Brawl Stars, to the moon!
Guest post by Kenneth Landen, Director of Product at Hit Factor
Executive Summary
In the ever-evolving landscape of mobile gaming, Supercell's Brawl Stars has undergone a remarkable resurgence, transforming challenges into triumphs. Ilkka Paananen's acknowledgment of their need to "Serve Players in a Live Game They Love, So It’s Played and Remembered Forever" has fueled a series of strategic moves.
From a revenue dip in the post-COVID era to the removal of paid loot boxes, Brawl Stars has faced obstacles. However, the game's recent success is evident in its January 2024 performance, marking a historic high in revenue and unprecedented engagement metrics.
Key contributors to this success include:
New Monetization Tech- including tiered offers that include random luck mechanics
Battle Pass Optimizations- such as the change to IAP only purchases
Better Economy Management
Deeper Economic Depth via Hypercharges- a new ability slot for some of the Brawlers
Social Focused LiveOps
As Brawl Stars charts a course for the future, it's evident that Supercell's commitment to iteration and adaptation is steering the game toward continued success. While challenges persist, the game's trajectory is promising, aligning with Ilkka’s vision for Supercell’s future success.
WTF is going on?
On February 14, 2023, Ilkka Paananen published a public letter “The Next Chapter of Supercell”. In this letter, he acknowledged that one of the key challenges that the company needed to focus on was improving how they served players in their live games. It is my belief that we are starting to see that effort bear fruit.
From the start of 2023 to the end of September, Brawl Stars was earning around $260k a day. New content releases would drive intermittent spikes in revenue, that would push revenue up to between $500k and $750k.
A respectable amount of revenue for most game developers, but far and away from what we come to expect from Supercell, and a significant dip from the momentary highs at the start of the Covid era. A few different factors contributed to this decline in revenue: a post-covid-world engagement and spend hangover, a slow inflation of the player resource economy, including the removal of paid loot boxes in the game, as well as Supercell pulling its games from Russia.
However, as seen in our Daily Revenue data provided by data.ai, starting in October the game has been seeing significant growth in revenue. Culminating with the highest revenue month the game has seen in years in January 2024.
This massive uplift in revenue also comes with a resurgence of player engagement. ASthe GM of Brawl Stars, Frank Keienburg, has stated on Twitter “Our DAU is the highest in the history of Brawl Stars”. Also noting that both D30 engagement, as well as Returning Player engagement, is the highest it’s ever been. The CCU numbers in late January were so high that the game actually had some technical issues that resulted in some “matchmaking weirdness and general slowness”.
Tweets from Frank Keienburg, the GM of Brawl Stars
As covered in the Two and Half Gamers podcast, this growth in DAU is also largely due to a resurgence in installs. The highest they have been since the start of 2022, at roughly 150% greater than 2023’s baseline install rate.
With these impressive KPI improvements in mind, let's dive into some of the items that are contributing to this success, as well as predict where Brawl Stars will be going from here.
Monetization tech and Economy health management improvements
Since October 2023, there have been many changes to Brawl Stars that are collectively contributing to the improved performance of the game.
These feature updates have changed the way players purchase content, how quickly players are exposed to new content and goals, the way players earn progression resources, and they have brought an element of luck (removed with the boxes) back into monetization. Many of these changes are centered around the Battlepass, which is a key content and goal driver for players:
Battlepass changes
Brawl Stars’ Brawl Pass, has seen many iterations over the last year or so. This includes the amount of steps, the types and counts of resources, the primary carrots, the infinite end reward, the XP needed per step, and the currency required to purchase it.
These iterative tests have culminated in a much more economically healthy battlepass:
Purchasing options
One of the largest changes to the Pass was removing the ability to purchase the pass with gems, which shifted the purchase option to IAP only.
The Brawl Pass with multiple purchase options
Previous to this change, many free-to-play players were able to save up the gems required to buy the pass through purely free gameplay methods. This change is targeted at those players with the gem economy to purchase the pass without having to make IAP purchases, thus targeting conversion and reconversion rates. The Brawl pass is also a key component to quest content depth and goal setting in the game. So while it isn’t a particularly expensive IAP, its core value is in driving player engagement and stickiness. Monetizing it helps reinforce that stickiness and makes it a more effective monetization tool going forward.
