Battle Pass | Supercell's Tale of 2 Cities: Clash of Clans vs. Clash Royale

you the first talk is called supercells tale of two cities and the objective of this talk from Giovanni and I will be around what we see our divergent performance outcomes in the implementation of battle paths and we thought it was especially instructive to take a look at supercells implementation than two of their games I will be starting the presentation and presenting the first half and then the second half will be presented by Giovanni and I'll go ahead and hand that over to Giovanni then and in terms of the agenda start first by talking about the origins of battle pass popularized by fortnight although originally developed in dota we'll talk about the Tale of Two Cities and basically what we're seeing our different outcomes in terms of the performance in clash of clans versus clash royale then we're going to try to hypothesize some of the key reasons of the drivers for why we

believe there are different performance in terms of the implementation of Ballad past in different games and we'll try to generalize some of those learnings as we try to apply battle paths and games in the future and so what we've seen since the introduction of battle past over the past few years has been you know that this has become a very popular tool for monetization and as Alex and Jeff will talk about for engagement but as I mentioned before when we look especially when we look at supercell what we've seen what we believe are very strong results in clash of clans but when we look at clash royale we've seen that clash royale revenue is decline and that the introduction bow past does not really help to offset that decline as it has in clash of clans and so hence what we call The Tale of Two Cities and so again the objective what we're trying to do in this talk today is really try to understand what's going on that you know what why do we think there are different outcomes in those two games and then again to try and extrapolate the

learnings and what we saw when the battle path was popularized by fortnight when it was launched in season in in season two battle paths and December 2017 is that we saw three primary benefits of battle path one was introduced in fortnight and the first was the ability to really monetize fair to play game play right and so we had a game a shooter game where you don't have progression you don't have like stateful outcomes and so the ability to not only monetize fair to play but to help monetize Cosmetics was one of the biggest benefits of this bypass system in fortnight and it also helped drive broader conversion and did that by really improving engagement in terms of providing like a system in a vehicle for providing visual progression in a lot of short and medium term objectives in terms of like quest objectives and things like that that also gave people things to do and drove that additional

engagement in the third outcome of this the third benefit was that event therefore added a meta layer to games that were basically very core loop heavy right you've got bury gameplay focused games and then it added the quest system objectives and basically a vehicle to deliver this kind of meta systems layer as well so when we look at the adoption of battle past this is a truck by game refinery but what we've seen is that as mentioned before that in terms of a lot of the top-grossing games that the adoption of bow paths has been on the upswing and we've seen many companies try and implement battle paths in their games now again despite the fact that a lot of games have tried to implement battle past unfortunate what we have seen though is we have seen these divergent outcomes in terms of performance and when we look specifically at the two supercell games in particular that adopted bauhaus early we look at clash of clans and we look at

clash royale and you can see here that when battle path lengths in clash royale and did seem to have a pretty significant revenue boost to the game whereas in clash Royale we saw that revenue was declining that there was a little bit of a boost but then a further decline and so the question that we want to ask and that would giovanni will be diving into you in more depth in the next few slides is why did bauhaus perform so differently in both of these two games and just to kind of dig a little bit deeper what we is that and I hope you guys can see this at home but when we do a year-over-year comparison in terms of the revenue impact we see that overall when we compare the the period after the introduction of bowel passing clash of clans we see that there was a pretty significant increase in terms of net revenue after bowel pass and even if we exclude the December 19 update which was a fairly significant update we see that

just trying to isolate it more to the impact of baths that there was still a very significant impact on revenue but with clash Royale revenue continued to decline as mentioned before now one point of emphasis however I just want to make it clear that we can't just look at revenue and in be definitive in terms of the impact of battle pass right so and what I mean by that is that that the potential impact of bowel paths could be if we look at these two curves and this is basically our people for time the ballot paths could potentially have a lower term have a kind of depression area effect of on monetization earlier but might catch up over time so just by looking at revenue while we believe that class in class well battle pass has a net negative impact we can't definitively say unless we were to actually see the actual ARPU

characteristics of after the implementation about passing the game but I believe it's the case that it has a net negative impact but you know it's not definitively clear and with that I'm actually going to pass it over to Giovanni great ok so thanks Joe before going before doing deep into bala pass performance on versus class requirements I think it's useful to step back a little bit and recap in very simple terms what Bell Pass mechanics are what the benefits are and what the requirements to make it work effectively are so again very very simply mechanics you won't know this but players make a small upfront payment and in exchange for that they have the ability to unlock higher rewards over time if they're able to engage more than they would have

