4 x Reasons Why Squad Busters Suffers While Brawl Stars Soars
Written by Michail Katkoff, founder of Deconstructor of Fun and a games industry veteran with 15 years of experience in building, operating, and scaling games and game companies.
Another Squad Busters post? Why? In July our analysis (Squad Busters One Month Later: Down, But Not Out) was very much focused on reviewing the game’s extremely risky go-to-market strategy, which boldly dismissed Supercell’s meticulous process.
It’s like the whole company was under a spell so strong that they thought they could will their vast player base to love the game as much as they do.
Unfortunately, the spell didn’t carry over outside Finland and the game’s success has been relatively lackluster. But let's not kid ourselves. Despite all the criticism, Squad Busters will likely generate more than $100M in the next 12 months.
There are three reasons why I’m writing this article.
I started as a fan of the game. And I played a lot throughout the (shortest) soft launch in history until churning a couple of months ago. I believe it’s equally important to understand why you can’t stop playing a game to understand why you’re done with a game you couldn’t put down weeks prior.
It’s a mental role-play. Supercell is actively looking for a General Manager to take the reigns of the troubled new title. So I’m thinking to myself, “What would I do with the best people and resources in the World to turn around a rapidly declining game into a billion-dollar hit?”. What would I focus on fixing? What would be my thesis to rally the team?
Whenever we write critical posts about a game, the team seems to fire up to “prove Deconstructor of Fun wrong!” It’s well-known that our analysis of Call of Duty Mobile was printed on the wall of the studio to motivate the team to beat our early predictions. And oh boy did they…
There’s hardly any merit in proving Deconstructor of Fun wrong. It’s not frankly that rare. But I’m happy that we represent “a healthy opposition” if that helps the team at Supercell to get fired up. After all, we’re all playing for the Team Finland here.
Special thanks to Ken Landen, Phillip Black, Javier Barnes, and Adam Telfer for providing their much-needed feedback.
The Context aka. Premature Launch in Numbers
Despite the 40M pre-registered players, Squad Busters failed to reach the same heights that Brawl Stars was able to. This gap in downloads has only widened with time. Squad Busters’ downloads are only a fraction compared to what Brawl Stars was getting in the same stage of its lifetime.
Downloads 5 months post-launch. Both games had massive launches. Brawl Stars are even larger than Squad Busters. Brawl Stars’ downloads stabilized while Squad Busters' user acquisition seems to be mostly turned off. This is understandable as the game needs a lot of work before it can comfortably take new players.
The daily active users graph is the scariest of them all. While Brawl Stars was able to hold on to its core audience, Squad Busters looks like a leaky bucket.
Daily Active Users 140 days post-launch. Squad Busters has less than 7% of active players than Brawl Stars had five months post-launch. Nevertheless, millions of daily active users are nothing to sneeze at. Everything looks tiny when compared with one of the biggest mobile games in history.
Squad Busters monetization is significantly weaker than Brawl Stars’ had at launch. It follows a worrying trendline of Supercell’s subsequent games having ever weaker monetization at launch.
Monetization is crucial as it dictates the game’s ability to invest back into marketing. The revenue per download increases if the game continues to retain and monetize its players as the influx of new players decreases.
Revenue Per Download comparison. Squad Buster’s monetization is noticeably weaker than Brawl Stars’ had in the beginning. Despite the positive trendline, we have to take into account that Brawl Stars downloads were several magnitudes larger at the same point of the lifecycle.
Squad Busters’ lack of success is relative. The game still makes millions a month and is in most top grossing rankings, albeit losing positions every week. The goal is likely to stabilize the player base, increase repeat purchases and begin stacking payer cohorts month over month.
Monthly revenue comparison with global launches aligned. This graph is the most inspiring one because it shows that it took months for Brawl Stars to stabilize its run rate and years to find growth. Squad Buster’s revenue follows Brawl Stars’ trendline.
Looking at the graph above, you could conclude that there’s no reason why Squad Busters wouldn’t be able to find tailwinds even years after the launch. Yet despite many similarities between the games, Brawl Stars has a fundamentally fun core gameplay loop that has an economy issue.
The updates to Brawl Stars’ game’s economy fixed many of the core issues. While the team has added many gameplay fixes, the work on the game economy was the most meaningful to the turnaround as it clearly increased the players’ lifetime value, which in turn opened up user acquisition possibilities. Read Ken Landen’s: Brawl Stars, to the Moon!
