Supercell's Squad Busters - The Definitive Deconstruction

Hey, and welcome everybody to the Deconstructor of Fun podcast. This is a deep dive on Squad Busters, the game we've we've been busting our ass playing. That joke right from the beginning. Uh we got two people doing the deep dive with myself. We got Philip Black, game economist at Game Economist Consulting, also a solopreneur. I'm living the solopreneur lifestyle. Live it. Uh inspired by Matey, I'm doing what I can. All right. Trying to be brutally honest. We all know we're in this together. god, so many puns. Yes. Uh Matt Emery, first time on Deconstructor of Fun podcast. Am I correct? Absolutely. Thanks for having me. In the beginning of the podcast, we also realized that you are a solopreneur. You tried to avoid it saying you have contractors and we're like, "No FTEs?

That's a solopreneur." So, Matt, what do you do as a solopreneur? So, Turbine Games Consulting is a crew of eight. Uh we're senior to exec level PMs. Yes, all contractors. Um analysts, econ designers. Uh our specialty is helping game teams uh grow product LTV by 20 to 200% in 4 to 6 months. Awesome. So, you must have seen a lot of products. Yes. He's famous for testing app icons. This was like a nugget he dropped. He dropped it on the Joseph Kim podcast and I'm taking it everywhere now. This is This to me is like your best finding that you should use three variants for your app icon per month. Just sign up for it. You're going to get gains. That's how I've looked at it. Oh, it's it's simple stuff, right? Yeah. So, I'm MishKhatkov, Deconstructor of Fun, solopreneur. That's what we all are. So, uh question number one. Before we start going ahead, what do you guys think? Will Squad

Busters be the sixth billion-dollar franchise for Supercell? I mean, clearly Supercell thinks so, because they are launching this globally. So, Phil, who wrote massive deconstruction that you have probably read, if not, you will be reading, Phil, you go first. Is this a billion-dollar franchise? I think it will become one. I do not think it is one right now. I think it will become one. I think they have all the pieces lined up. My biggest issue is the soft launch period. I don't understand it, but I would say that's far outweighed by the game's like numerous wins, numerous innovations, like return to form. This to me is like the ratifying vote in this next chapter strategy. I want to know how they're going to scale. Like, I want to know how this team is going to approach all those other problems. I would say in reviewing this, it it's also clear to me like how important this game is to Supercell. Like, this game can give Supercell its record revenue year. Doesn't even need to perform that well, maybe 250 million. That's on par with Brawl Stars. I think

this game can do 250 million. I think this game can give Supercell like its highest annual revenue on record. I just love to see a late game form. Mhm. I would love to see I mean, we will all see it, but I I want to see it cuz annual blog post when they hit the record revenues. I mean, how many gifts are they going to be? Like, it's going to be a lot. So, Matt, what do you think? Is this a billion-dollar franchise? Uh so, I have a slightly longer answer. So, I'll do some back-of-the-napkin math based on very limited data. I was looking into what it takes for a game to reach a billion. Um you know, we can use Brawl Stars as a benchmark for what it takes to become a billion-dollar game. Brawl Stars did that in 3 years. In theory, a new Supercell game, you know, if it had the same install trajectory, same retention profile, same ARPDAU profile, would reach a billion dollars in three years. But if one of those three metrics was, say, like half of what Brawl Stars had, say it had the same ARPDAU, same retention, but the

install volume was half. If one of those metrics was, say, halved uh what it is for Brawl Stars, then it should take six years to reach a billion dollars, right? The thing is, Brawl Stars install trajectory was absolutely insane. According to AppMagic, it's in the top 60 most downloaded games of all time, which I had not quite processed before. And according to Sensor Tower, its first-year install trajectory was better than, you know, what we consider massively broad market games, like most hypercasual games, better than Candy Crush, better than Subway Surfers. This kind of blew me away. So, Brawl Stars, in terms of, like, market penetration, again, from the data I'm looking at, is just absurd. So, that's a pretty high bar. Even if we think that Squad Busters is more broadly appealing than Brawl Stars, it's hard for me to get on bet on any game, you know, in the current market matching that kind of install trajectory, just given how crazy it is. Second concern is retention. Again, according to Sensor Tower, and these are, you know, as we all know, Sensor Tower estimates,

all four of Supercell's worldwide launch games had D30s of at least 20%. Brawl Stars was at 24% according to Sensor Tower. Thirdly, Squad Busters is showing a 10% D30. Now, this estimate is based even know that, though? We don't even have We don't even have D30 data. Who are the Who are these people? I'm assuming this is based on the prior the prior beta from the year before. Mhm. I I have to assume that's so because, yeah, they're just hitting D30 today on the new the new build. You used to be Bayesian. How much do you weight that? Not very high. I'm hoping that we'll get some insider intel on what the number actually is, cuz that would absolutely change my assessment. But all I have to go on so far is this number that says 10%, which, again, I would love to see that poorly supported data show a higher number. So, you know, retention is a question. I love to see real numbers that change that. Third that like you said Phil they only entered soft launch what exactly like 30 days ago so they're only seeing

their first D30s on the new build today so they are operating from somewhat limited information to some degree. And so there's some obvious question marks there as far as the long-term retention potential for the game. Third concern is let's say the trajectory to a billion is 6 years 2 billion instead of 3 like Brawl Stars. You know, can this game play and platform retain a thriving core community of engaged players, content creators, and influencers for first 6 years? You know, if anyone can do it Supercell can but that's not proven yet and I know people have concerns about the scalability of the score gameplay you know, which I'm sure we'll get to. So, based on these inputs like it's absolutely possible this game could reach a billion in 3 6 7 years um based on the very limited data we have now but if I were forced today to bet on it I would take the under on this. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, what what's the the under on what bet?

Based on Sensor Tower data? I mean we love Sensor Tower but like that's the the first tower numbers. Give me the real numbers. I would love to see something cuz I mean all I have all I have is what I can see and you know, Brawl 250 million this year. Would you take the under on 250 million this year? Not necessarily. You're I'll give you two to one odds. Are we placing bets? Like what if he wins? Does does does Phil get half of your contractors? Like what what's going to what's the bet on this? We'll get this in writing Phil. I think the game will do quite well. I just think it's you know, it's very risky to bet on it being a billion dollar franchise at this point. So so hold up. So let's talk about accessibility for just a moment. And I'm interested Mishka on your viewpoint on this. What do you make of the pre-registrations? The 40 million pre-registrations already. Interesting IP. Tell me about the metaverse, baby. I I Yeah, I was talking to PR person. For a PR person, Supercell's got that like in their holster. But like penetration, there it is. You

know, what what what more do you need? I mean, that's that's a lot of downloads out of the gate. That to me is some pretty heavy penetration. That to me gets you 250 million easy on that right there. And consider Consider the launch. So, let's talk a little bit about the cuz this affects a lot of the revenue that that we're going to be seeing. The fast soft launch period, like hardly a month in, they're going global. And they're going with the uh what I'm hearing in the streets of Helsinki this going to be the biggest launch of a Supercell game ever. Wow. And it's not like they It's not like they don't have the the war chest, the ammunition to to carpet bomb the market for everybody and their mother to download this game. So, we can expect, you know, what, 100, 150 million installs, right? In in next few months. That seems completely reasonable to me. I don't have the benchmarks against the other titles. But I would bet on historic download volume for a game like this. I I think this game just screams accessibility from the top to the bottom. And one of