otherwise and this what this means is a basically battle pass accelerates players progression that's the main point from the last hand side the benefits talked about them with regards to fortnight you don't wanna I want to make them a little bit more generic and say look if you do it well better pass should be able to drive conversion being broader broaden the player base should be able to drive regularity meaning that your doll race you should be getting closer to one hopefully and ideally also drive engagement in terms of session length in terms of focusing on specific features or game modes that otherwise players wouldn't have not touched the requirement is basically you know you have to have enough stuff for players to want to chase and that is the basic requirement because as we said on the left hand side you are accelerating players progression so you have to have

enough players one and then enough that players want could be either economic or non-economic if it's economic it means that you have to have a deep and scalable economy and if it's not economic means you have to have meaningful vanity and perks that players want to chase okay so basically let's talk about what it means to have a deep economy a scalable economy or in very simple terms does the economy have enough desirable chase items that players that can sustain a faster rate of progression for players over time easy comma scaleable can you add you know can you expand the list of what players want over time and then the non-economic rewards are basically you know is vanity relevant in this game in the specific game and aren't there

enough perk that players consider valuable not every game by design will have space for either vanity and/or perks you know one way in which I think about this is in very simple terms it's a it's basically a physics problem if you think about it you know the depth of the economy is the size of a bucket full of water right the rate of progression is how much water gets out on a regular basis the scalability of the economy is you know your ability to turn on the faucet up top to continue refilling that bucket and basically the games that I've seen perform the best are those that are able to generate a never-ending desire to progress meaning you keep the bucket half full or full enough to cater to the excitement level of your other players when the bucket gets empty players have beaten and you don't want to get there basically okay with that framework in

mind let's look at the two supercell games and see how they stack up against these three dimensions that we've talked about depth of the economy scalability and non-economic rewards this framework page is basically a summary what we were gonna be talking about in the next few pages so here I'll briefly glance over these points and then what will be basically a page for each pocket so in case you have questions hold on until we get to the to that page and then we can talk to you about one more thing I wanted to say is that of course the first two points are very Connelly driven they're basically scalability and size of the economy that have nothing to do with the battle past itself and the last point is basically how much battle pass offers in terms of non-economic stuff one more general point before that in deep here if you guys haven't seen

haven't seen there's a pretty great talk from a you know just that the designer our culture plans basically talks about the introduction of burrata and he talks about how before doing that they had to fix a bunch of things in their econ so if you look at that presentation or that YouTube video with these concepts in mind you're going to be able to frame it a little bit more great so let's look let's look at the first one depth on the economy so basically the main point that I'm trying to make here is that the economy is class for y'all is shallower than they have consequence and that is true for a variety of for three reasons at least the first one is that you're the players desire to collect cards is limited by their ability to use those cards in game because the game is so punishingly hard and that's why we all will love it but because the game is so hard and it

takes months to to master using each card you know if a car doesn't fit in the eight ones that you have in your deck because swimming that most players play with one or two decks because it's so hard you know you really don't don't really care about getting additional cards or you you care less in contrast cluster clients if you look at the progression the bread lots of the progression is not just tied to attack strategies there's also big component of approving your village so all the buildings all the heroes too that are used in offense and defense by basically everybody so at least half of what you upgrade in class your plans are things are common to all players whereas in classroom yeah basically it's those eight cards and or if you're a master two or three decks total another point is that you know partially I'll

somehow not been able to generate enough incentives for players to collect broad so beyond that specific Jack you know they've tried to come up with new game modes like touchdown or they introduced clan wars but somehow they were not as effective in compelling players to collect just as much as social class did speaking of cost plans instead basically the end game for most players is the social component and carnivore leagues is basically what it comes down to and the ability to you know play with your clients your client lifts your clan up and fight against other clans and the incentive there is basically to upgrade everything that you can as fast as you can because that way your client will be will be stronger so I got very strong incentive to progress last point on clash Royale is not only you know their

economy is smaller than that of partial plants but they also have diluted it by over time introducing more and more sales and by making the more valuable cards like legendaries being this later so that was for the death part on the scalability part I think here is where we have even more problems for our area so basically clutter LOF has hard card caps when you reach level 13 on your cards and no matter what type they are common rare or epic imaginary they basically max out and you know that's great but at the same time you know because you reach a max level it feels good but because the game is so hard to play you know once you get to a reasonable level of those cards you've basically done where as cultural clients instead that's what I call the moving

