In this post, I’ll take a look at why I think retention is becoming a problem for Clash Royale, to include a cursory analysis of their TV Royale feature.

I have a love/hate relationship with Clash Royale. Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty hooked – it’s the first thing I fire up in the morning and I log several sessions throughout the day. The addictive core loop and excellent production values have ensured another top grosser for Supercell.

Is there trouble in paradise, though? There seem to be some signs that the game is not bound for eternal chart dominance. Perhaps the meta is faltering a bit in its bid to retain players over the long term.

App Annie shows a downward revenue trend

While perhaps it’s too early to be looking at the industry tea leaves, there’s a clear downward trend. The game currently sits at 16 in the US iTunes grossing charts. Would that we all have that sort of problem, but it’s not quite up to par for Supercell.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the game hasn’t performed so well in Asia. In fact, it’s doing worse than Clash of Clans. Again, it’s still early days, so maybe there’s an update in the offing that will address this. I should also note that the game is sitting comfortably in the top 5 grossing in other strong markets: Italy (#2 grossing), Spain (#3), France (#4).

But I’d be surprised if there weren’t concerned parties in Helsinki.

To everything, churn churn

It’s hard to monetize a game that is losing players and I think it’s safe to say there’s a fair amount of churn in Clash Royale.

TV Royale  – at launch and in the following months, there were millions of views of the top-watched matches.  Nowadays, it’s rare when a match is viewed more than 150K times.

You might say that views are now distributed over all the arenas as previously TV was just one feed of matches. Even still, the sum of all match views now would be dwarfed by the view count from before–probably by about 4x. There are less viewers, so players are either not playing as much or aren’t sufficiently invested to watch and learn how to get better.

Interesting aside: the above chart helps support Supercell’s decision to add a new Arena (Frozen Peak). There were likely a lot of players “stuck” between Royal and Legendary Arenas. Adding a tier helped players get over the progression hump a bit, though now it seems there’s a fair number of players stuck between Frozen and Legendary…

Also looking at TV Royale, you can see that the matches between top ranked players feature decks with maxed out cards. Top players are at end content which means they don’t have a whole lot to spend money on. If this isn’t addressed soon, they will get bored and bail.

I have no doubt that more content is coming. Will players return for it?

Clan Activity – file under “anecdotal,” but activity in my clan has died down pretty substantially. While not scientific, it’s a pretty decent indicator that the game is not as captivating as it once was.

The sky is likely not falling, but there is a clear downward trend. In my next post, I’ll discuss some other potential factors and some ideas for fixing them.

Please check out the second post here.