Supercell's secret weapons has been IP building. I don't think they've gotten enough credit for that. Like they're out there They're out there selling toys, you know? They're out there They're out there hawking toys, they're experimenting in transmedia stuff. Like they've set aside a big chunk of cheese for a big huge chunk of cheese. A huge chunk of cheese for for getting this brand wheel going and like it's it's real IP, it's coming together. Like it's fun to see all the games come together. The other thing I just want to note here is that none of the games from Supercell's failed titles have made an appearance in Squad Busters. And I just think about Bill Belichick, the head coach of the Patriots. He doesn't hang losses on the company the company office. And like as much as they love celebrating dead games, it's interesting to me that they aren't willing to pop the champagne in this way. Like you need to make it to launch to get onto the wall of fame. I I would like to see Gunshine characters, maybe a little bit from Battle but like Gunshine would be fun. Like let's just bring in the old school, the ultimate, you know, the the big fail that that caused the big pivot to what Supercell is today. That would have been

pretty fun. I could not agree more. Yeah. Matt, what do you think? Let's talk really about the other the fast soft launch period. Like why the pressure? Why are they not cooking it? Why are they coming out like barely having D30 numbers? Oh, I mean it's pure speculation on my part. I could only guess. My hope My hope is that they're seeing retention numbers much, much better than that tiny slice I saw from Sensor Tower and then they're very, very confident. Uh that would make me happy. I mean again, I love the game personally. It's just a question of the market and the numbers. I mean you guys are thinking 150 million installs within months? Yeah. I don't want to sign up for 150 million. I think for those 50 million pre-registrations will convert better than Warzone for sure cuz I think it's a little more flexible device requirements. Like that really killed Warzone. I think it could do Call of Duty Mobile numbers for sure in terms of conversion rates for the pre-registrations. Call of Duty did like 100 million first month installs. We could check the historicals on that

one. If that is true, I would sign up for that same I would sign up for similar trajectory. So Call of Duty numbers. Yeah. Uh Matt, Matt, you mentioned the point is like they're just seeing such a great numbers that they're basically foregoing soft launch and just tech launching this. But to my understanding, listen, how can they see these numbers that are so great in terms of retention because when they came into the soft launch, the decision to launch had already been made to my understanding. So if you have big launch coming in 1 month after you release this game, that means the plans to launch on that date, all the marketing that they've set up had been already done 6 months prior at least. So they knew what they were coming out Yeah, whether that was all premeditated. Yeah. And and so and so you have to kind of go back and and understand like okay so how are they so confident? It must be that first of all the we know we played this game a ton. This game is is like crack on steroids. They must have internal focus groups or kind of some

kind of an internal audience, maybe streamers, maybe some kind of a power users that they've been testing and all the numbers from internal testing have been so convincing and the company has such a big cojones that they're like we're not even going to test it with the real market, we're just going to launch it. So that Well Peak did this recently. Remember we covered this on Twig a little bit. We covered this with I believe it was it was Match Factory and that's been a enormous success for them. They just like gun ho I I don't get if this is a new strategy. Like what is like the whole point of mobile was that you're able to soft launch a game, get its KPIs in a good place, they're predictive of global, launch it in global, don't burn your marketing budget, cancel the project if it doesn't get there. That's a Scopely playbook. Scope Scopely developed that playbook. But can I throw in a theory? So something that I've been seeing with with some of the titles that have not been able to scale in various genres, let's say casual. These games came out via the early metrics were really good. They they were hitting that golden cohort and then the

golden cohort was starting to run dry and what the company would do is is in in terms of soft launch as we always know what they should be doing so they would cut the spending. They would focus on product improvements. There's always tons of optimization that we could do. Matt's consulting company and eight contractors can help with that. And then the goal was to improve the KPIs so that they can then increase the the UA. But what I've been seeing and I don't know if this is well, I post actually about this on LinkedIn. But, what I've been seeing is companies ending up in a sort of a death loop. So, because of the limited channels, at least in certain puzzle genres, when you're decreasing your marketing budgets, you're significantly decreasing at the moment the quality of your audience, and so all of your metrics are going down. And so, despite doing your product improvements, the overall quality of the audience is decreasing so heavily that all the metrics are going down. And so, you enter in the death loop where you

cut down on spending, your KPIs go down despite work on the product, and then you end up cutting a little bit more from spending because you're focusing on the product improvements. And then, there are some games I'm not going to name that are in this death spiral, and you can see it clearly going this way in data AI or or Sensor Tower graphs. Does this theory make sense? So, to counter this one would be to just go full hog. Just everything in. It doesn't make sense at all because it's it's not at the margin. There should be diminishing returns. So, if I'm removing units, then the on the only way I think you could win on this is some sort of K factor argument, right? This is brand marketing logic. It's it's recommendations. It's The amount of channels in UA has decreased significantly, and the dominance of, for example, Apple App Lovin' as a channel for many genres is so Well, it's it's so significant, it's almost like 70% or more of your audience is coming through AppLovin'. And so, if you remove that channel or decrease your

bid on that channel, you're getting significantly worse audience for your game, and that tanks your KPIs. So, the sort of strategy of like, "Let's press the brakes." is not optimal, and the more optimal strategy, based on this assumption, would be to just hit it out the park. Whenever you feel confident, just go full in. I'm not there yet. This predicts bigger budgets, bigger swings, and I'm not so sure if we've had that yet. Like, how much did Arc Rumble spend? You know, that that's a game that we were look I was looking at today that hasn't gone anywhere that we had like really high prospects for download volume. Miss. Strike out. Yeah. Toy Match, I think is interesting. I just I want to get inside the heads of these marketers and where their head space is at. To be honest with you, I like I like my Tencent theory. Like, that to me is why you get this game out there. It's Tencent tapping on the shoulder of Ilkka being like, "Hey, look at our money. Our investment has not increased. If you look at their revenue, it has not increased since Tencent purchased it in 2016. Their annual revenue has declined when you compare it to 2023. So, basically, you have a downward slope in

the entire period. They've had some uplifts when they launched Brawl Stars. Honestly, like the biggest surprise in the Supercell portfolio right now is Clash Royale. That is honestly the story. The story of the company is that Clash Royale has been in the the stinker for a while. If you remember, they did were doing an external hire a really long time ago, which was rare for them. That game has been That game has been really in the stinker, and Brawl Stars has been over over satisfying its need. But, its revenue is down. So, like, if I'm Tencent, look, it I'm not doing that well. This thing isn't moving. It's not making more money. Supercell, get this thing out the door and make us some more money this quarter. That's a very interesting hypothesis, but then if you consider Tencent and if you consider the the founder CEO of of Supercell, there must be a reason why he's still at the helm of the company. And if you'd have a boss that is tapping you on the shoulder and telling you to do a bunch of things, he's in a such a position of his life that he doesn't have to listen to doesn't need to be tapped by anybody. And if he's happy where he's at, I bet nobody's tapping him on the shoulder.

And and Tencent doesn't have that type of a history. Even if you interact with people from Tencent from their central teams, they provide you all sorts of support and more. Like, the amount of support you can get, the amount of insight you can get is infinite, but it's up to the studios to take advantage of that. That's the way I've understood Tencent is working. Completely fair. What do you make of Supercell's top design chief, the one that previously worked on Clash of Clans? Yes, what do you make of him, who is also in the announcement video with Ilkka for the game? What do you make of him updating his LinkedIn page to being the Squad Busters lead? I don't know. I don't I I don't know. your top chief on the game? That's very interesting to me. You know, your top lieutenant, I need this to work. Can you go execute against this? Deliver. Deliver. I know some people who are on the team and I know that they chose to be on the team and they wanted to work on this but like let's be honest. Like if you were Phil working in some central function at Supercell, head of product or you name it, whatever titles they have, and you

see this game going gangbusters, it's so much fun, it's so interesting, wouldn't you jump on it? Why would you be, you know, consulting on the side? wouldn't. I wouldn't. And this this consumables model is banging. We're going to be talking about this. This thing is banging like His is his fingerprints. I wish he would give more public conversation, but like he gave a GDC talk, which is amazing. I wish I wish he gave more regular public appearances. It'd be cool to talk to him about this. Let's see him at GDC. You know, Brawl Stars went last. It'd be great if he went next on kind of this game and its evolution and like its genre influences, just like Ben Brode did for Marvel Snap. I think he'll be busy for the Well, actually no, it's it's going to be No, he has enough time to get this on a growth track and and put it in place, but yeah, GDC is far enough. He will have time to uh to talk about the launch. Fingers crossed. Elevate your game development with Heroic Labs, the cutting-edge platform for building multiplayer games. And you need an edge to be successful in today's gaming landscape. Their scalable Nakama server empowers you to create compelling

