Supercell could be going cross-platform with one of its in-development games, Project Rise.
Project Rise was originally announced as Clash Heroes, an action RPG, but it was rebooted in June to become a ‘social action RPG roguelite’.
In a YouTube video with Supercell influencer Echo, Project Rise game lead Julian Le Cadre said it would “make a lot of sense” to release the game on PC, given its genre. “Our primary platform is going to be mobile, still. We’re not ruling out PC, of course it does make a lot of sense for the audience, going cross-platform…we’ll see if we can do it.”
Later in the video community manager Frame said that while Project Rise will be as streamlined as possible for mobile players, Supercell is open to making deeper types of games than it has released in the past.
“Maybe also it’s the right time to introduce a game that has longer session times,” he said. “I don’t think we have actually tried that before. We are seeing games like Elden Ring blowing up so hard in the gaming industry right now, and that game is anything but easy, and yet it’s doing bonkers numbers, and people are excited to play it for longer sessions.”
Game lead Julian Le Cadre also explained more about the thinking behind the recent pre-alpha community test and what his team learned from the experience. “I think for us as a team, we really believe in constraints,” he said. “So if you have infinite time and infinite money, you’re never going to ship a game. You’re going to spend your time just making it better and just iterating forever.”
“What we really wanted to do is just put it out there, get some feedback, validate some assumptions, and make sure that we understand what people like, what they don’t like and any pain points you might experience in the game. As an example, the perk selection system, it does interrupt gameplay quite a bit – we knew that, of course, but now it’s validated and we have to fix it.”
Le Cadre said that the test has “validated the second to second gameplay” but “there’s still a lot to improve on”. Based on the pre-alpha feedback the team now knows it needs to prioritise adding more in-game communication into the game and flesh out the meta and lobby more, he said.
Le Cadre also confirmed that his team is making Project Rise in Unreal Engine, a first for Supercell. “Overall, for our team, for the game we’re trying to build, it’s been great,” he said. “Yes there’s a bunch of features we’re excited about, but I’m not going to talk about them just yet.”
Supercell was typically shy about a potential global launch for Project Rise, but did map out what it is looking for in each stage of the game’s development.
“Alpha would be about validating the metagame and also getting ready for production,” Le Cadre added. “So right now – until alpha at least – we are focusing on systems, we’re not focusing on content. If we pass this and we validate our core loop, metagame features and so on, we’d work towards beta and beta would be closer to something that you’ve seen for Squad [Busters] or MoCo…just having probably a two week test with a more complete game experience overall. And then soft launch is the real test.”
As we reported last month, industry watchers described the pre-alpha test as a “mixed bag”. Naavik consultant Devin Becker described Project Rise as “an intriguing blend of Gauntlet-style co-op gameplay with roguelike elements”, but he also said that while the “core loop shows promise”, “several key issues need addressing before it’s ready for prime time”.
He later concluded: “In its current state, I’d be surprised to see Project Rise progress to soft launch without significant overhauls.”
In its newly-rebooted form, Project Rise may be up against another title Supercell has in development, Mo.co. The Finnish firm is already teasing a global launch for that title, which has been described as “A Supercell-ized mix of Diablo Immortal, Monster Hunter, and Warcraft”.
Supercell’s most recent launch, Squad Busters, went global on May 29. It had already racked up over 5m downloads from its soft launch, which was a little over a month long. By launch day it had reached 40m pre-registrations, and six days later Supercell confirmed to us that the game had already passed 30m lifetime downloads.
Estimates suggest Squad Busters hit $10m in player spend in its first week of global launch. Supercell has also said that Squad Busters’ soft launch was shorter than it would have liked, but it is “quickly getting toward profitability” and is likely to host third-party IP in the future, much like Nintendo’s Smash Bros games.
