(If you haven’t already, please see part 1)

In the previous post, I discussed reasons to believe that Clash Royale is having a bit of an issue with longer-term retention. In this post I’m going to cover a few more reasons why that might be and some suggestions to improve things.

Tournaments are broken

The recently released Tournaments feature is pretty much broken. It is very hard to get into one – you have to keep refreshing the page and hope that you:

1.  Actually get any results
2.  Get results that aren’t already filled

It’s a very frustrating experience.

Once you are in there, it’s pretty fun — you can count on getting a good binge of play. However, the current structure means that, in the last hours/minutes of the tournament, there are usually just a handful of people left jockeying for position — either to place or move up a reward tier. This means it can be hard to get matches toward the end. Also, it’s generally the very best players duking it out, leaving it very demoralizing for less advanced players.

Suggestions for improving tournaments

1. Once a player looking for a tournament hits refresh a few times and is unsuccessful finding anything, serve them an offer to create a tournament for a discount. This will encourage players to spend gems on tournaments and have the added benefit of creating more tournaments so players are less likely to be faced with endless refreshing.
2. Let players chip in their gems to host tournaments. Granted this requires some UI consideration, but it would be a neat feature for players and would also encourage gem spend.
3. Give players a reason to stick around in the tournament. This ensures a more lively tournament and allows for better matchmaking (less waiting around for a match). Perhaps creating a lowest tier in which the bottom finishers, save maybe the last 5 people, are granted a card or two.
4. Add more achievements for tournament hosting/participation.

Clans/Social is lacking

It’s tough having a multiplayer competitive game on mobile — the gameplay generally doesn’t suit the patterns of use for mobile devices. Luckily, there are so many people playing, it’s easy to find a match (unless you’re looking for a tournament, heh). However, because people are on their phones sporadically, the clan chat is pretty sparse. There’s a bit of sharing of matches, some discussion about cards, but overall it doesn’t feel like a multiplayer clan/community.

Currently, in a match, players have to rely on emotes to communicate. This is fine, but players need more control over them. It is especially grating to be spammed by emotes in this game because strategy is overshadowed by the random component. It’s extremely frustrating to battle against someone who constantly emotes and rubs your face in a loss — akin to being in a console FPS and be subjected to teabagging, name calling, etc. Not terribly suited to more-casual mobile play and it adds to the “f this, I’m quitting” impulse.

Suggestions for improving social/clans

1. Make it easier for friends to find one another. Nothing like real-world ties to strengthen digital ones.
2. Allow clans to create timed events or give them some other reason to all be online at once. People online at the same time will increase stickiness.
3. Offer clans the ability to create cheaper clan-only tournaments. Let clan members all chip in (see above suggestion in Tournaments).
4. Clan vs clan! I’m sure this is coming, but the sooner the better.
5. Let players squelch emotes.

Legendaries and experimentation

There’s (at the very least) the perception that legendaries have upset the balance of the game. Whether this is true or not is not so important if the perception it’s true is pervasive. Looking at the meta (top battles on TV Royale), it is clear that legendaries feature prominently. Based on anecdotal evidence, I certainly seem to lose more against decks that have legendaries.

This was already said in the excellent Deconstructor of Fun post, but it’s annoying enough to bring up again. The game doesn’t allow for deck experimentation. You are actively punished for trying new cards and combos. You could try clan battles, but given the fact clanmates are rarely online at the same time, this is hard to do.

 

 

 

 

Suggestions to improve on this

1. Consider giving new players legendaries instead of epics. Granted, this might be hard to do retroactively.
2. Give players a very clear idea about how they can get legendaries.
3. Allow cheap (coins) buy-in to no trophy battles for practice decks.
4. Echoing the Deconstructor article — add a daily goals system to encourage using certain cards — see Hearthstone
   • “Get one win using only skeletons”
     • Note: This would have to be programmatic to ensure player had the cards.

 

Final Thoughts

Is Clash Royale broken? Certainly not. It’s an impressive achievement to bring a core PvP game to the masses. It’s even more challenging to keep them coming back, which seems to be happening now. I’m confident that with some changes to allow for a more robust meta, the game can enjoy a long lifespan. Kudos to Supercell and good luck as the game matures!

 

 

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.