real-time multiplayer experiences effortlessly. Benefit from features like in-game chat, leaderboards, matchmaking, and more. All designed to enhance engagement and retention. Whether you're developing for mobile, console, or PC, Heroic Labs gives you the tools to bring your community together. Unleash the full potential of your game with Heroic Labs, where every developer is a hero. This podcast is brought to you by data.ai. Now, you're asking, "Didn't they get acquired by Sensor Tower?" They did, and that's awesome. Here's why. What do you love in data.ai or Sensor Tower? The combined company will offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the full digital customer journey. Exciting times lie ahead as Sensor Tower data.ai join forces. Go to data.ai or sensortower.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business. Now,

back to the episode. But let's talk about the other the basics. So, Phil, you want to you want to show us the other gameplay? God damn it. When you show this gameplay, I want to start playing it. Like this is this is one of the Like in my entertainment funnel, like this has gone so much higher up. Like it's not, you know, I'm not killing myself by watching it news, reading about interest rates, or any of that. Like this goes number one. This is like ahead of Instagram for me at this moment. Like in my entertainment funnel. First, open chests, then look at Instagram. So, let's let's talk about the core gameplay and we'll kind of like work our way outward, almost like a job breaker. Uh this is me right now, by the way, where you know, if you're watching the video online, I've I've got the Squad Busters screen in front of me. Uh I'm level 24. I'm in Beach World, obviously. I'm a hardcore player. Um I've spent I've spent money. So, let's let's go and start a match. Um the thing that you'll find that's really interesting to start with is that when you click play, the next thing you'll see is a selection of

characters, and these are the characters that you have a chance of opening once you're in the game. And each row is a rarity. So, if you look at the top row, you'll see that all of the characters that are selected are common. Then, you see another row that's rare. Although, I want to say that's the wrong color for rare, Supercell. You You got this one wrong. Yellow Yellow orange is legendary. great point. And yep, and and blue Normally, common is gray. Or, you could do uncommon and you can make it green. That's a separate topic. Okay. But, each row is a rarity and those rarities are going to correspond generally to phases of the game. That's generally when you have a higher probability of unlocking them. You can unlock them earlier. And they're a subselection of the characters that are available to you at that point in the game. So, it's also possible that you could have a probability of opening a character that you haven't unlocked yet. So, you have this really strong incentive to go out there and make sure you collect all of the characters. And so, no matter what you do, when you click this play button, you're going to get a new subselection. And it's a large portion of your roster, but you're not building a deck. Your deck is You can almost say randomly

chosen for you as you enter a match. The other thing you'll see here is in the lower left-hand corner, it's this cute little bag icon. The 2D art for this game is adorable, by the way. And it's called the battle bag. And inside it is four consumables. And this is like one of the marquee items in Squad Busters, one of the marquee kind of progression economy institutions. It is these four consumables. So, one of them is a reroll. When you go and you open chests, you're going to selection of three characters. This lets you reroll those three characters. There's another thing called a key here and we're going to talk about this. This is the most pay-to-win element I've ever seen in a game. Very interested to see what you guys think about how pay-to-win these keys are. And they're of different types. So, you can get a different ability based on the key that you use. So, we're going to go in, we're going to hit play here. Um it's going to use a chest ticket. It's going back to this old like almost energy system. You can play as long as you want to, but you need to have a chest ticket consumed for you to be able to earn a chest reward at the end end round.

And you can buy more chests for gold in the game, but this is what you need to be able to get a reward at the end of round. So, I don't have enough. I played too much. So, I'm going to buy some more. It's now going to roll some modifiers. And you'll notice here the matchmaking isn't quite as fast as normal Supercell games because remember this is 10 players PvP, although a lot of those are bots. A lot of them are bots. A lot of them are bots. Uh this game loves to tell you pick up gems to win. It loves to tell you how accessible is drag to move, stop to attack. This is like a key accessibility moment. I don't know what you guys thought about how this is displayed. There's an action circle. This is another really interesting part of the game. So, I had a choice of three characters, which was pretty interesting. When I started, I chose this character that's an archer, and I'm immediately faced with these different enemies. So, I'm going to go around. I'm going to slay these enemies. I'm going to use my basic attack. And again, I just walk up to them. And then I stop moving. Mhm. They're in my action circle, which is this fixed circle that's around me. I automatically attack. They lose health. And then once they lose health,

they drop both gems, gold, and sometimes these PvE currencies that they just introduced in the recent update. And you'll see here like it's very early in the game, but I got this epic character. I got witch, which is one of the characters that was chosen shown to me beforehand as someone I had a probability of getting. I'm going to choose witch. And once I choose witch, she also drops an item when she spawns, which is really cool. There's items in the game. So, these are things that spawn inside of the map. You can only have one at a time. One character lets you have two at a times, but generally you can only have one of these at a time. And these are just consumables that you can use. There's no element of monetization when you see these in round consumables. It's only in the keys. And as we continue to progress through the map, we're going to slay more enemies. We're going to get more and more golds. And as we get more and more gold, we get to open these chests. And once you open enough chests, and you get three of the same characters, they fuse together. And when they fuse together, they get really powerful. In fact, they get more powerful than the sum of their parts. Their DPS increases, their health

increases, sometimes their abilities are upgraded. And the other thing that happens, and this is really core to the game, is that when your three characters are fused, your squad size goes down. And squad size correlated with the price of chests. So, if you make your squad size really low, the price of chests is really low, and so you can build up your squad even faster. So, you're trying to fuse these characters together. You're trying to build your squad as fast as possible. You're going on this gold price roller coaster. The other thing you'll notice here is that this isn't the win condition. The win condition in this game is actually to collect another currency. So, not just gold, but also gems. Gems are how you place yourself on the leaderboard. And if you are in the top five in terms of gems by the end of the 4-minute round, I believe, then you preserve your streak. However, if you are in a let's say first place, you get extra chest taps. And we'll we'll see that at the end of this round. Some extra chest taps. Um but you also see, if you look at my screen now, I just got a mega unit. This is another consumable in the economy.

You got super lucky, by the way. Yeah. I I know, right? So, what will happen generally when it comes to combat is that you're going to have your squad, you're going to have the collection of fused and unfused characters, and you stop and you just hover over another player, and combat is going to commence. And so, what's really challenging about this game that I think a bunch of people have picked up on is just how hectic the screen is. So, if you're looking at what's happening right now, there's gems that are exploding on the screen. Everyone's running around. Um there's PvE elements. There's just a bunch of things that are happening all at once. It's really hard to get a read of the meta in round and how to react. So, it may be the case that I want a certain type of character to counter my opponent, but with all of this just smush, it's hard to know what characters I should use, what characters they're using, and so I can build a particular squad that might be able to defeat them. And it's It's just hard to know how the battle is going. So, like you're going to start to slowly lose characters and they're going to start to lose their characters. And so, you got to make a decision on whether or not you want to retreat. And when you

retreat, you use this turbo button to run really, really quickly. But, you only have a limited amount of it, so it recharges. So, you kind of have these like stop-go chases, which I found to be annoying. Yeah, and Phil, by by the way, like the whole retreat is is the incentivizer, in my opinion, because you get a lot of damage when you try to retreat because your retreat speed is the same speed as somebody can chase you. But, when you're moving away, you're not shooting. So, the other one who's chasing you quite often just chases you down and murders everybody or at least causes way more damage at a retreating player. The other thing that happens there is when you turn away from another player, your tanks move to your front. Your glass cannons are in the back, so they get picked off. It's pretty interesting how they did that. It's almost designed in a way that when you go into a battle, you either win or you get out. But, if even if like I've gotten out so many times with like one or two characters. And then by the time you had that engagement, you're

essentially done. Like you can still get to fifth or whatever, but you're going to be last in line because essentially if if nobody's eliminated, then you're going to be last. But, but it's it's based on how many players are eliminated. So, what I'm trying to say is it's almost like one encounter that was going to determine it. You can't really come back from that one battle. I I don't I don't know if you commit that's Yeah. Yeah, I would agree if if you commit. I have found some escapes that are that are possible. I I think it needs to be more viable strategy from a character perspective. Like this is one of the things that I talked about in the deconstructor fun piece is that I think the character design feels very muted here. And when I think about just like the different quadrants of strategy right now, I wish my characters did more to make that a possible. Like you can use Max, who gives you more speed boosts, which would technically make your escape more viable. but I'd love to see more explicit features, more like dashes, something of that nature. Just feels kind of confined right now. You mentioned stuff about the fact that the top five, basically half of the players win. Yep. It's actually even more. Now that we're