Removing the Brawler from the Pass
The second major change to the pass was the change to the primary carrot of the pass: The Pass no longer contains a new featured Brawler. In its place there is a host of new high quality brawler skin and cosmetic sets.
Removing the featured brawler from the pass allows the Brawl team to include that Brawler in a dedicated IAP offer, thus creating a new monetization vertical for the game. This dedicated IAP allows the developers to bundle content and price points specific to that Brawler in a separate vertical that doesn’t compete with the core goals of the Battle Pass system.
The new skins in the Pass also address one of the team’s core goals of providing an increased amount of content for players. Each Pass has 2-3 new high quality cosmetic sets, which is a significant increase in the amount of cosmetic content presented to players. This gives players more cosmetic agency, which they had been requesting on social networks.
Players are still able to unlock some brawlers via the pass through Star Road credits. But these brawlers tend to be older content that isn’t as highly sought after by players when compared to the new featured Brawler.
Infinite Reward Changes
The third major change is by far the biggest impactor on the player economy. It's been reported by the developers that the pass itself contains more free soft currency now than previous passes for free to play players. This was done in an effort to help smooth over the community reaction to the change in purchasing methods of the pass.
However, what they’ve not called out is the change to the infinite rewards that players get once they complete the pass, which has significantly reduced the amount of soft currency players can expect from the end game of the Pass.
Prior to the latest pass design iteration, after a player hits max pass level, they earned a set amount of soft currency. The player was then able to infinitely repeat the last level and keep earning the soft currency until the season ended. The latest change has replaced the infinite level currency reward to a Starr Drop, an unpaid gacha pull, which adds a luck component while grants lesser amounts of soft currency overall.
This keeps the player engaged with exciting reward moments and reduces the soft currency in the economy for heavily engaged players.
User @colonbrace on X posted this comparison image of infinite rewards
As you can see from the image above that compares the infinite rewards from the older passes to the new pass, players are earning much less soft currency than previously. This change helps reduce the amount of free soft currency inflowing into the game. When paired with some of the other economy focused changes, such as the new Hypercharges (which we will cover later in this article), you can see why the soft currency economy is drying up and creating demand for additional soft currency purchases.
Pass Cadence, Quest XP, and Tier Requirements
Finally, the last significant change to the Brawl Pass system is the cadence of the Pass, which has moved to one new Pass a month, halving the release cadence.
This cadence increase pushes on the count of new liveops content in the game, stacked with the increase of skins in the pass itself. This cadence increase, along with an increase in pass quests refresh times from twice a week to once a day, has increased the rate at which players get and accomplish new goals. Thus driving on player engagement and stickiness.
While players are getting more quests more often, they are also seeing an increase in XP required to get to the next tier of the pass. This is a balance play to ensure players are completing the pass at a speed necessary to maximize player attention while reducing economic inflation from free pass rewards. We expect to see the Brawl devs continue to fine tune the tier count, tier XP requirements, XP given per quest, and quest refresh rates, as they look to hone in on a sweet spot.
More Economy Depth via the addition of Hypercharges
Hypercharges are a new and very powerful end-progression ability that players can unlock with 5000 coins, roughly $22, when they hit level 11 with a specific Brawler.
Players unlock Hypercharges at brawler progression level 11.
While Hypercharges were initially released in September of 2023, primarily to a small handful of older Brawlers, we start to see their effects really take hold in October and November 2023, as they continue to sink excess coin soft currency out of the economy.
Supercell is currently releasing 6 new Hypercharges every 2 months, which is quite a big number given the amount of design work needed to implement them without imbalancing the game.
There are currently 76 brawlers in Brawl Stars, which means that at the current pace we could be getting new Hypercharges for a couple of years.
Their heavy utility, which is paired with high coin costs to unlock, ensures that they will continue to be in demand for a long time. This provides an excellent mid/long term credit sink for the economy, roughly 15,000 coins per month, roughly $66, which will help set a new economic baseline over the next year.
Many of the newer and over tuned Brawlers got their Hypercharges in December of 2023
Players can also earn these Hypercharges in Starr Drops, although they are extremely rare, as well as farm coins from various free to play means over an extended period of time to unlock them. I was able to unlock two during the latest Coin Shower community event.
