Squad Busters One Month Later: Down, But Not Out
Written by Phillip Black, Game Economist, Game Economist Consulting.
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Thanks to Krishna Israney, Mishka Katkoff, and Kenneth Landen for feedback and editing!
It's been about one month since Squad Busters launch—enough time for front-loaded marketing spend to subside and the immediate reality to set. Squad Buster’s launch failed. We were hilariously wrong about the launch prospects of this game.
Much less than acquiring portfolio-high download volume, Squad Busters is Supercell's weakest launch entry, behind only Boom Beach. While Squad Busters initially drove massive download quantity, it quickly sputtered out, and poor download quality translated to lackluster active users and revenue.
The unreliability of pre-registration numbers, the overestimation of brand equity, and the waning influence of first-party featuring are soon becoming recurring themes in mobile gaming; Squad Busters' launch throws these challenges into the spotlight.
It’s particularly a poor showing of Supercell’s IP. Gathering all Supercell IPs under one roof was supposed to be Squad Busters' strength, but the result is irreverent. Supercell may have brand recognition, but brand equity remains questionable.
One thing we know for sure: Squad Busters launched too early. Forgoing a soft launch deprived Supercell of the ability to assess even Day 30 KPIs. This decision remains puzzling, as there was no pressure to launch Squad Busters. Brawl Stars is completing a historic comeback, while Clash Royale requires immediate attention. Instead, Supercell now needs to repair both Clash Royale and Squad Busters while also managing a plethora of other initiatives: Spark Labs, a growing investment of 19 companies, scaling headcount & remote work, and a North American studio that rears its head once a quarter.
While the decision to forgo a soft launch was wrong, it was human. Sources indicate that no individual made the call, and leadership stood behind the decision. Forgoing a soft launch reflects a near decade of understandable Supercell frustration and an easy way out of prolonged soft launches: “Just do it.”
Combined with a brand view of Supercell IP as akin to Nintendo, glowing first-party allegiance, and an eagerness to rack up another win on top of Brawl Stars’ revival, Squad Busters’ launch was too tempting to pass up. Squad Busters is a disciplined reminder of the importance of soft launching and a reality check on the strength of platforms and mobile-first IPs.
While the game holds immense promise—a claim we stand behind—game lead Eino Jonas and the team are tasked with growing its magnitudes behind its portfolio peers. Yet, Brawl Stars reminds us that nothing is outside Supercell’s purview.
What Happened?
Squad Busters aimed to be Supercell’s biggest launch, something sources say Supercell’s CEO Ilkka himself encouraged. And on the heels of 40M pre-registrations and for five days post-launch, Squad Busters was Supercell’s biggest launch. But it quickly came tumbling down: pre-registration players didn’t stick around, and brand spend flopped anywhere that mattered.
Preregistration Woes
After a month, Sensor Tower estimates Squad Busters had 40M cumulative downloads, precisely the number of pre-registrations. This suggests a huge volume of pre-registered players didn’t download the game, which is automatic on Google Play but requires user action on the App Store. The weak download conversion funnel mirrors Call of Duty: Warzone’s March launch. Despite racking up 50M pre-registrations, Warzone scored only 19M downloads in its first two weeks.
Furthermore, the quality of pre-registered Squad Busters players is low. By offering pre-registration rewards in every Supercell game, marketing attracted an audience that was already happy in a Supercell game and reflected the massive Tier 3 share of their existing titles. And as we’ll see, there were little to no DAU drops in other Supercell titles during Squad Busters launch.
Brawl Stars Rewards for Squad Busters Pre-Registration
Pictured: Reward in Brawl Stars for hitting specific Squad Buster pre-registration targets.
The pre-registration effect frontloaded downloads, and for the first five days of Squad Busters launch, these exceeded portfolio highs before receding to portfolio lows1.
As a result, the cumulative download curve bent like a twig on day five.
Impact, Impact, Impact
Much of the launch download volume was chock-full of "fat," a combination of pre-registration players from Supercell's other titles and low-retention regions. Rather than growth, the massive drop in daily active users (DAU) so quickly after launch reflects a quick leaning-out process.
Despite concerns about potential cannibalization, Squad Busters' launch had surprisingly little effect on Supercell's existing portfolio. Beyond a slight Brawl Stars DAU dip, Squad Busters failed to sway players away from Supercell’s other titles. It's behind Supercell's smallest live title, Hay Day.
Furthermore, Squad Busters impact on Supercell's active users portfolio barely registers a blip: portfolio DAU is nearly flat pre- and post-launch, even inching downward.
It’s hard to attribute Squad Buster's first ten-day download volume between pre-registrations, first-party featuring, and brand spending. And, of course, all of these things interact in unique ways. But we know the download composition was overwhelmingly Tier 3. Over 60% of Squad Busters download volume came from Tier 3 countries2 - relatively more than Clash Royale or Brawl Stars during their launches.