looking your end screen, three of the players got demolished. So, it's actually five win, two of the players who kind of like also ran, and then well, yeah. Half of the players are essentially always winning. Not quite. And here's where I think we would get into a little bit of the systems design. So, we're talking about earlier, like you have these gems, which is this this second currency you need to collect in game. It has no impact on the moment-to-moment gameplay. It just places you on the leaderboard. And so, if you rank in the top five, you extend your winning streak. And the reason the winning streak is important is that it gets you extra chest taps. So, let's talk a moment about the chest taps, cuz it's just about to happen here. So, I'm at my results screen, if you're looking at the Let's go. Tap it out. I've come in sixth. Let's talk through a little bit. I've come in sixth. So, I have not come in the top five, which means my streak is not going to be extended. So, we're not worried about that. The thing that's interesting is the audio says uh sixth place, keep it up. It always has this positive reinforcement, which I think Supercell should also fix. Like, no, you should not keep it up. That's a bad result. And so, you'll see here my Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do that.

Good job. Sixth place, and I have this this lightning bolt that says plus three. And I just want to say like, this is one of the times I actually think Supercell's animations actually don't do it justice, or some of the UX falls down, is you never see this kind of symbol anywhere. You never see this like energy symbol that gives me extra taps. It feels kind of ethereal. I'd love to see it have more visual impact. And if you look under the six, it has this plus 38 with this kind of octagon symbol. Now, I believe that is portal energy. I don't know what that is. It's supposed to be XP. I think it's player count XP, but yeah, it's it's really hard to track down what that actually is. a hit? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, like a an animation would be really nice there. So, anyways, let's let's open this chest. How How taps? So, I I lost my streak. And the interesting thing that happens is like you get additional taps based on your streak level, and you also get taps based on where you placed in the leaderboard. And so, with the thing that's really interesting is that there is kind of a dullness in the shape of that distribution. So, there is not a lot of additional gain to coming in first place

versus coming in, let's say, fifth because the streaks compose so much of the additional taps you get. So, there is this like bent payoff curve, which I think is another reason you don't see a lot of combat in the end game is that there isn't a lot of gains to coming in first versus coming in second because you're not going to get that additional taps. And remember, if you get busted, if you die, you're not going to get a taps. Like, your streak is broken. So, I think that's another problem. But, they have this very interesting like keep your streak going. It's very match three. Can we just pause here and talk about this for a moment? What do you What do you guys think about this like streak prevention gold sink mechanic? Can this be in any PvP game? I love it. Uh I mean, loss aversion is a fantastic mechanic, and it's deployed in so many games these days to great effect for monetization. I mean, I love the streak mechanic here generally. I love the tap mechanic. I find it to be better than the Brawl Stars implementation because uh you can upgrade the size and the number of taps, and so it just feels kind of more multi-dimensional. You know, the more taps you get, the exponentially more value you can you can get from the chest. Um and so,

once you learn how it works, I mean, it's it's fun at baseline, I think, just to do the tapping. Like, the the core mechanic, like you like you said, Phil, is just really delightful and addictive. But, I find that the way that the streak system, you know, synergizes with that tap system and reinforces it, I I think is is brilliant. Yeah, I So, I spent all my coins in the beginning on this loss aversion just out of I don't know. It just automatically it made sense. And then I became more coin cautious, and you start kind of calculating these things because the price increases the longer your streak has been. And so, it definitely makes sense to spend in the beginning, but it doesn't really make any sense to upkeep your streak other than vanity reasons. That is like 18 wins or so forth. It's just too expensive. And the return on on that investment doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the tuning is a little weird. No, I think that's totally a fair thing to mention. I would agree with that. You know, what what is the cost per unit

of spend? You know, that makes a lot of sense to me. Like, how does this compare against every other part of the game? It's still super interesting. Let's go ahead and pay it for now. I think this is delicious. Let's go ahead and play this out. And so, my streak is preserved at 5. And by the way, they show this on the leaderboard where your streak is. And you know how much of it someone has paid and what how much someone has not. So, I've seen people with like 146 wins in a row. Obviously, they're paying. Oh, it's not real. So, when I initially came across this mechanic, I did not think it was going to work because the PvP game, 50% win rate, it's going to be too brutal. We've talked about this with Clash Royale, too brutal, a lot of reactivations, frustration, I quit. Uh people like to win. This is a reality of PvP games. This uses bots. They boost up win rates. You don't end up spending, you know, on streak saving 50% of the time. Uh but I think that's a that's been another interesting part about mobile games is just kind of this this move to bots, uh which is very old in console games, and it's like hasn't really come back, but is coming in in mobile, which is interesting. Okay. So, we're going to get get it. Let's talk about how this works. You just saw these little icons. These are my taps. Now, you're going to get a

chest rarity. This is on a chest cycle, very similar to Clash Royale. So, you're going to get different rarities based on which uh chest number that you have. And you'll see that I have these taps down below. And so, I'm going to tap once. It just did a little spin. That was actually a roll on the back end. And that roll gave me a probability of a couple things happening. One was that this chest could level up in terms of rarity, which means I get might get higher rarity character shards. The other thing that might happen is that I could add more copies to the chest, so I could get more shards at the end. So, I'm going to tap it again. We're going to do another spin. Um I don't think I got anything that time. Oh, bonus spin. This was Oh, I got I got plus one. I got another copy. All right, yeah. Uh, and you can see like there's this is like lightning around the bonus. I mean, how can you not love this Like how awesome is this? And the other thing I'll just mention, this is in the update. If you have a rare chest, I believe on the final spin, uh, like a star comes in. Like no one had to add that. No one asked for them to add it and someone at like midnight just decided to make it more exotic. All right, one one more copy here. Big and then you this is another spin and this thing is just like it just wants to implode right now.

It's bursting. It's bursting, it seems. And and you can tap this really, really quickly, right? It's it's almost like a fidget thing. Like you can whip through these extra taps. All right. Boom. Boom. Go, explosion charge up. And I got seven copies and they're only giving away babies right now. Baby. Heavy. Do you want to talk about the meta a little bit in the progression? Yes, yeah. So, so I would start with when talking about the meta, I would start probably since this is a PvP game, I want to talk about the balancing. Like how do you feel the balancing is when we talk about the mechanics that but especially the characters, abilities, and maps. Like how would you rate that? I I mean, it's it's a lot of bots, like you said. I'm very curious the extent to which bots are leveraged once they go big, once they go worldwide. But I mean, from from my playing, I found it to be nicely balanced. We can have a separate conversation around PvP in the match and what that feels like and you know, just that mechanic. But as far as like the balancing of whether I can win or lose and I feel like the outcome is fair. Felt pretty good to me, to be honest.