Squad Busters on the other hand has a fundamentally weak core gameplay loop, underneath a poor game economy. The collection and account progression mechanisms, as well as their utility in an action sequence, are very different and lacking when compared to Brawl Stars.
In other words, to achieve a turnaround Squad Busters needs a massive rewrite of its core collection, account progression, and gameplay loops. So let's talk about the changes we would have likely seen in a soft launch had Supercell had played by its own rules.
#1 Diversity of Gameplay
Squad Buster’s gameplay is predictable and repetitive due to having a single game mode and little choice in characters. This is a stark contrast to Brawl Stars, where the gameplay changes with every game mode, and evolves with every new Brawler and level released. The quest system, which is tied to the battle pass, further amplifies gameplay variety.
Playing on different game modes, in different levels, with different Brawlers is the foundation for gameplay that continuously feels different. Through the quest system, players are incentivized to diversify their gameplay. Players are kept from the ranked mode to avoid punishment that can occur when trying new levels and Brawlers.
From one session to another, not much evolves: The length of the match is the same. So are the win conditions and rules. The match objectives and number of opponents are always the same, with only minor variations in match conditions. Level layouts and dynamics are largely the same as well.
There are small random elements, such as the player’s squad composition and up to three different level modifiers. But this doesn’t change gameplay as dramatically as game mode, Brawler, and level in Brawl Stars. Every match feels largely the same despite the different modifiers or the Busters the player picks during the match. So why would a player spend money on a game if the purchases they make have very little impact on the gameplay outcomes?
The introduction of new Busters hardly changes the actual gameplay let alone the metagame (August 12th Lava World event and September 16th the Transformers event). That’s scary. A live game is expected to grow with each content update. But if the updates fail to generate a compounding impact, the game will fail to retain its audience.
The new Busters may add an interesting quirk but in the grand scheme of the match, players can just choose to ignore them by choosing different options, and the chaotic nature of the game means that players don’t change their behavior if they see an opponent using those newly released Busters.
On the other hand, Brawl Stars offers a huge degree of gameplay variation:
First, it’s the ever-growing catalog of unique and exotic Brawlers. Each specific Brawler changes the player behavior a lot both in strategy and execution levels. It’s completely different to play with a sniper or a support specialist and kowing when to use their gadgets and special skills. Additionally, facing every Brawler effectively requires mastering the specific attack and dodge patterns
Secondly, the variety is achieved through a bunch of different game modes and level layouts that differ not only in winning conditions, but also in layout and the match dynamics that generates. Whether you’re cooperating to take down the enemy boss, playing violent football, coloring the level, or simply going with a 5v5 means that players are able to make every match feel different.
Thirdly, to make sure that players play with different heroes and all the different levels, Brawl Stars uses the Mission System. Completing Mission is vital to progress through the Battle Pass. In other words, the Brawl Stars rewards players for not sticking with the same Brawler and the same level. In Squad Busters a player can’t design their squad. Thus there’s no meta in the same sense.
It’s good to notice that while Brawl Stars is a competitive PvP game, ranked mode is not the main game mode. In fact, getting to the ranked mode requires a player to have at least three level 9 Brawlers, which is not something you can do in a week of active gameplay – unless you pay, of course.
#2 Accessibility and Depth
What separates Brawl Stars from Squad Busters is that the game didn’t lose its depth in favor of accessibility. Instead, Brawl Stars gradually exposes depth as players level up each individual Brawler and unlock new ones.
Simply put, Brawl Stars invites mastery while Squad Busters in all its chaotic gameplay feels eventually unmasterable.
The Brawlers are easy to play with and hard to master. As players upgrade each of their Brawlers, they increase their base stats and unlock skills and perks that alter their gameplay.
Squad Busters is the most accessible game Supercell has ever released globally. Essentially, it’s like an ultra-polished hybrid casual game. Something like Archero meets Snake.io.
I know there are counter comments where players feel that having to stop to attack is awkward and the chaotic nature of the game makes it difficult to understand what is actually happening.
Players move using a contextual d-pad. They stop when they want to attack without any need to aim to press anything. There are only two buttons: There’s the booster button, to move and/or shoot faster. And then there’s the spell button, which often requires the player to aim and release.
Brawl Stars is an ultra-accessible version of a Team Shooter such as overwatch and a MOBA, such as League of Legends. Let me explain what I mean.