The most obvious explanation is that Supercell’s existing active user portfolio is largely Tier 3, and these are the players who contributed to the early download volume. Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars are Supercell’s biggest games, all maintaining 50% or more Tier 3 DAU shares.
But there’s also the possibility that launch marketing and first-party store featuring brought large Tier 3 volume shares, in addition to the pre-registration population. Either hypothesis presents troubling conclusions:
Pre-registrations drove many early downloads, suggesting launch marketing did little.
Pre-registrations drove few early downloads, but launch marketing spend and featuring were largely low-value Tier 3 downloads.
And That’s Brand, Baby
Supercell spent on pre-registration ads, created a pre-registration campaign in their other titles, was rumored to have spent $15M or more on a star-studded live-action launch creative, and received ample first-party featuring. Each plank is designed to create a confluence of events culminating in the launch “moment.” It’s straight from the brand marketing playbook.
In an interview, Supercell marketing executive Rob Lowe explained their approach:
"We've done loads of analysis. We knew when we did this that it would come in at a huge level, get a lot of awareness, drop down a bit, and then come back up. Or you can start from nothing and build up over a long period of time. Both end up in roughly the same place. So, you have a bit of a choice there on how you do it."
Firms like Scopely also burst launch spend (as one Scopely GM named it: "the scorched earth strategy"). Still, they usually have ARPU and retention estimates for parceling spending appropriately before launch. With only a couple weeks in soft launch, Squad Busters had none of this.3
It’s hard to know if Supercell’s marketing strategy is post hoc rationalization, but there is evidence of a download rebound and a level of convergence in downloads between the titles.
On the other hand, the rebound is weakest in T1 regions. So far, the downloads haven’t translated to active users: Squad Busters maintains a constant T1 & 2 DAU share.
AAA Boom and Bust
Supercell’s “much more typical of a AAA game launch, and is atypical of a mobile launch” strategy failed.
While it succeeded in driving “awareness,” it failed to heed mobile acquisition’s iron law of LTV > CAC. And how could it? Without reliable ARPU estimates, which were forgone with the decision to forgo a longer soft-launch period, marketing fires blind, and “scorched earth” takes over—there are striking parallels to Marvel Snap’s equally expensive and questionable Samual L. Jackson ad.
This isn’t a new trend for Supercell, as their infamous 2015 Liam Neeson Super Bowl ad reminds us. And while it drove 80M YouTube views and likely 120M more during the most watched4 (and greatest) Super Bowl of all time, the impact on downloads appeared tame.
Questionable returns may have led Supercell’s Chief Marketing Officer, who was on the job for only half a year, to depart. While this occurred well before Squad Buster's launch, the brand thinking seems to have remained. Supercell now spends money on Summer Game Fest trailers to raise the firm’s prestige, desiring to become something akin to Nintendo. Prestige chasing is a troubling aim for mobile marketers, whose primary goal is growth.
As Eric Seufert explains, and appears to align with Supercell’s stated marketing goals,
A CMO should own the company's outward-facing growth initiatives. A lot of CMOs don’t think that way. They think they should own brand vision or the thoughts that are conjured up [when customers think of the product].
Another Seufert piece helps pin down Supercell’s marketing woes: the difference between brand recognition and brand equity.
While The Barbarian is certainly a recognizable element of Supercell’s titles, which may reduce marketing costs, players can instantly compare Squad Busters against other titles where price is no barrier to entry. This model emphasizes the role of soft launches: launch when KPIs suggest the game is compelling rather than editorial opinion, whether from marketing, platform, or game design leaders. Current Game Lead (and former Chief Game Lead) Eino Jonas emphasized Supercell’s “very, very high” bar for launches, and it’s now clear soft launch should be a mandatory part of the bar.
The launch of Squad Busters calls into question not just Supercell IP but all mobile-first IP. Despite the transmedia craze, the best Western mobile IP can do is a five-year follow-up to an Angry Bird movie sequel and a Mario Lopez match-3 game show. Meanwhile, HD franchises like Fallout are scoring nine-figure TV budgets. The ability of mobile-first brands to rely on organic traffic continues to be a skeptical proposition.
The Garden of Platform Eden
As seen in the charts throughout this piece, Clash Royale is Supercell’s biggest launch and its shortest soft launch, at two months.
During its 2016 launch, it received glowing first-party platform support, including a new and thick Editor’s Choice top banner and an “Editorial” section. The editorial introduced Royale’s characters, a precursor to the App Store’s current iteration.
Clash Royale App Store Launch Banner
Brawl Stars received similar glowing support but didn’t quite reach the heights of Royale’s custom banner. It was released after Apple’s 2017 App Store UI pivot removed the top-grossing leaderboards and embraced the editorial format.