This key is just like an explosive part of this game is that you can use these in-round keys. When you use a key, you forego the gold cost of that chest. You can immediately get it. And I can double up and I can use the gold I would have spent on that chest to get another one in succession from one another. That that's an incredible pay-to-win element. It's insanely powerful. It's insanely powerful. It seems to be surviving. And again, I I I point to Supercell's top chief designer being on this game. This guy's old school. He like he knows he knows what brings all the all the wallets to the yard. It is power. No, it is win probability which I mad respect. Yeah, I I mean but you know, is is he former CCP economy? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Definitely has been around game economies. Um, when it comes to the other characters and how they've been balanced, I don't think they're quite equal in that sense. Like I'm I'm always bummed if I get Greg or the chicken one. Like there are there are certain

characters that are almost punishing to me at least when I'm seeing them out of the chest in the beginning where like at that point know that the whole round is going to be up. Like I'm not going to win. It's going to be avoiding everybody because I got like two bad drops in a row which is pushing me towards Mavis or chicken or Greg or all these collector or the trader character kind of like these collecting items because when it comes to the play style, I found that the optimal play style at least for me has been always around either I'm killing a lot of monsters or I'm killing other players. But the sort of a resource hoarder doesn't seem to be the best strategy especially since the map is getting smaller. So I'm kind of like wondering and and also The resource hoarders are the coins. They they're coin generators. They So let me let me go through this and then destroy my my hypothesis. But the resource collectors are coin generators, but you don't win based on coins. You win based on gems. So I end up like collecting a ton of coins because I go

with this approach of of just collecting resources and then somebody blasts me and I give that person who built a great attack deck just ton of coins so they can become even more powerful. So that's how I'm I'm feeling when it comes to the balancing that there's too many of these sort of a supportive characters that are around not supporting your damage dealing or your crew like the medic, but helping you to gather resources and you get two of them on your same team, couple of babies each, you're That's it. Like you need to use reroll. So this this to me is the secret of this game. This is why I think this game has the greatest ceiling in Supercell's portfolio besides Clash of Clans for a lot of reasons. Is that it is a structured sandbox and it supports those type of strategies as you just mentioned, right? Like there's a whole part of this game where it's either hey, I just want to go out and collect resources cuz what can happen is that you get a character called Mavis or you get Greg. Greg cuts down trees, trees give you gold. Mavis picks

carrots, carrots give you gold and gems and the gem trader trades those gold into gems and gems place you in the leaderboard. So you can technically win this game without ever engaging in combat. Like that's a path that you can take. in theory. I play the strategy. I play the strategy. Watch the YouTube videos. Greg is regarded as like one of the best characters in the game Generally. is. He is. He is. It is really fun to do. You got to You got to know your maps. There is a way to execute against the strategy, but the point is is that it has this type of ability to create these kind of strategies. I'd love to see more organic strategies. I think a lot of them feel very Supercell designed. I'd love to see spontaneous order come out of this, but they have a sandbox and that's what's so exciting is that they can pump characters into this game and because everything's randomized, you are going to have to master the different strategies. You cannot settle into one strategy, right? Like this is the problem with CCGs is that you have a given set of cards that you master and then once you've mastered that deck, it's pretty much over. But

you're going to go in with a random set of characters from your inventory and they can pump more and more characters into that and you've got to master that. So like I think all these problems are going to be solved. How about the other sort of a like depth and mastery? Like one of the things, you know, I I have this love and hate relationship with the TFT. The element that they have in their live ops as well as in their character design. And And this game has a lot of elements of auto chess genre, but the element that it that it has is that all these characters have an origin. So, basically, like in this game, if it would be a Clash Royale character, or just like in a Clash Mini, they like if it's of the same class, or type, or game, like Boom Beach characters, they get some kind of affinity bonus based on how many you have, and you can build a strategy around that. Like in TFT, there's so many strategies, not only based on classes, but based also on origins, and you're kind of managing that origins and classes building as you go forward. Here, I did not get that feeling. They were quite simplified, which might be, again, the right strategy for incredible

accessibility, but it feels like it caps a little bit of that mastery going forward. What do you guys think? I mean, Supercell is the king of simplification, right? Yeah, I love auto chess, personally, but I love how they've simplified that here, and sort of combined it with some other genres. What's interesting about the strategy and the strategic depth is that it feels more about matching the mods that you're thrown, which we haven't talked about yet. Uh it's sort of matching your strategy to the map and the mods, rather than matching your strategy to the other players and some predefined play style you have, or build out that you like. Uh so, like Phil said, you're you're sort of forced to learn how to play as everybody. And then you're forced to learn how to play as everybody, and pick the ideal strategy based on whatever mod you're thrown into. The geometry of the strategy is a little different, you know, it's less about learning how to counter other players, less about learning how to I mean, honestly, the ceiling on PvP combat is somewhat low, it feels like. But it seems much more about like

playing to the map. This game has a bunch of depth in its combat and in its moment-to-moment gameplay, and I actually think this is where Supercell is a little bit more junior in its thinking about real-time combat. Like Brawl Stars was its only other really real time combat kind of twitch game. And I think the other thing to remember is this is 10 players in a map. There's There's There's actually a lot on the back end and it's very interesting test for Supercell's engine. But the thing that's really interesting is that I think they're they're learning about combat readability and they've struggled a little bit with that here on the UIUX. So like right now we're in a practice match and I have a hog rider. And one of the things that's interesting about his ability is that if he goes over grass, he actually gets speed boost, which is really really cool. And that's a deeper element in the game. It plays on the map design. It's just like brilliant game design in my opinion. It's kind of like using what you know. It's not introducing like this other element. So you can see him doing it right here. The problem is that in this really big squad, it's hard for me to know that he's the one who activated this. And so you know, in these real time games, I'm not always going to read the menus or the abilities. It needs to make

intuitive sense to me. Like that's that's the beautiful thing is you just intuitively interact with it and you understand how it works. And UIUX is a big important component of that readability. And that's where I think that they've just they've struggled a little bit more here, right? So I It's hard with so many units and I've also wondered whether or not 10 players was the right amount of players if they could have shrunk that to to five. You know, why does there need to be 10? That was never really flex. It's a multiplayer flex. It's like we can simultaneously let 10 players play. Yep. And And the hog rider thing is like really nitpicky, but like So I'm in combat. If you actually hold down the turbo button, which gives you that speed boost, it actually increases your attack speed as well. And they don't change that to boot to like a sword when I stop. And like that's a that's a really deep mechanic, right? Like that ends up becoming very important. That's the type of stuff I'd like to see surfaced a little bit more in the game. Um like these are the things that Clash Mini spent a lot of time working on was combat readability. And I I I think it's tough with so many units, but I think with more time they definitely would have solved this. Here's another thing that actually dropped in this update

that just happened. When you're in combat with another player, you know it can turn into this mishmash and you don't really know who's winning. They introduce this a sound effect. So, when a player dies or a character dies, you hear it. And so, you can hear the pings, and you can see like, "Oh, wow, I'm ping You know, it's it's pinging really quick. I need to get out of here." Oh, yeah, that's true. And then it gets louder and louder. It's same thing when you start killing the units of your opponents. And yeah, it's a it's a really cool sound effect that they just added. It really cool stuff. Um it's great that they got this in before launch. I would have loved to see a little bit more of it. Again, like I just don't understand the rush, you know? Like you just give I I I I I get like the model here is opportunity cost of revenue. Like you can essentially just do like a discounted net present value equation. It's not. It's it's the decision on on on launching has been made. That's what I think is is uh is is rushing them. That's all. The the decision's been made, and you have to execute. So, here's the thing. What What do you Where Where does their team head count set? So, is this Is this team that's in 45? Is this 45 head count? Like what is this in terms of Supercell's next chapter? I would say probably around 30.

Okay. Like like if we're just talking about the uh the the development team. Interesting. Okay. I mean, it's it can be tougher to fix fundamental problems when you have a larger head count size. You know, it's it's Yeah. trying to steer a yacht versus a you know, a you know, a speed ship. Of course. Um 30 doesn't actually sound that bad. And to be honest with you, I don't think these issues are that big. These issues are not big. Yeah, cuz we know that that when Brawl Stars is like really really growing, we're talking about 50 50 people, 60 people for a game that is how many years since 2018? And now they've reached like these insane numbers of 60 people. So, I would assume that this one is about 30, which is very manageable team. Yep, I agree. That doesn't sound too bad. can get into a single room and have a conversation. Step into the future of game monetization with Xsolla, the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach and revenue. Xsolla provides a robust suite of tools

designed to enhance user acquisition, manage subscriptions, and streamline payment solutions worldwide. Unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customized, secure payment architecture and dedicated support team. Xsolla, powering game developers to achieve global success. This podcast is brought to you by AppsFlyer. In today's digital world, understanding your app's journey from discovery to download is more than just insightful, it's essential. Enter AppsFlyer, the leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts, making every ad dollar work smarter. With AppsFlyer, that's your new reality. Dive deep into data-driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app. AppsFlyer, where your app's potential

