is reasonably sound, but it is also expensive.
We are taking a different approach for Squad Busters 2.0…we’re still trying to bring in new players to the game, and we’re trying to bring back a lot of lapsed players, actually. So there’s a lot of players that obviously came into Squad expecting something, but what they actually found wasn’t quite for them.
So we want to go back to them and say, look, we’ve changed the game, we think what we’ve got now maybe was what you were looking for originally, and we’ve got many, many millions of lapsed players that we can aim for.
We’re building a whole lore and story and back into the game, and we’ve actually been quite ambitious by doing out-of-game marketing with in-game events. We’ve done a little bit of storytelling, because people didn’t have much emotional engagement with the game before. They didn’t know why they were battling these other squads. We’ve tried to build in more of an emotional reason and a nice little story for people to realise there’s a purpose to what they’re doing.
So we’ve got really cool CGI trailer, we’re making an awesome gameplay trailer, and we’ve got our amazing community content…we’ll be boosting the visibility of those towards a very specific audience, more of a midcore mobile action-strategy gaming audience, and being much more targeted towards those.
And if we start to see traction, then we’ll certainly expand the marketing out from there. But yeah, it is definitely a different approach for this version of the game.