It has kept the action of a Team Shooter but taken it into a isometric form making the game feel much more accessible. I firmly believe that it takes much less from a player to enjoy a match of Brawl Stars than to enjoy a match in Fortnite or Call of Duty Mobile.
Brawl Stars looks and plays like a mobile MOBA. But it lacks the genre staples, such as in-game leveling of Champions, resource collection, creeps, towers, items, and load-outs. Features that prolong match length and make MOBAs hard for more casual audiences to enjoy.
What separates Brawl Stars from Squad Busters is that the game didn’t get rid of depth in favor of accessibility. Instead, Brawl Stars gradually exposes depth as players level up each individual Brawler, both when using it, and when being matched up against it.
Additionally, more complex elements like Gadgets, Gear, Star Power, and Hypercharge all become available when players invest resources to continuously level up a Brawler. All of these elements breathe new life into a familiar Brawler by modifying how a player plays them.
Allowing mastery in core gameplay leads usually to more variety as players create new ways to master each element. This creates a foundation for deeper progression and thus a way to provide more goals.
Squad Busters’ lack of mastery is a problem that needs immediate solving. As long as players don’t understand how to become better at playing the game, Squad Busters will continue to bleed players.
#3 Multiple Progression Vectors
Brawl Stars offers multiple progression vectors and rewards tied to those vectors. In contrast, Squad Busters offers a shallow upgrade system with fewer vectors of progression and thus, fewer reward types and means to obtain them.
Credits, Tokens, Coins, Trophies, Brawl Pass XP, and many more resources help players set up that next goal, which feels just a few matches away. That’s a stark contrast to Squad Busters, where the next meaningful upgrade is often so far away that opening gachas feels meaningless.
In Squad Busters, the player has three resources: Busters, Coins and Hammers. The player collects Busters to evolve them to the next level. And spends Coins to buy more Busters and to save their winning streak when losing.
Hammers are used to build decorations in the main menu. In the current state the feature is absolutely uninteresting and utterly irrelevant for a player. Should the decorations be infused with function, this would change.
Why would I decorate my home screen if there’s no way for other players to see it? This is not Hay Day where I visit farms. Nor is it Clash of Clans where I raid other players’ towns. Yet it is an entire system with it’s unique currency and a lot of content that I’d argue creates so little upside that you could take it away and there would be no effect at all on any metrics.
Here’s why the game economy, aka the feeling of progress, feels broken in Squad Busters:
Evolving each Buster is an exponential grind. The first upgrades are fun. Then you have to collect 100 Busters to evolve it the next level, and 1000 after that. This requires an insane grind requiring hundreds of hours of gameplay before the player can dream of upgrading their Buster to the next level. The recently added Star Chests are meant to address this issue.
The poor pacing makes collecting Busters feel largely meaningless. After all, what’s 8 Busters from a mega rare drop when you need 823 to reach the next Buster level?
As a result, after a couple of weeks of active gameplay, the progress in Squad Busters grinds to a halt. Players experience no noticeable progression. Collecting Busters feels pointless and the whole progression system caves in on itself as there’s nothing that encourages the player to win or spend on.
The lack of mastery within the chaotic and randomized core game as well as the lack of depth and metagame are major issues that would unlock long-term engagement.
The progression is likely locked behind an exponential curve due to the lack of utility on upgrades. If there were more utility vectors, and therefore more levels that could be unlocked, you wouldn't have to tie progression to an exponential curve.
The game also lacks incremental power progression. In Brawl Stars, every level up increases base stats just a bit. In Squad Busters, merging 10 into 1 rewards the player with an animation. That gets old quickly.
Brawl Stars, through many iterations, has a very strong upgrade system and game economy.
Most importantly, the game features multiple progression vectors, which allow the introduction of several different resources all of which are earned by playing. Secondly, Brawl Stars has fixed the economy by reducing the accumulation of these different resources creating scarcity, which in turn has resulted in both an increase in engagement and monetization.
The demand for different resources extends players’ engagement through a sense of purpose. Every match is geared toward earning the next prize, which takes the player closer to their mid-term goal.
In practice, to level up a Brawler, I need both Power Points and Coins. I can earn them best through Battle Pass. Which means I need to complete Quests to gain XP. I can earn some extra resources through Trophy Road. Which in turn incentivized me to play more with Brawlers I haven’t played much before as their Trophy count is the lowest. Which goes back to the issue of not being able to influence what your squad is in Squad Busters.