meets performance. Phil, do you want to talk about combat readability while we're here or save that for later? No, I would say like I mean that's pretty much all I would have to say about it is that you know, it's an important part of the game. It's not working well. That sound effect sounded like they're making some improvements. Um it nee- it needs to be better. And I think it will be better. Let's compare it to a MOBA or or an auto chess. Isn't the readability as difficult in those genres as well? I think it's closer to an RTS. This is where it's RTS on this one's coming out cuz there's just so many units. AI, uh enemy bots are on screen, too. Gold and gems, like this is my my other big knock is like the dual win condition or I I don't call it dual win condition, the two currencies. This is actually what Monopoly Go had, by the way. This was an early Monopoly Go design is that you collected cash and that's how you won. And then you also rolled around and you used energy, kind of similar to what you might call gold here. I I think that's another thing that's really difficult to keep track of here. I'm not exactly sold on that win condition, which is a more fundamentally problem. Yeah, especially since coins they're

in-game coins and then there's meta-game coins. Those are different. Yeah. And coins on coins. So So if you are new to this type of data, like there are these sort of a very I would say almost like hardcore game economy designs that that has multiple different currencies, but it's still under the same names cuz you know, it's different. This is meta, this is core, but for players I would assume that they don't consider different. Like I collect coins in the match. Like those are the coins that I'm probably taking into the meta game, right? It's like the gems you do. Right. Like the gems from the match you do directly go into a gem pass, but the coins don't go into your coin wallet. So it's a little disjointed there. I think Sil had some good points before about combat readability and I think that's like one of the big problems here. It's just that in the late game especially, like I can't tell if there are three or four teams, five teams running around the center of the map, like I can't I don't really have a way to tell who I can fight and who I can't. Like who is more powerful than

me, who's less powerful than me. It's just these big mobs of characters that I can't read. I can't assess who's in those teams and make decisions about like oh, they're they're using mostly Gregs and so I think I can take that. Like it's really hard to tell anything except that you have these clouds like these kind of Andy Cap tumbleweed clouds of of characters running around and I mean, it makes combat in the end just sort of this kind of jockeying game that it feels like a hard to have PvP combat depth given that concession on the design front. And it's I think a major limitation of the current core gameplay model here. It make It just forces you to make most of the strategy and skill around things other than PvP combat. Which is interesting. I mean, not a deal breaker, but it's feels like a shortcoming. The only thing that they choose to visually show is how many gems you've collected till that point. Right, that is the only kind of like um visual communication of your strength. It's like you must be pretty

badass because you have X amount of gems, which is to somewhat correlating to your strength in in the game. Yeah, it's really weekly correlated, I would say to like team team's strength. I mean, because you could pick up gems without fighting anybody. Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's a little tricky. But I mean, I understand how they got here. You know, they had to make design decisions to arrive here. Uh it just isn't you know, a concession that they'll have to deal with. So, uh jumping in on on the sort of a mastery and skill-based progression, what do you guys think? Like if we start with Phil, like is there a reasonable skill depth in this game? I think we need to look at it in the right way when we talk about skill depth. To me, at its core, this is testing a roguelike theory, which is theory crafting. Like that is what drives roguelikes, that's what drives Vampire Survivors, that's what drives a lot of Battle Royales. Battle Royales are roguelikes, they take so many of those elements. It's that in-round progression combined with the RNG or the randomness of what you can get in those

chests, which as we were talking about forces you to master all those different strategies. But ultimately, what drives a lot of the content is me thinking about what strategies I could run or should run or interesting to run. This is why like I draft in Magic the Gathering so often. So I love getting that random assortment of cards and doing problem-solving on like how how I solve this particular situation. We shouldn't see just like one meta emerge from this game. It should be dependent on map, it should be dependent on location. Exactly as you were talking about, Matthew, like that to me is a healthy a healthy meta is if like these design elements really stand out. That forces me to change how I take in information and like form a strategy. That that is content that you get to consume. And I think they just have this like really stable pipeline to make that happen, just pump more characters into it. So I I think like they're going to add more characters. I think the abilities are going to get better. I don't think the abilities are as I'm not in love with them as I thought I would be especially in the first part of the game. I think they need to move some of the second part of the characters backward like for instance healing from the medic is unlocked in the second world and having that in your team is

actually like pretty game-changing in terms of strategy. Like some of the characters could really be yanked backward that I think unlock a lot of strategic depth on how you deal with issues like Mavis is another example of a character that would be great to see kind of earlier on or traitor. Like traitor's would opens up that gold to gem strategy that really PvE strategy and it's not really viable I think in the first part of the world. But I think they're going to have a ton of mastery here. I think they're going to have mastery. I think there's more possibility here for mastery than in Brawl Stars. Yeah, a different kind of mastery as you said. I mean if they keep adding features, maps, abilities, you know, that in theory the foundation is there. They can add tons and tons of layers to it. It's just that some Supercell players expect is there to be more depth in the core the moment to moment PvP combat and that seems limited here. But you know, there is plenty of opportunity in the meta to add more mastery options there. The other thing that you mentioned Phil that's worth calling out again is that you know, that the theory crafting is definitely there.

But at the same time you are limited by the selection of characters in each round. So it's not like you can pick a theory and try to test it and refine it match over match. I mean you're just thrown into a you know, you get a random deck of cards each time and you have to sort of play what you're given rather than working on developing a particular strategy. You have you have some agency in round, but you're still operating in that umbrella. Yeah, to me there's the the depth is not quite there when when comparing against I'm doing the comparison of like what is the most strategic and that would be TFT. I'm not saying that this game should be nearly as deep as TFT. Of course the rounds are are much longer or much much much longer depending how you want to play, whether you hyper roll or just play the uh the original classic game mode. But, it it does seem that that the depth, at least, is quite shallow. Like, I almost know how the round's going to go, but nevertheless, I'm I'm still enjoying it. So, I don't know if that's a bad thing. Like, I get the sort of a

like, "Okay, this round is I got a couple of Gregs and a couple of Mavis, and like that's not my crew. I like to attack. I like to kill." And and I'm like, "Well, let's see if I can survive this round." And I'm still playing the next round because they are so rewarding, and that's where the 50% or the uh if you're in the uh top five, it still rewards you with a streak. So, it's not punishing when you draw the characters that you don't want to draw. It changes your gameplay. You're doing something different. There are the quests that you're constantly doing. So, that's in kind of a like in the back of your mind like, "Okay, let's let's get some um box opens or or the uh the blue box breakage, or let's find some loot in the grass, or that kind of stuff, or let's kill certain type of monsters." There are always the quests that you have going on. So, I don't think that this game is very deep. I think it's kind of on the medium level, but I don't think that's an issue, either, because there's so many other things going on, because the rounds are so short, and because it is so rewarding, and you have that power

progression, but it's not an issue. That's how I would put it. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I I find it to be insanely addictive in the short term. You know, it has it absolutely has that, you know, just one more round feeling. The question is, you know, can you picture content creators on YouTube still making videos 3, 6 years out based on that same core meta? You know, if they add more modes, like is that is that addictive core loop still addictive 3 years from now? Why is that the bar? I don't care about influencers. I don't I don't care about them. Yeah, exactly. Make make what you want or you don't want. Well, influencer influencers are great for advertising and I think this type of a gameplay is pretty cool to be showcased on Tik Tok. Like I think it's uh like the short I don't know. It's like like everything about this looks like candy. Yeah, I mean I I say influencers, but I mean like content creators. I'm using that as a proxy for like community engagement and that initial core group of players still being interested, invested in the game, talking about the

game, celebrating the new rollouts and the new features. Like is that Can we still see that happening 3 6 years in the future based on this core gameplay? I'm not saying you can't. Okay. So you're you're definitely 250 million. I'm not asking if anyone can figure it out, Supercell can. Let's talk about monetization cuz I thought you'd be in support of this. I think this is this is like a lot of bull cases emerge from this. The core loop, let's talk about that. Yes, so you're going to go into these matches, you're going to get these chests based on your performances, you're going to spend these tickets which we've been talking about, and then what you're going to do is you're going to go into your squad selection. You're going to see all of your characters. And then when you have 10 copies of a character, you're able to evolve it. And when we evolve it, the 10 units get converted to a two-star unit. So, you're only getting baby units. Once I get 10 baby units, I convert it to a two-star, I think they call it classic unit. Then once I get 10 classic units, I convert it to a super unit and they're just about to launch four-star which is going