goalposts every few months with a new town hall or even without in town hall they basically raise all the cups of everything buildings troops spells heroes and you know effectively that means that you know your progression doesn't stop at level 13 like it does with culture yeah just keep going back to clash Royale so new cards I think have been less impactful than they could have been and this is because of how difficult it is to design a new card for cost that is meaningful again we can go into more more depth on this later but basically you know once you have zapped and log I don't think you need that many more cheap spells and you only have eight slots in your in your deck so you know because cash from Yahoo has chosen to you know unlike other developers to basically make sure that every card has

a unique narrow purpose as opposed to of trumping power with the power with more cards like basically every other game does you know that limits them so on one on one hand I am applauding their effort to come up with a very pure game and on the other I'm saying well you know that has been a very expensive choice for them cosmic lands has instead been able to scale the economy not only by adding levels to their cards but they also introduce consumables to very effectively in their game and we'll talk in depth about these but basically they solved many pain points in the economy and these consumables became valuable chase items for events for for mana pass itself and for offers that's awesome and also consumables can be easily drained from the economy so that's a very very easy way to scale up your

economy lastly on country all there really isn't much else to to spend on which is a direct contrast with the consumables that Cara was able to to add effectively you know once you have the cards that you need and you may spend some gems I'm a couple of emotes if you want a specific one you may spend a couple of gems on challenges but that's really good okay so basically we have painted a picture where Katja has not only a smaller economy but a less scalable economy now let's look at malabar specific points and so non-economic rewards my point here is that both games have introduced vanity that I'm assuming many players can find exciting actually all has powers cans and amounts and as far as has one skin per hero per bottle passed and if so I think you're they're pretty much doing the same kind of job I think we're closer class

performs better is the fact that about a pox with lots of meaningful perks and these perks are similar to the consumables in that there are not something that players would really spend a lot of money on but they're very valuable for example the one Jen the one gem donation and all of the research boost and all the building booster those are amazing and they're worth buying the battle tasks even if you don't make it to the very end and buy them themselves can make your your quality of your experience from a quality of life standpoint so much better that you know they may be just as relevant as the economic gains that you can get you know and also from a share of the non-economic over a total battle past loot that you get classical acid has a much bigger part focused on on these non-economic didn't do the math but if you play the games it will be immediately obvious that they gave you a

lot more of this non-economic value which is a great way to not have to give you so much permanent production and instead the client clash royale doesn't really have a ton of these perks they have introduced chest curing which is nice free challenge entries which is nice but really there wasn't anything that is game-changing from a quality of life at that point and the last point is that you know they have a lower share of non-economic rewards over total rewards mean they're forced to give you more a more permanent progression so again not only it's a smaller economy it's less scalable but on top of that battle box makes that faucet you know the makes the the bucket empty sooner basically ok so now let's go into each one of these I've mentioned most of the points but let's see if there's anything more to add deft uh become Akasha y'all basically

like I said before the collection is a kind of skill count most players play with one or two decks at most each card requires moms to master write by itself and you know the synergies with the cards with other cards in your deck and that basically means that if if a card doesn't fit in your deck you know you may want to keep you me you mean what I get it anyway because at some point you may want to switch I try new decks but it's less of a compelling need also because the progression in cash flow is defined by the PvP ladder and you know mastering that is punishingly hard you know the fear of losing trophies is real so you know once you have the once your collection is high enough from those eight cards you really think about it twice before you actually let's just say let's find this new new deck every time I'm trying it basically

I've dropped hundreds of trophies and said okay this is great but maybe maybe not we can send them suspending collection I mentioned this before basically leveling up a card in control feels great at the beginning because of how cheap and from a number of copies of the card and gold required but then it becomes progressively harder and harder and I know Josh talks about this in his Cochran's presentation where he says that clans had a similar problem and they flattened the curve out a little bit because basically when the ROI decreases too much for players it becomes discouraged and so the clash royale has a very steep and very [Music] punishing curve after after a few levels from level 12 2013 the number of copies you need for economy is basically more than every other level combined which is insane if you think about seven point is

that non PvP game modes they really provide strong incentives to go abroad we talked about how clan wars for some reason was as effective in class yeah whereas it was it is the the Keystone driver of player engagement in classifieds so the same thing was with touchdown other game runs and then the last point here is that class for y'all because it's a very pure game if you will allows players to play many competitions that tournament standard meaning term extender is reachable with really a couple of months of grinding and basically no money spent and so you know the having maxed-out cards doesn't really matter for a variety of the other competitions so that puts a bit of of a strain on going deep as well and the last point here the economy has been deflating since since the very very