New Monetization Features
One of the most impactful changes to Brawl Stars’ monetization is the addition of new monetization tech that allows for tiered purchases.
Tiered purchases are nothing new for our industry, with games like Monopoly Go, Legendary Game of Heroes, and many others using different flavors of the tech for quite some time. However, it's a first for Brawl Stars, and right at a moment when it is most needed. That’s because these new tiered purchase options include an old fan favorite, luck mechanics!
CCTV Poco skin tiered IAP offer
Players are shown the primary carrot of the offer on tier 1 of the system. The reward value then drops on level 2 and then progressively increases towards higher value rewards as they progress up the tier chain. Throughout the tiers, players may need to pay additional fees to continue unlocking rewards. The rewards range from soft currency, to Brawl Pass XP doublers, and finally to Starr Drops, which are essentially gacha pulls. The final tier of the offer is a Legendary gacha pull, which includes the best economic drops, cosmetics, and brawler ability unlocks.
This new tech is also being utilized for direct purchase of early access on newly released brawlers.
When the tech is utilized on early access direct Brawler purchases, the reward schemes change to be more focused on the progression requirements, as well as on unlocking cosmetics, for that brawler. In the above photos you can see the new Brawler “Larry and Lawrie”. This offer, which costs $14.99 to unlock, did not have additional purchases after the first primary purchase. As such this offer is more akin to a traditional IAP bundle with the addition of time gates to collect rewards from the bundle. Players have to wait 1 day in between each of the free tiers, thus strongly incentivizing retention of purchasers during that time period.
In games with more aggressive monetization strategies we would likely see variants of this offer at different price points, that target players spend history. At the top end of the spectrum we would likely see an offer that included the resources needed for the Brawler to unlock max level, as well as unlocking max gear. Depending on the amount of content that is prepared for that Brawler on release, you may also include something like a curated gacha pull for that brawler that drops a skin from a pool of skins specific to it. The offer shown above still leaves quite a bit of investment needed from the player to max out the brawler, which makes sense given the price point.
Winter Sales
During the month of December we saw a large inflow of discounted offers in the shop. These offers ranged from individual Hypercharges or Brawlers…
To Brawler bundles, that included a brawler, instant progression to max level, their Hypercharge, and cosmetics…
As well as from winter holiday themed skin offers, some of which used the new tiered IAP tech, to IAP only currency bundles…
One of the things that stands out to me as a PM is the high diversity of offerings from a mechanics perspective. This mix of offers, from gem or IAP, tiered or stand alone content, to me seems like either they developers were testing the player base or new mechanics. It is also possible, in the case of the inconsistent tiered content, that there was a lack of throughput, perhaps driven by a lack of liveops headcount required to run offer depth.
The other major item that stands out is how much value many of these offers are giving to players. In some cases 10x the value over historic offers. This, when not properly managed, can lead to cannibalization of future revenue.
Social Focused LiveOps
During this period of heightened revenue growth we also saw a handful of engagement focused events and features rolled out. These additions helped ensure the game was stacking users while they were running the most important sales of the year.
New 5v5 Game Modes
5v5 is a new game mode variant for each of the core game modes.
Bringing in an extra two players on each side into the match turns the gameplay into a more action filled and fast paced experience. Players will gravitate to the mode if they are craving that level of chaotic energy. In my opinion, this mode’s primary purpose is to let players blow off some more steam. It’s very difficult to strategize in these game modes due to the chaos unfolding on the screen, but that allows for a more casual gameplay experience.
The mode has been appearing pseudo-randomly since its launch in December, coinciding with major tentpole releases. I expect Supercell to continue to iterate on these core modes, as well as on their maps in 2024, given how integral they are to the core loop of the game. This is an area where a large liveops team would really help drive diversity and relevancy on content. With the launch of the new lunar new year battle pass I would have expected map variants with lunar new year themed art, instead of the winter/snow themes that have been in the game for the last two months.
New Win Streak Mechanics
The three key placements where players can see their win streak
Win streaks were added back into the game and reward players with additional Trophies (a progression point system) when they string together wins. This feature, which displays in three key areas: the home screen, the match victory screen, and on the player’s profile, is a fantastic peacocking mechanic as it allows friends to compete with each other over who can get the largest streak going.