to be ultra and that is going to require 10 units of the super as well. So, they're only giving away babies right now. So, you can see that the cost is exponential for each of the characters, how many copies you need. It reminds me of like those old like Chinese counting systems you've seen like the little discs you keep moving from side to side. Yes, thank you. Like like how does it feel to be getting those babies the other the base common units when when you're going for the for the last set where essentially you need thousands of them? Like There's a lot of velocity that they can play with. So, they can give you a lot of taps. They can keep that going. They can give you a lot in different types of progression because the currency becomes less and less valuable per unit to your progression. So, they kind of increase velocity a little bit. I don't know, Matthew, how how you felt about it. And you, Michigan as well. It's like in any game because they've made that haptic and that visual feedback so powerful that it always is nice to get a ton of babies. Like, oh, I got seven taps, you know, so many barbarian babies. This is great. But

when you kind of zoom out and really, you know, work your game design brain, I'm like, this makes no difference. Like, this is a drop in the pool where I'm currently at. And it that thinking kind of disincentivized me of of paying for the streak because whether I'm getting three or seven or eight has no god damn difference. I need 10,000. So, so that that to me felt kind of like discouraging to a point because, as you said, the value of a single resource unit is degraded so exponentially as you evolve the character. That's every free-to-play game in existence, I know. When I did the math though, when you priced everything in babies, and I'm sure, by the way, they are going to come out with classic and supers that you can get. I'm sure they're going to give you more than just babies at some point cuz the units are going to become silly. But when I did the math on, hey, how many babies do I need to get a classic? How many babies do I need to get a super? When you price all of that out, I was actually surprised that the price to

evolve a character, let's say from a baby with zero copies to, let's say, a super, and it does vary by rarity. So, we can look at the store. The store is very interesting. I'm sure we can talk about that a little bit. But if you use store prices to anchor this, which is likely a ceiling, for an epic character, it's only about $100 to max them out to three star right now. And when you think about, you know, 25, 27 characters, you're, you know, uh thinking about in totality when you combine the common, the rares, and the epics. Maybe maybe $200 worth of spend to get to two stars. And this three-star evolution they just came out with, maybe $2,000 in character spend. I don't know, does that seem like enough depth? It's light. I mean, I think it's actually only a thousand copies to get to the new Evo they just released. Cuz you only need one I see, I was thinking about that. ultra rare of that character, right? You don't need all ten. So, like drop a zero off the spend depth that we calculated before, Phil. I mean, it's like Yeah, I mean, I think right now the total depth for characters in the game

is like $2,200. You know, which puts them significantly lower in spend depth than, you know, Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, any of those games. If they added another Evo, then they would 10x that in theory. Yeah. 2,000 to to 22,000. Yeah, it is. Yeah, basically. Um it's it's light. Supercell like likes to be conservative with monetization. They generally don't like to charge more than, you know, a couple hundred dollars to max a character. That's just sort of their style. Yeah, I would I would agree. I was not incentivized to make purchases, to be honest. I think it's important just to take a moment to talk about like why you would evolve a character. And so, the reason you would take a character from like, you know, baby to two star to three star, all the different stars, it's because it unlocks different ability that the character has. It does not improve stats. It may improve stats of an ability, but it's about getting those abilities. And I think there's just another like weird part of this game where like the babies are part of this game's marketing. Like it's a fun part of the IP is that there are these baby versions. But you have a baby version for a very

brief amount of time, you know? Like two seconds you're going to interact with the cute baby characters, and the rest of it is like really where the exponential curve takes off. Like you're going to spend a lot of time with like the seniors, you know? Like it's going to be it's going to be like a senior housing at some at some point. The store, I think it's worth talking about this. So, I was critical of their spend velocity when I initially wrote the piece. So, remember you can get those chests from the end of round gameplay, but the only other way to really strip into this in terms of spend when you don't count about the gem pass or like a you know the the the squad journey which is their account level progression system is the store. And there's only eight characters that you can buy character copies that you can buy at any one time. And I was like, "Oh my god, this is going to limit spend velocity to whatever the sum is of all of the characters in that store for that single day." And this little finish co- put in the freaking refresh deals for 2500 gold in the update. You can see it right here on the Oh, you wrote about it. You wrote about it.

I I wrote about it but it didn't even make it into the piece. This is my like big argument. it. I have to I well, I put in an update. I put in an update of like, "Oh man, why don't they just in you know, implement this inverse loot box?" I've tried to convince like every HD company to do this. Just let me refresh the store. It's like an X-ray pack. And they they they did it. So, you can go in, you can spend They did it. They did it before you published. It's interesting the refreshes increase in price. So, if you do your first refresh it's 2500 and then it gets 4000 golds when you do your next one. So, there's but but you can sit there God damn it, you have a lot of gold. You have 850,000. Yes, I have spent a lot of money. gold. Yeah. I'm in, man. Holy moly. Matthew, I'm get I'm getting them at 250 million by myself. That's how it's going I wish I could help you. I I have to play with my state account and I can't I don't have a credit card with the right address. I really wanted to buy the battle pass cuz I'm just like Progression's so slow without the battle pass. I want to buy everything in the store, but I can't. Everything's so

cheap, too. Like everything in the game is so cheap. The consumables are so cheap. I just don't have the gold and I can't buy it. It's like they're like they're like a great point. Actually, now that you mention it, you're playing it from your Canadian account. And so, the other reason for going global so quick is that the metrics are going to be quite different because there's probably a lot of players who are playing with the accounts from other countries where they can't spend, but they can play. And so when you go global, that that issue disappears. Again, I don't know what the percentage is, but it feels like that's that's considerable percentage of players. Interesting. Yeah, it's hard to know how many cheaters there are like me out there, but I definitely want to spend. I would I would be happy to increase their their KPI in the soft launch. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Like what about the battle pass? Like was, you know, Phil of course spent on the battle pass. In this game, I kind of like didn't spend on the battle pass. Like I've been again, I love this. I play this all the time, but it just doesn't feel enticing.

It's a good offer, but it's just more of consumable resources rather than something unique that you get from Fortnite. Like it's not like, oh, I need this battle pass. This is so cool. It's just like, whatever. It's just more more Do you feel like you're progressing as fast as you want in the main progression? Uh like I'm enjoying it. I I never feel that I lose because somebody paid to win. I know how you can pay to win to win, but I don't know if somebody opened up those um Yes. those chests without paying and so forth. So it's not like it's not like I can blame them for paying and winning that way rather than it was just wasn't my luck. So I think this game has the great balance between if I win, it was because I'm best. And if I lose, it was just bad luck. That is the the optimal. There's a lot of balancing. Yeah, and it's definitely balanced with the bots because when I get the kicked out of me, like when I'm the the ninth eliminate like

just eliminated the beginning with two Mavis's just ravaged by somebody with barbarians and a and a and a chicken. Like I start the next match and in that next match, it's clearly like bot driven and it knows what's up and it just, you know, carries me to number one. So, I feel that balancing. I feel that I'm kind of like making it good for it for killing me so early with the real PvP opponents. Do you think they'll continue to use bots that heavily when they, you know, have enough player concurrency to fill players instead? You know, just for balancing purposes. Of course they will. Of course they will. This is the new hot trend. I can't imagine any mobile game without bots these days. I would not recommend that to anyone who's making a PvP game in mobile. You should always have bots. You got to get win rates high. We know We know win rates get your attention. I think the danger here is like you start to lose player trust. Who's a bot? Who's not? I think ethically we have to mark bots. That's a separate conversation, but I think this is going to spread like wildfire. This is like This is like the new fake ads. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah. No.