start I remember very well when they replace the chests in the store I think it was December 2017 you know if you guys remember back then the best way to get a legendary was to buy a super magical chest which cost $30 and had a 40% chance in the top of an arena to give you a legendary that wasn't replaced with a better chest they had a hundred percent drop rate of a legendary and this was done effectively throughout every single chest on top of that they've had more frequent sales to seal all the time now very generous events like Gold Rush and and also trade talk it's basically you know the ability to acquire a legendary now imagine that you want is much higher with training that basically disrupted the the need to go by legendary in the shop again I think I'm not criticizing being generous

with players I'm just saying again it's a it's a physics problem if your bucket is smaller and it doesn't scale as much well you have to be careful with this because it can it can hurt you okay deaf of the economy for clash of clans basically we mentioned it before progression here is not only tied to attacking you want to level up everything in your base all the buildings it's meaningful to every player everybody wants heroes these are common to every attack strategy basically and then one more a little bit nerdy point if you if you will class has way fewer troops than clash royale control has almost a hundred cards by now and you know you pick the eight to sixteen a you need and that's basically it whereas consequence has maybe twenty troops total or or less and most of the troops or most of the army compositions

are similar in terms of the units that you need meaning when you have fewer units but everybody needs them it's easier to want to level them all up as opposed to you know a class four yeah I never never gonna use mirror so I'm not gonna be spending the resources to operate as Giants even if I play mostly we're there I do a charge because I know I would use them at some point social incentive to progress we discussed this basically clan war leagues as the ultimate progression driver in consequence and incentivizes every player to level up as much as you as they can if you look again at the representation from a culture of clans you know there's one again this is a pretty no your point there was one change that the clash of clans team made a few years two years ago that majorly had a major impact on the economy and the desire of players to progress faster

has at some point had a match making algorithm that was designed based on warwick and so players didn't have the incentive to level up everything in their basis because he wanted to have the lowest war weight to be able to be matched against a player with low water weight as well and so you know you you were taking all the resources that you were gathering and pouring them into walls or at least I did that for two years it was all about maximizing your punch power and minimizing your your your war weight by changing this little elementary and introducing Concord leagues were you are incentivized to invest in your base as much as you can as much as you want that basically created a desire for players to invest in everything and so that was major before ballot-box was introduced okay scalability of the economy so we talked about how in cash we are all here

on cards or captain level 14 and that cap never grows and by the way it will never grow even now because they have added vanity for the cards on top of that so even if they wanted to they would have to overhaul the whole value system tie two to card you know each new card is a little bit limited in its impact by design because because there are no straight upgrades and you know the the design space is getting a little bit narrower like I said once you design this app and log maybe if you're a genius it can come up with with tornado that was very effective of being a cheap spell that has a unique purpose but how many more of these can they reasonably create in a way that is meaningful for players changes the actual manner without overpowering the cards that we have it's really hard and so you know as you may have noticed if you look at the number of new cards that they've released over over time at the very beginning it was it was fast and now they've slowed it down because there really is limited design space and even

even I would love to take a look at their and their data and understand the adoption rate of some of the other new cards and then like we said before there's basically a little else to to spend on you know some emotes and power schemes are are covering the non economic rewards section but it really isn't much else to do just bad scalability of the economy on clients I think this is the single most brilliant move from clash of clans they've been able to create an economy with a moving wall post everything scales up and gains on a regular basis and that the true masterpiece here is that they've been able to do this in a way that players look forward to so basically you know the folks in my class because we have more to chase so with fewer units and fewer things to

work on they've created this perfect conveyor belt where you always want to sync resources into into to these limits and on top of that they also have you know so this has created a very strong economy that has offset the slower introduction of new heroes buildings and troops and and spells you know the one thing I would like to say about clans that is not perfect is that they have not been able to introduce a lot more new heroes ability to espouse but this is offset by the fact that their existing economy is so strong and this moving goalpost is enough to offset that two Super Bowls we mentioned these before effectively what consumables represent is they present a meaningful chase item for four players for everything for events for offers for monetization levers such as balla balla pass and what they do is they eliminate major pain points for example it could