Additionally, this feature really ramps up the pressure on players to try as hard as they can each match so that they don’t lose their streak. This subconsciously increases anxiety and joy within matches, making the wins and losses feel that much more impactful to the player.
New community goal events
The Brawl Together community event progression board, which is buried inside of the news feature
Twice over the last few months we’ve seen community goal events that create elimination goals for the players. These events, which provide a few different high value rewards to the player, incentivize players to get as many eliminations during the event as quickly as possible. Players push to get those needed kills as quickly as they can so that they can extend the period of time of exclusive event modifiers, such as double XP/Mastery as well as Coin Shower, which awards coins for every XP players get from wins.
This event is particularly meaningful to free to play players as it is a key coin inflow into the economy, as well as a free way to get access to Legendary and Mythic Starr Drops.
These events were stacked alongside other major feature releases, thus further pushing onto engagement with a community during one of the most hype periods of the year.
New social targeted battle pass quests
New socially focused quest types
Finally, we also saw the addition of new socially targeted quests near the end of the Starr Toon Brawl Pass. These quests were framed to the players as a way to catch up on their pass, due to the large amount of XP given upon completion relative to standard quests, if they still had a few levels left to go prior to the end of the season.
The “Use ‘Play Again’ N times” quests target the use of the button that appears on the Victory/Defeat screen that allows you to opt to play with the same set of players again. This appears to be a push to get players to build possible friendships through repeated plays with the same group of players. Where Supercell could push further here is by giving additional goals/quests to the players that choose to play together again.
The “Play N Matches in a Team” is a more obvious attempt to get players to socialize within the game. These two features show that Supercell understands that if they want to push on engagement they have to increase the social aspects of their game, which at the moment, lacks popular features we would expect from other mobile titles in the same space.
A potentially obvious option would be for the Brawl team to push further into providing shared goals and benefits for those that chose to team up. Something as simple as providing bonus Brawl Pass XP to users that are playing with a team can drive engagement.
Where they need to go from here
While the changes highlighted in this article show Supercell's drive and willingness to iterate to success, there is still room for further improvement to get on the same live operating level as some of the other top mobile game publishers such as Zynga and Scopely. In order for the Brawl team to really meet the expectations set by Ilkka’s letter, they will need to continue to scale up their live operations team to meet the heavy operations needs of further optimization.
Personalized Offers
It’s no surprise that there is a significant lack of personalization in the shop, given that there are currently no Product Managers working on the game. What they have been able to build and offer with the limited team size they have is truly impressive. Right now the personalization that exists in the store is limited to the current brawlers and skins a player owns, as well as those brawlers’ levels and gear unlocks.
The types of personalization that we would expect at a minimum in modern free to play games includes:
The player’s past purchasing history, so that players are not offered a $4.99 bundle after showing willingness to spend at $99 per purchase level.
The player’s soft currency wallet amounts, so that players are shown offers that include the required soft currency to meet their goals.
The player’s most frequently used brawlers, so that the skins that are being promoted to them are relevant to the brawlers they actually care about.
In some cases players are shown offers in the store that they can’t purchase due to not meeting progression requirements.
In this example, I was blocked from buying a Hypercharge because I don’t have the Brawler at level 11. Why not create an offer that allows me t o both buy the Hypercharge and the levels needed to unlock its utility, given there are similar offers that are bundled with the Brawler itself?
The game developers do not need to develop a machine learning algorithm to do simple targeting like this. They can leverage basic Recency, Frequency, and Monetary principles to build offers that appear at the right moments, that are relevant, and at the right price for the user.
Event design structure and theming
Brawl Stars event design structure is designed in a way that optimizes for diversity in gameplay so that a variety of player persona types is satisfied with at least one offering. That works to engage a diverse playerbase, but in a shallow way. Players can play their chosen mode, but the design lacks incentives to deeply commit to a mode that's ideally themed, as well as the mechanics to monetize the modes more than just the Brawl Pass quest mechanics.
As Supercell continues to iterate on core gameplay throughout 2024 and grow their headcount to support the speed of content and iteration, we would expect them to further iterate on the reward/goals, themes, and monetization systems surrounding events so that they can turn engagement into monetization. This could be as simple as a time limited themed event that has limited free entries every N hours, but allows players to purchase tickets for additional access, while also utilizing matching themed cosmetics as a chase reward for engagement.
