Pressure to launch a new game led to Squad Busters' global release

• The team felt the company wasn't being bold enough with new game launches.
• Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen said a one-month soft launch didn't leave room for testing of the meta and long-term retention and monetisation beyond D7.

Internal pressure and the feeling that Supercell’s risk appetite was getting too constrained played a role in the launch of Squad Busters - the first live game to be shut down by the studio.

That’s according to the company’s CEO Ilkka Paananen and the title’s game lead Eino Joas, as detailed in a new blog post on the company’s performance over the past year.

In the article, Paananen noted the challenge of launching a new mobile game, which he claims is “harder than ever”. In 2024, Supercell made the decision to release Squad Busters, five-and-a-half years after it launched its last hit, Brawl Stars.

Beta Busted

Paananen said development on Squad Busters began in 2020. Following three years of development focused on core gameplay, the team went into a closed beta in February 2023 with 5,000 players.

The title achieved 29% D7 retention, which didn’t meet its goals. After another three months of adding more player agency with boosts, abilities and map events, it entered a second beta in May 2023 with more than 140,000 players.

Here, D1 retention hit 61%, D3 44% and D7 38%. The title was also said to have received positive feedback from content creators in its Creator Program, as well as Apple and Google.

Paananen said internal pressure was building at Supercell during this time to take bold risks - though insisted that didn’t come from the leadership team.

"We had a success rate of 100% on our previous five launches,” said Joas. “We all felt that our risk appetite was getting too constrained, and we weren't being bold enough.”

"We were blind to that"

After launching and scaling the team, Supercell soon found the title didn’t work with a large group of players.

"We wanted the game to be for everyone,” said Joas. “Everyone could pick it up, understand the controls, and enjoy it. But there was a huge gap between expectations and reality.

“We had 40 million pre-registrations, 75 million installs, but not a lot of those players stuck around. They came in and didn't find what they were looking for. We were blind to that.”

Key lessons from the title’s failure included:

• Large beta samples don’t predict global behaviour.
• A third, longer beta might have exposed the title’s problems earlier.
• The one month soft launch didn’t allow for testing of the meta and long-term retention and monetisation beyond D7.
• Don’t invest in a “massive marketing push before the product vision is deeply validated”.

Paananen and Joas have previously discussed Squad Busters’ challenges here.