Clash Royale’s game leads James Back and Aleksandar Markovic explained some of the thinking behind the game’s recent updates and systems design that led to its big comeback.
Just like a GDC 2024 Brawl Stars session, at this year’s GDC Supercell ran through the recent changes in Clash Royale’s live ops, monetisation and gameplay that led to a huge spike in player engagement and revenue – and yes, they did credit Supercell’s large creator community for the comeback, albeit briefly.
In terms of pure design, the three lessons Back and Markovic learned over the last several years were around how to add more ‘novel’ content, making progression and new gameplay features more accessible and really simplifying the game’s systems, especially for returning players.
They concluded that recent changes made to the game had meant some short term pain in terms of both metrics and player sentiment, but many of the bets they made around the game’s events and monetisation had greater long-term gains overall.
Markovic began on the topic of adding ‘novel’ content by talking through Clash Royale’s Card Evolutions, which were intended to add novelty to the cards players already use rather than pushing them to learn new ones, which was causing confusion and churn.
Evolutions were a success, but followed a difficult period for the game where the Clash Royale team were faced with “increasing cost and uncertain demand,” said Markovic. “Increasing cost is scary for every business…the diminishing returns and uncertain sales is just truly horrifying.”
He continued: “Because we used to have such small teams, when you have something that has ever-increasing cost and ever-diminishing return on investment, what you do is just cut it. We ended up having only three pieces of novel content pushed out in 2022.”
2023 saw the team rethink this approach with Card Evolutions, which were successful enough for Supercell to create a whole production pipeline around making new Evolutions. The Clash Royale team then started releasing them monthly, then there were several a month, and later Evolutions were added to the battle pass as an incentive for players to sign up to that. And it worked.
Card evolutions were so popular that Supercell extended the idea, adding in Tower Troops, Spells and other ways to multiply the effect of using synergistic cards together. “When you push out these cards and they are that sweet spot between pay to win and pay to lose, we would actually get these viral spikes in terms of player engagement,” said Markovic. “And they would actually sustain for a while and will actually compound.”
The increased production capability pushed the Clash team to add as much new content to the game in 2025 as they did during its launch year in 2016, added Markovic, who credited the team’s larger size and increased understanding of what works for the increased productivity.
This led to even bolder bets, said Markovic, with new game modes like the Goblin Queen’s Journey in 2024 – a whole new, separate trophy road system. But the sustained MAU spike Supercell wanted from Goblin Queen’s Journey did not materialise – it actually caused a MAU dip.
Then the Clash Royale team added Merge Tactics, a streamlined version of killed soft launch game Clash Mini, which delivered much better results. Supercell concluded that it needs to “understand game modes better” before adding them into the mix in future.
James Back then talked through making progression much more accessible. Clash Royale has moved away from the old system that saw players gradually upgrading their decks. Progress to the top level cap had “slowed to a crawl”, said Back, and “players who were on the last step of trying to max out their deck were getting pretty bored.”
Magic Items were created to get around this, making card progression less random by allowing players to choose which cards they could upgrade. This meant more players could progress through the game faster. Magic Items were also popular among returning players who had churned out due to the slow upgrade progress.
“We saw a big improvement in returning player retention, and that, in turn, led to our DAU starting to climb at the fastest rate in years, which set us up for an even bigger spike when at the end of the year,” added Back.
Evolution cards, while successful, also suffered from being too hard to unlock. So in September 2024 the team added a new event in which players could earn a Mega Knight Evolution card for free by grinding the game for a week.
“This was especially exciting for our core players, and a lot of them came back for this event,” said Back. “It generated a lot of excitement during that season, and honestly, it probably cost us something in the short term, as players that would have bought this thing instead were grinding for it. The problem was that it only put the Evolution in the hands of the players who were working hard enough to earn it, and that was very few people.”
That led to February 2025’s Barbarian Evolution card event, which made the card much easier to unlock. “As a result, a lot more players got their hands on an Evolution, and the retention of returning players reflected that,” Back continued.
“This was really good timing, because the support that we got from our content creators in the months that followed brought a lot of players back to the game, and this gave us a really great start to 2025.”
Markovic then talked through simplifying the game’s systems in order to serve the returning or more casual player better. First, the game’s hub screen was cleaned up.
“From a business perspective, simple just costs a lot,” explained Markovic. “Doing something simple just takes a lot of effort, and it’s not only the cost, it’s also the opportunity cost, because the time you’re spending to simplify something is the same time that you should be making something new.”
Supercell also removed the Season Shop entirely in March 2025, and lots of players were not happy about it. “The outcome of that was some of the worst outrage we’ve ever seen,” said Markovic.
Despite the outcry, Supercell went even further, Markovic said. “So after amazing results like that, we thought, why remove only one feature from the UX? So we decided to just go ahead and remove the whole [Events] tab, and replace it with something else…if you go into the game right now, on the main navigation bar, there is a button that says under construction. And trust me, I have it on good authority that there is nothing under construction…”
Events were moved to the main screen’s mode selector, to both “simplify the player experience and hopefully expose more players to game modes,” said Markovic. And after some initial turbulence in the community, Supercell has since seen “more players more actively playing more games” after this change.
Back wrapped up by saying that some short term pain is necessary to get those long term gains. “We can only learn these lessons by having the space to try things out, to make these mistakes, and not be afraid of that short term pain,” he added.
