As a resurgent Clash Royale peaks, does Supercell need a radical change in strategy for new games?

• Clash Royale delivered its third-best month ever with $78m in revenue a 10x increase from early 2023.
• It has been seven years since Supercell’s last major new hit.
• Competitors such as Rivergame, Century Games, and Microfun continue scaling through focused genre strategies and aggressive UA.

Jakub Remiar is a product and game design consultant.

Clash Royale just had its third-best month in its nine-year history, with $78 million in net revenue. 

Compared to its lowest level in February 2023, which was $8.3m, it's basically a 10x increase. It is currently doing more than 55% of the whole monthly portfolio revenue making it again the Supercell's biggest game after eight years!

It is more than 3x Brawl Stars' monthly revenue so it seems Supercell pulled another "10x the revenue of an old game" trick out of its sleeve. 

Let's look at the last two years of what actually happened:

▪️ In June of 2023, they introduced Card Evolutions, essentially doubling the daily revenue from $250k to $500k. This is a qualitative upgrade to some units. More units are getting these with every update. Basically, recycling their whole unit collection for more different units created from old ones. Very smart and efficient move from a production standpoint.

▪️ Then, in March 2024, they introduced Lucky Drops, an analogue system of Star Chest from Brawl Stars, which was used during the "to the moon" phase of its scaling. But you would just get 2 Lucky drops from daily quests, so it's not that impactful on economy yet, as you see on the chart above, this was still more of a testing period.

▪️ Then comes the critical update one year later, during March 2025, which removed the signature timed chests feature from the game and added 4 Lucky Drops daily instead. BUT, they also heavily nerfed the economy, giving much less resources to players, no more season shop, no more gem offers, no more daily quests. This is the real culprit behind this. And then comes the rocket boom of the game, making it now $2m a day instead of $ 500k a day.

▪️ They also added Merge Tactics on June 30th, which is a streamlined version of their killed auto chess game Clash Mini. It's great that it feeds the exact same Pass Royale progression and you get to play with the exact same heroes as in the main game, but as you see, this was not the killer feature. It was economy rebalance and the gacha system of Lucky Drops.

▪️ Last month even Lucky Drops were removed and instead there are Lucky chests now and four kinds of them. Common, Magic, Haunted and Phantom. What does this mean in practical terms? This continues the paradigm of giving out even less daily free resources, as getting those five-star drops with the possibility of dropping full evolution cards is now not really going to happen, unless you open 5000 chests to break through the 0,02% chance.

To the moon

It took Brawl Stars nine months to peak, during its "going to the moon" phase, when it more than 10x'd the revenue from $8m a month to $90m and from that point it's been declining for the last 17 months.

Clash Royale is already in month nine of the "to the Moon" phase and it seems it has also peaked following a similar pattern on both revenue and downloads curves. Even though Supercell relies mostly on its army of influencers, conventional UA also seems to be heavily running here, which is definitely not cheap. 

Does this mean that Clash Royale will only decline from this point? Most probably, even though it will be a very lucrative decline, still making dozens of millions per month, but a decline nevertheless. And this is the part where the long-term outlook starts to look pretty grim for the Finnish mobile juggernaut. After seven years, Brawl Stars is still their last successful “youngest, billion a year” game in the portfolio. 

After its global launch in 2018, there were nine other soft-launched or publicly announced games, which were all killed. The streak continues with Squad Busters' demise at the end of last month. So this leaves us with three more publicly known projects on the table, but I am sure there are many more in development just unannounced.

Mo.co, a PvE-based action RPG, which had the strangest global launch in March this year, compared to the Hollywood-style fanfare of Squad Busters. The team already had to clarify that the game is not following Squad Busters' fate yet. Looking at the revenue numbers and downloads, this still seems like a prolonged soft launch, as the project announced a major revamp slated for Q1 2026. 

Project R.I.S.E., another salvage operation similar to Merge Tactics, built from the ashes of Clash Heroes, already had a few pre-alphas, but given its feature set, it is still very early in development. 

Boat Game is in its second alpha test at the time of this article. It is a third-person multiplayer shooter with naval combat, but again, as it is an alpha test, it is still in its early stages of development. 

New games strategy

These newest games are a reflection of Supercell’s signature strategy of being very creative, tackling new genres and perfecting mainstream concepts for mobile. But this has not produced a hit for the last seven years and we also shouldn’t forget that Clash of Clans was an iteration on Backyard Monsters and Hay Day was an iteration on FarmVille. 

Is their current strategy still viable in 2025? As we see the onslaught of rising Chinese companies doubling down on their core genre focus and scaling their games through very aggressive UA tactics, this seems like an outdated setup.

As seen on the Rivergame’s portfolio of new games, all are 4X. And even though they released three new games in 2024 and none of them produced a billion alone, together they are already past that billion, and all of them are still scaling up. 

Just the mobile monthly revenue we see in the west is now nearly $250m for October 2025. A similar picture can be seen in Century Games' portfolio, which has produced this year's biggest new game by revenue, Kingshot, which made $80m last month.  

Again, another similar graph can be seen on Microfun’s portfolio, which has literally taken over the merge-2 genre. Still soft-launching multiple games last year, and all of them are still scaling up. All of these companies have very similar product strategies. 

Perfect and advance your genre, work in templates, which gives them incredible production speed and master the best ad creatives for the biggest scale by any means necessary, even to the point that they have now built an extra fully fledged onboarding game to offset the mismatch of fake ad creatives.

Deep down, I was hoping that Supercell would, at some point, enter the 4X genre with their Clash IP, but now I am not even sure how that would work without the aggressive UA strategy that is mandatory for all the top 4X games. If Clash Royale starts to decline and there doesn’t seem to be any new “saviour” on the nearest horizon, there is not much growth ahead.

I can’t imagine Supercell will be able to pull something like Kingshot anytime soon. Whether we like it or not, this is the current state of the mobile games market and Supercell will need to radically adjust to it eventually or risk being pushed to the sidelines.

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