Clash Royale’s resurgence has saved the dream of a Supercell IPO.

Clash Royale’s resurgence has saved the dream of a Supercell IPO.

Especially with Brawl Stars returning to KPI Earth, Squad Busters in hospice, Mo.co confused, and everything else chugging along.

There’s a whole lot more to write about how they’ve done this from a mechanics perspective, and the roadmap to get here has certainly bucked my expectations: doubling down on RPG and vertical progression vectors. When the game launched back in 2016, I expected them to incorporate more traditional CCG elements, such as card rotation. Instead, they’ve carved their own path, and while that looked shaky for a while, the game’s identity is more apparent.

There’s still no one that’s competing in the 1v1 real-time PvP category despite armies upon armies of clones. When the game launched, it was a technical breakthrough, given the period’s cellular strength and speed. But now that the barrier has been removed, we’ve still seen relatively little emerge in the West to grow the genre.

I’ll cover this in a future post, but it’s also a reflection of Supercell’s evolution. The degradation of UX is readily apparent, as is the plethora of content. It speaks to the trade-offs Supercell is starting to encounter as its headcount rises, and the coordination problem starts to strike.