Squad Busters makes $472,000 on Chinese App Store as version 2.0 is slow to ignite global fortunes

Supercell’s Squad Busters has generated just $472,000 in gross player spending on the Chinese App Store during its first seven weeks in the country.

After launching on April 21st, 2025 in China with parent company Tencent acting as publisher, AppMagic estimates suggest the squad-based action game made 64% of that revenue in its first week, or $303,000.

The remaining $169,000 in player spending has taken a further six weeks to generate, with near-immediate slowdown from the game’s early spending peak.

Player spending over the first week of June was just shy of $10,100, accounting for 3% of the earnings achieved in its first week.

Squad Busters’ earnings in China are likely higher when including sales on Android stores, but the falloff on the App Store has been stark, with daily player spending at a record low of just $1,100 on May 27th. A record high in the country of $52,500 was reached on on April 23rd.

A new hope

Despite crossing the $100 million mark in its first year, the global game has failed to reach the heights of its forebears like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars, and, much like the Chinese version, has been unable to maintain player spending in the long-term.

Between Google Play and the App Store, Squad Busters’ global version peaked at $30.2m in monthly earnings in June 2024, its first full month on said stores after global launch.

Since then, Squad Busters went through a 10-month decline down to a record low of $1.6m in April 2025.

Supercell recently launched version 2.0 of the title on May 13th, overhauling the gameplay in an attempt to breathe new life into the game. This update added new central Hero characters to lead each squad, removed certain features, altered victory conditions, and added a new emphasis on strategy.

In almost four weeks since Version 2.0 went live, Squad Busters has generated just $1.8m. Spending has risen approximately 50% compared to same number of days pre-update, which stood at $1.2m.

However, revenue remains a far cry from the $26.2m made over Squad Busters' first four weeks in 2024.

Speaking to Supercell head of marketing Rob Lowe and head of Squad Busters Johnathan Rowlands, PocketGamer.biz learned that the game is now being much more heavily targeted towards "more experienced mobile gamers", where it previously intended to "bridge casual, midcore and even hardcore audiences".