Supercell has 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.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, it is also suggested that Supercell recouped the cost of its star-studded launch trailer on its second day of global launch, suggesting that the spot had cost several million to put together.
Supercell marketing exec Rob Lowe also states that Squad Busters is “quickly getting toward profitability”, and likens the game to Nintendo’s Smash Bros games, as it is likely to play host to all kinds of different game IP.
“That’s something we’re certainly looking at,” says Lowe. “There’s loads more stuff in the Supercell cupboard for us to go and root around with, but there are also a ton of other third-party IPs that we’re starting to look at as well.”
“Our art director on the game is very focused on how it feels, and that it feels like it fits into the universe, which is absolutely the right way of thinking about it,” Lowe continues. “So it’s not like we’re going to suddenly stick in a random IP and completely change the nature of those characters. It needs to work within the game. But, yeah, I’m sure we’ll see more on that coming soon.”
Lowe also says that Supercell would have preferred to have had a slightly longer soft launch for the game, but opted for a ‘big bang’ style global rollout.
“We took a choice with Squad to have a short soft-launch window; in an ideal world, it probably would have been a bit longer,” he says. “But what that did enable us to do is to have a big bang launch…we’re able to point all of the artillery, both ours and our partners like Apple and Google, towards that launch. That’s much more typical of a AAA game launch, and is atypical of a mobile launch.”
Lowe also suggests the game is designed to hit a slightly younger, Mario Party or Mario Kart-style audience, as a sort of entry point for the portfolio. “[Squad Busters] could be bringing in lots of new users to Supercell,” he says.
As we reported on Monday, Squad Busters passed $10m in revenue during its first week of global launch, according to two out of the three data firms we obtained estimates from. A third estimated week one player spend of $9.1m.
Last Friday, Supercell was one of the only mobile game firms to buy a slot in Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest stream. The trailer, which initially launched on YouTube on May 29, was about three minutes long and would have cost Supercell over $500k, if the numbers in a recent Esquire report are to be believed.
Squad Busters launched worldwide on May 29 and had already racked up over 5m downloads from its soft launch, which was a little over a moth 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.
Supercell also has Mo.co in development. 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”.