I mean, Snapchat's been doing this for a while. Snapchat's like going viral. Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh should we talk about economy and uh finally Yeah, just economy. I think that's the last thing. That sounds great. Well, I think we should talk about cannibalization to close it out, too, cuz there's been a lot of comparisons to Brawl Stars. That's a That's a good point. I see people playing Brawl Stars a lot. Anecdotally, you know, shown this this game to kids who are Brawl Stars addicts, and they weren't that interested, but I think it's because this game hasn't been marketed yet so big that it's kind of like, "Uh they're like, I'll play Brawl Stars and if I need to play something bigger, I'll play on my PC or my my console." But, um you know, in the short run, I think this naturally cannibalizes the game because the attention goes to this one and there's only finite number of games that you can play and the progression at the beginning is so fast and everybody's going to be playing this, so of course you'll be playing this and then through that it becomes the main game. The question is like, when does that

stabilize? Because we saw the same thing with Clash Royale. When it came out, it cannibalized Clash of Clans and then it kind of balanced off during that year as the game declined in size and the players went back to Clash of Clans. So, I think we'll see the same type of a thing happening with this game where in the beginning we'll see clear cannibalization with Brawl Stars, but over time the players who have made the progress in Brawl Stars will start returning to that game as the main game because, you know, because they have just so much invested into it. And this is the story of almost any free-to-play franchise and that's why they're unbeatable. Phil on it from top to bottom. So, here's here's here'd be my pushback against this. So, we just saw AFK Journey go out. No cannibalization with AFK Arena, which blew my mind when we look at active users. That blows my mind, too. That makes no sense to me. Absolutely zero. Absolutely zero. Just crazy to me. We've seen zero. In fact,

AFK Arena might actually be up, which is mind-blowing. Like it might be taking up some organics. It's a mistaken traffic. So, that's crazy to me. Now, on the other side of the aisle you have Genshin and Star Rail, which has been nearly 100% cannibalization. I would argue that this game fits into the AFK Arena category. And the the reason I think that is for the same reasons that people made the same mistake when Battle Royale came out. We asked this question about whether or not it was a mode. We've had that question for Squad Busters, too. Is this just a mode that could have appeared in Brawl Stars? In fact, in many ways it did, right? Because they had Gem Hunt, they had Death Valley. They have a lot of the mechanics you see here have existed in these other games. And that was the same case for Battle Royale. And ultimately a lot of people lost that bet because Battle Royale became its own genre. And again, it goes it goes back to the sandbox, right? It created its own structured sandbox that was separate and different from the sandboxes next to it. And ultimately, like that was a new paradigm. And arena shooters could not mirror that paradigm and they are a very small part of the market. And Battle Royale's are a very large part of the

market right now. So, I think this game like has a potential to do its own thing. I don't think it's competing for the same pool of players. I expect that Brawl Stars is going to be fine. I think this is measurable. Like, let's look at downloads for both of these games as they come out. If CPIs are up, if there's a download fall, like we should see it in Brawl Stars. But, it's a big ocean out there. There's a lot of room for a lot of PvP games. I don't think this is going to be an issue. Yeah, I think I generally agree with that. I think there will be some degree of cannibalization, but you know, the games are quite even though they're both action games, they're quite different. Um you know, reading comments from Supercell players who like Brawl Stars, like a lot of them are pretty somewhat negative on the combat depths of the game. Uh particularly the Brawl Stars players one one said, "It's like this game was meant to be played by dopamine stimulated 8-year-olds." So, I mean, it's like which which I find insulting cuz I love the game. That sounds great. That sounds marketable. It's scratching a different itch. You know, I I think there may be some cannibalization, but I would bet that it would be additive. Again, just because it is substantially

different, and hopefully it's expanding their market to different types of players. Interesting point of view. What else do we want to cover? We got 5 minutes to go. We never talked about the boost mechanic. Like, the core mechanic is so cool. Like, you move and you boost. And you're just constantly riding this boost button. You feel powerful all the time. You kind of feel like you're always powered up. You're just sort of riding this this button. It Are there other games that have this mechanic? I found it to be pretty novel and and just really dopamine triggering for me. What do you guys think? I mean, we we've had like sprint mechanics like in first-person shooters. I I would say like I'm I don't know if I'm as into it as you are as you are about it. I used to work with like a professional Battlefield player. We hired him at DICE. And he actually remapped the keys so that sprint was just the normal walk button. Which is like a secret tip. Like, you should do that for all your first-person shooters. It makes you so much better. But, like it's kind of horrifying because you get into these again, it go always goes back to the hunt where like some of your characters die and then

you're like scrambling to hit the turbo button fast enough as it's depleting and your enemies are like catching up on you and killing you. I agree with you though that like it's accessible. It's accessible, right? It's just one button. Like go forward or do not go forward, sprint or do not sprint and everything else is contextual. Yeah. Yeah. Like I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah, it's kind of like a Dota on like 2x speed, you know, you can resolve an entire build and battle match in 4 minutes because you're you're like you're sprinting the entire time. It just It's really It's really novel to me and really interesting. I don't know if they had the sprint button in all the previous versions, but yeah, I was really impressed by that. Keeps me playing it. I'd be interested to see because the turbo button also doubles as that attack speed boost, I'd actually see this I'd love to see them tweak that up a little bit more and increase it cuz we were talking about like combat resolution takes a long time. I think that's another issue here is that, you know, there's combat readability which we talked about, hard to know what's going on, who's winning, who's not, do I retreat, do I not retreat. The other thing that it takes is just time to resolve. Especially the end game, you have so many units in combat with one another, it'd be interesting to see them tweak that a little bit more so that

combat will resolve quicker. Because you there's also opportunity cost which I found to be one of the biggest barriers to combat which is like I could be farming, I could be doing something else, I could be growing rather than shrinking and all I'm going to get out of this combat is maybe a key cuz you get when you when you bust another player, you get a key which gives you a powerful character. I'd like to see a little bit little bit more rewards there. Yeah, I'm on team accessibility though. Most accessible game I think they've created. I agree. I agree on that. I think we all agree that this is going to be a major success. The question is Matt is the most negative of us. I think I'm the most positive. Phil falls somewhere in the middle of just how big of a success this game is going to be, but it's been It's been a pleasure playing this multiple times a day. I love it. I'm a I'm a squad buster, 100%. So, um No social. No social though. Let's Let's see if they can't throw us None of that. No No No leader boards. tried an emote?

Yeah. Yeah, I know. But But I think there's there's so many things that are still left that not have not been added. Live ops events are Live ops is not there. Escape from Match 3. Yeah. Episode race. Volcano. What are you waiting for, Supercell? Let's go. Open that playbook up. Exactly. This is There's There's ton of low-hanging fruits, if you will, and and very clear paths for this game to develop. We've seen only one update. And even that one update was pretty good already. That came in less than a month after the launch. So, I bet they have a goddamn chest full of features and stuff that they will be throwing at the players as soon as this launches. But super interesting strategy. We'll be following how this cannibalizes, how many downloads they're going to get during the first month, how widely this game is going to be accepted, and then most like most importantly, what is the retention going to be like? Is it towards what the demo said, or is it more towards like the best retention we've ever seen type of a category? So, very curious to see that. Yeah. On that note, if you haven't read

the deconstruction written by Solopreneur, Philip Black, you should from Game Economist, you should check it out. And um gentlemen, Matt, thank you for jumping on on the podcast. Phil, as always, thank you for being Game Economist. Thanks for having us. And thanks for the deconstruction. The deconstruction was, by the way, marvelous. There were a few people writing it. You wrote it first, and it was goddamn great. So, if you haven't read it, it's it's pure magic. So, Matt, you helped to edit it. And Laura, Laura helped edit as well. And one mysterious person, too. Don't be humble. It takes It It takes a It takes a village to write one deconstruction. We know it. No, it was great. Great work. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Read the uh deconstruction if you're on the blog. It's right below. If you're not on the blog, go to deconstructoroffun.com, go to blog, you'll find the uh the deconstruction there. It is a great read, and this was discussion based on Phil's amazing deconstruction. On that note, thank you very much, and bye-bye.

You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. More importantly, are you a member of the If you 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructoroffun.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry's best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand, or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the Deconstructor of Fun content creators. Thanks for listening.