Accumulation of resources is constant as is investing them into Brawlers. And as I invest my hard-earned resources, I’m rewarded with gradually stronger Brawlers.
#4 Sufficient Soft Launch
Squad Busters infamously launched without a soft launch only to pop and drop. The game has also had an unimaginative and unaggressive post-launch roadmap. It’s like the team took a good ol’ month long Finnish Summer vacation post-launch. Meanwhile, Brawl Stars endured a true gauntlet going through massive changes before gaining the conviction for a global launch.
Brawl Stars, Supercell's crown jewl in 2024 had to climb outta of a hole in 2018. The soft launch was not going well at all. The team did major changes. Some were stinkers. But that's what the soft launches are for.
Brawl Stars was in soft launch for 18 months going through three massive core and meta-game iterations that reset players’ progress every single time. The game launched with a portrait mode and two different control systems. A meta-game that has little resemblance to what it is today and to a setting. Not to mention the rigid Sci-Fi-Western theme - hints of which you can still see in the original characters like Colt and Primo.
The soft launch also saw the game open to new markets gradually as they depleted the Canadian audience with so many restarts. The process also featured a change of the game leadership. Only after all these massive changes inside the game and the game team did Brawl Stars dare to launch globally.
Squad Busters, on the other hand, was the biggest and the most expensive game launch Supercell has made to date. You’d assume that before an investment this big, you’d test the product you’re launching. After all, it’s not only expensive to launch a game but it also ties up a considerable number of human resources to operate, market, and support a live game.
Well, the fact is that the soft launch didn’t happen. In its current state Squad Busters needs an enormous amount of work to dig itself out of the unnecessary hole caused by the pre-mature launch.
What’s worse is that Squad Busters could very well be in a scenario known as the “Doom Loop”. This scenario occurs when a game has gone through its golden cohort of players and is unable to hold on to these users. The subsequent cohorts could be performing significantly worse, which decreases the game's revenue leading to a decrease in the marketing budget and a further decrease in both the player count as well as player quality.
Down But Not Out!
The Supercell’s dry streak lasted for 5 years. The graveyard was filled with killed prototypes and games that were killed in the soft launch phase. Yet hindsight, the dry streak should have lasted for at least one more year.
I really wanted Squad Busters to be a hit. I drank the Kool-aid. I was on the hype train. And now I’m eating crow with this analysis.
What’s most troubling about Squad Busters is not the game itself. After all, it’s a fun game that just needs way more development time.
The troubling part is that Supercell made the decision to launch it globally. Forgoing the purgatory of a soft launch that would have ensured its readiness to scale. This makes no sense. It’s simply an unnecessary bad decision. The company didn’t need to put the game out. There was no rush.
We can say that Squad Busters just needed more time in soft launch. But you can simply counter this with Clash Mini and Clash Quest. Both gameshad an abundance of time in soft launch but lacked the same aggressiveness that the Brawl Stars team showed last decade.
As an industry analyst, I find asking myself, does Supercell have what it takes to launch new monumental hits? Or was this a miss the company will learn from as they proceed in launching Mo.Co? That’s a perfectly valid question. If you look at all the incumbent publishers on mobile today, just like Supercell, they are all finding success in servicing their existing games rather that launching new ones. Well, all except Scopely.
Nevertheless, the most important question is: Will Squad Busters become a billion-dollar franchise? As a Supercell optimist, I’d say “definitely maybe”.
Firstly, Supercell has reinvigorated its games before, which means there’s a strong belief they can do it again inside the company. And there’s no reason why outsiders should not share this belief.
Secondly, the company is also known for its talent density. I’m sure the new general manager (apply!) of the game will succeed. And if they fail, Supercell will simply bring in new general managers until they have the right person for the job.
Thirdly, Supercell has infinite resources. Despite being a Tencent-owned company, they are seemingly not beholden to external pressures. In other words, Supercell has all the time and money in the world to work on Squad Busters.
Finally, to conclude this analysis, I’d absolutely love to understand why the company changed its processes for Squad Busters. How do they avoid getting caught in a moment in the future? What organizational changes have taken place after Squad Busters?
As a fellow blogger, I’m impatiently waiting for the Supercell CEO's annual blog post more than ever. It will surely address the learnings from Squad Busters. And I sincerely hope that a simmering turnaround story will be a part of those learnings.