Supercell has shown a willingness to iterate on events with their new 5v5 mode, as well as some of their other time limited events such as Boss Fight and the Permanent Vacation mode. We are just left asking ourselves why they haven’t attempted to push monetization further there.
Seasonal Quest cadence iterations
One of the most disappointing things to see for me personally as a player is the refresh rates of the current Brawl Pass Seasonal Quests. These limited quantity quests, which currently refresh every 24 hours, are a meaningful part of a player's goal setting. Being able to effectively accomplish all of my goals in a single session a day means I have very little reason to come back for session 2 or 3. This problem used to be even worse, when the refresh rate was set to twice a week.
Where have all the quests gone?
We are left then asking what is the optimal refresh cadence for these quests. Should there even be a limit to the amount of quests a player gets? The answer to that is likely yes, given these quests provide economic inflows for the players at the end of the brawl pass, and there are retention benefits to completing the pass near the end of the pass season.
But can we optimize the refreshing rate to maximize for average session counts? These timed quests are one of the game's key timer refreshes, which, similar to the chest system in Clash Royale, are a key part of the retention loop. Unlike Clash Royale, there are no short refresh rate options akin to the 4 hour chest refresh. It’s our recommendation that Supercell starts testing durations as short as 4 hours, or alternatively, provide another primary goal setting system for the user that doesn’t compete with the Brawl Pass quest system goals.
Pushing the luck mechanics
As noted by Javier Barnes in his article, the removal of the loot box system from the game resulted in a meaningful decline in revenue and player engagement. This is because luck mechanics are exciting and fun. Whether it is a paid experience or a free experience, as is the case with the loot box replacement Brawl stars added into the game earlier this year to combat the loss of loot boxes. Players love the experience of opening a MTG booster pack as an example.
A legendary Starr Drop gacha pull pre opening graphic
That said, there is much less player appetite for paid loot boxes that can impact gameplay within the Brawl community, and increasing pressure from EU legislators means that there are more constraints now when designing these new luck mechanics.
In order to satisfy both the player needs for more luck based mechanics, as well as the player needs to restrict the mechanic from impacting core gameplay, my suggestion would be for the team to focus on cosmetic content as the key carrots. Cosmetics act as strong secondary goal drivers for many players without competing with the highly competitive nature we see in many of the most deeply engaged players.
This would be another key area that the Brawl team would likely have to staff up for in order to fill a gacha system with enough content to have sufficient spend depth while also ensuring that the cosmetic fodder items are still of value to the player base.
Reinforce social
Brawl Stars has made some recent strides towards improving the social experience of players while putting a short term emphasis on the benefits of its current social offerings. From the Mega Pig guild event, which gives guild members free star drops, to the Brawl Pass quests centered around forming new friendships or playing with a team.
One of the key areas for growth will be to turn those short lived goals into meaningful permanent features. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of great social goal systems built in mobile FPS or MOBA games to use as a good framework for Brawl. Many of the guild goal systems in rpg games would suit Brawl Stars well, such as the guild perk system popular in many MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.
The Chinese SKU of Brawl Stars actually experimented with a Third Space where players could move their brawler avatars around in a 3D room and socialize with each other outside of the core gameplay experience. Those types of third space systems risk pulling players attention away from the core gameplay, and typically require secondary progression/customization systems to fully get the benefit from.
This will likely be one of the hardest design challenges for Brawl in the upcoming year.
Closing thoughts
2023 was a year of ups and downs for Brawl Stars, and Supercell as a whole. The team is moving steadily in a positive direction, thanks in part to growth of headcount and bringing in some key hires who were able to help iterate to success and vastly increase the amount of content per release cycle. The Brawl Stars team is small, by our estimates right around 45 people, but high cabaple. Those who know them would tell you that they are highly collaborative, often pulling some of their best ideas from team members who weren’t traditionally responsible for that specific task. They continue to prove that they are full to the brim with talent, but that the types of talent they will need going forward will start to look different than what they have primarily targeted in the past.
This new direction and the success it is bearing is an indication that Ilkka’s vision for the company is on the right track. Whether or not the team will leave money on the table will likely be down to how fast they can staff up their development teams.