Brawl Stars App Store Launch Banner
If first-party platforms helped push historic download volume on these titles, why couldn’t they do the same for Squad Busters? Sources indicate that the first parties were thrilled with Squad Busters and pledged similar support. But featuring is not the kingmaker it once was.
Despite ATT's attempts to reclaim platforms' distribution power, it’s been an open secret that the power of featuring has crumbled, and pre-registrations haven’t plugged the gap. By all appearances, platforms couldn’t deliver high-quality Tier 1 downloads as they did for Brawl Stars and Clash Royale.
Frustration, Hubris, and The Next Chapter
Supercell’s Brawl Stars turnaround coincides with their Next Chapter and a slew of other initiatives like Spark Labs. Supercell was hitting its stride, and the only thing that seemed to slow them down was soft launches.
Losing every 2021 “trio” member—Clash Quest, Heroes, and Mini—is demoralizing, no matter how happy Supercell PR presents game deaths. But the losses didn’t stop there; as Naavik’s analysis shows, it’s been nearly a decade of loss after loss.5
Source: Naavik’s Unpacking Squad Busters’ Unique Journey to Global Launch
Morale, and more importantly, key team leadership, wanes under long soft launch periods. This is one reason Monopoly Go had a short launch period. We also see titles like Match Factory successfully scale despite limited soft launches.
Suppose you were coming off a Brawl Stars high, reflecting on Clash Royale’s launch success and two-month soft launch, fending off emails from first-party partners glowing about Squad Busters, and consoling team members from dead games. In that case, it’s easy to understand the human impulse to forgo Squad Busters’ soft launch.
After all, what’s there to lose? At maybe $50M in launch budget, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the potential to forgo soft launch periods for other games in development.
The Stakes Remain
The launch is done, and there’s no going back. Supercell needs to grow Squad Busters before it becomes something far more costly: a resource vampire. Weakness hides in numbers, and with so many initiatives in Supercell’s pipeline, the runway to improve Squad Busters shouldn’t be unlimited.
Opportunity cost is pressing, with Supercell’s top design chief on the title and Mo.co looking poised for an early 2025 launch. Additionally, as this analysis and the last one have backhandedly shown, Supercell’s top priority should be getting Clash Royale back on track.
…But Not Out
This piece exclusively focused on Squad Busters’ launch. Surely, the game’s inability to retain deserves discussion too! And while there’s no shortage of ideas to improve the title, these mostly reflect a game that launched too soon and thus too feature short. Leaky bucket or product shortfall? The answer is yes.
That said, thirty days of data is hardly a death sentence for Squad Busters. It has a deep hole to climb out of, but it’s equipped with the industry's smartest designers, engineers, and analysts. And as in soft launch titles, Supercell is willing to make significant core changes if they feel things are not going well.
In the debate on improving monetization or retention, the answer is scale. While Average Revenue Per Daily Active User ARPDAU appears healthy, it’s simply a function of a tiny active user base: only the most interested players remain.
The path to additional monetization is straightforward and underway. More characters and additional character evolutions will explode maximum spend depth. Bringing back paid loot boxes, which were present in Clash Royale’s explosive launch, remains viable. On the other hand, the consumables model is still strong, although more Megas autonomy is likely.
On the retention side, the list of improvements is vast, reflecting a game launched too soon. Lackluster is a generous way to describe Squad Busters’ PvP, while social remains missing and ongoing liveops events are vapid. In a game built on streaks, the inability to at least test the match-3 playbook (Lava Quest, Episode Race. etc) is puzzling.
Too Close to the Sun
As the dust settles on Squad Busters' tumultuous debut, it is a stark reminder of mobile gaming's unique economy. The launch lays bare the limitations of brand power, the critical importance of soft launches, and the weaning power of first-party platforms. It's a cautionary tale that even industry giants can miscalculate when straying from tried-and-true mobile development practices.
While Squad Busters' launch fell short of lofty expectations, consigning the game to failure would be premature. Supercell course corrected Brawl Stars into a monster hit years after its launch. However, past triumphs don't guarantee future success; Boom Beach faced no such turnaround.
In the coming months, we’ll see if Squad Busters can join the ranks of Supercell's comeback stories or if it will serve as a costly lesson in the perils of mobile game development.
1 Hay Day and Clash of Clans launched staggered iOS and Android versions nearly a year apart and are excluded from the comparison.
2 Tier 1 Countries: ("US", "CA", "KR", "CH", "JP", "AT", "DE", "SG", "NO")
Tier 2 Countries: ("FR", "GB", "IE", "BE", "NL", "MC", "PT", "ES", "IT", "MT", "SM", "VA", "IS", "SE")
Tier 3 Countries: all else
3 Do U.S.-based soft launches deserve more attention?
4 At the time: two more recent Bowls have surpassed it
5 Clash Heroes is officially killed as well.