have taken two weeks to upgrade something and now you have well 14 days well I can go to 2-0 and or they can offer great rewards that you can fill up your dark elixir gauge or something like that and the beauty of these consumables is that they can be easily drained from the economy there's also a cap in your inventory and so you know you you get them you use them and then you want them again which is awesome let's look at the non-economic rewards there specific ones tied to pala pass only so I divide this into three parts vanity perks and overall weight vanity I think the first point is common to both both games have quite a reasonable amount of 19 terms of one here asking for partial clients for Bella pass on towers can any modes for partial yeah

you know they seem very similar they both do a decent job at coming up with something that sounds exciting for for players or for some players although clash Royale allows you to access vanity also outside a pal pass because like I said when you max a lady card you can begin to add vanity facts to it however I'm not quite sure how critical vanity is for these two two games I think there's definitely a part of a part of the player base that cares about them but you know classic cosmic classroom y'all have been very strong without vanity and I would love to be able to see if it were possible how many players truly care about about this my sense is that in clash of clans the majority of people I know are happy to collect the skin at the very end but that's not why because of all the economic and non-economic rewards and the perks above

all that you get perks Tasha Yar again has some but a lot more I think these have these are not only more in terms of volume but they're very meaningful quality of life changes and upgrades again the 1gb donation for me is worth buying about a pass even if I don't finish it there are massive discounts to basically research and upgrade time upgrade cost and those are very very valuable and then there's also a bank similarly as one thing also is that the specific we haven't really talked about UI here but I wanted to call out that the aspirants UI is very powerful it's showcasing all the different types of rewards that you get and again if they do a lot of emphasis on these perks and

on the quality of life and not just about not just focus on the economic value and then lastly I didn't do the math here to prove my point but trust me this is true the amount of value that you can get in terms of non economic rewards share the share sorry the share of non-atomic rewards in cash bonuses is bigger over total compared to where you are because they just don't have a lot more to to give you and so like I said that makes a battle pass much better sustained within the finest economy compared to in clash Royale one more point I want to call out this is an open question I'm not saying this is true but I think culturally y'all may have done a damage to its game by uncapping sessions so one of the core core perks or actually it's not even approach because this is accessible by every player both

those who have passengers who don't have with the introduction of about a path has overhauled how crown chest works so basically class we are used to manage player sessions with crown chests that is that thing on the top right corner that we still refresh every 24 hours and has a pretty good chance of giving you records and with for test loss in the unlocking time and bail pass partially uncapped these factions by removing a 24 hour cool down and letting players to basically be in bench play so sure you do lose some value in bench playing because you still have those four chests lot that hasn't got away but I found myself and other players that I know basically just going for because the contest is so good and can give you

about value and I think a game like Australia could see burnout and or potential medium-term you know losing interest in the game because you have this massive sessions now and and I think by the way one of the things that battle pass is supposed to do is driving this regularity where players come back every day by uncapping such as you basically undo that and so you know I don't know it for sure I would love to look at the data and see but I think there are potential negative downsides for caution in the medium term by capping these sessions okay so basically stepping back a little bit summarizing all that we have talked about below pass is a great tool to drive motorisation and particular conversion and I think it can be even better at driving regularity

retention such a length and engagement with specific game modes it can be very very strong I think battle pass can you know it's not a silver bullet for all games it's a bit of a dangerous herd mentality and in the industry where everybody sees something working and they think oh it works for game XYZ it's gonna work for mine too well not really you have to have like we said before enough stuff that players want the economy has to be deep has to be scalable and you have to have enough meaningful non-economic rewards because otherwise if your game is like oh yeah we're again the economy is somewhat smaller than a clash of clans it's not scalable and you've been developing over time well bail pass although it does it basically accelerates that depleting of that water bucket and I mentioned before third point here is that non-economic rewards such as the 19 per can be very valuable to limit the impact on IIPs and

does a great job there and the fourth point we didn't really talk about much about I think it's worth calling out anyway basically especially for games that have a lot of focus on that the items implementing and operationalizing metal box requires scaling up your lineups efforts to produce and maintain an amazing content pipeline think about all the deals that Faulkner has made with the Marvel and all that seeing a Python all these games can be really expensive and you know keeping your shop and your battle path exciting and sexy over time requires bulking up of the team and of the focus on it and lastly be careful of design pitfalls because there could be things aren't working well for example session in o'clock for y'all and you don't wanna battle past you break what's actually working okay so with that I will pause and open it up for questions [Applause] [Music]

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