The latest Clan Wars update dropped for Clash Royale this month adding a new competitive mode that pits clan vs clan in a 2 day competitive event.  Clash Royale, the poster child of innovative mobile battle arena gameplay has been losing engagement and viewer across YouTube and other streaming platforms. In fact, Clash Royale’s quarterly revenues are around a half of what they were just a year ago.  The games industry is a fickle place where gamers quickly switch between titles to play whatever is hottest at the time. Clan Wars is Supercell’s attempt to lure loyal fans back and give them a new reason to play the game?

Clan Wars – What is it?

A clan war is split into two phases. The first is a 24h period called “collection” in which each clan member has the ability to play 2-3 different match types against a random selection of players.  These match types will be familiar to anyone who has been following Clash Royale for the past year or so in that they mirror the common challenges that are sometimes used for events. So far I’ve seen, double elixir, draft and 2v2 and in each case you can pick from your own cards or draft although they use Tournament level stats.  If you win your match you win a Clan Chest that opens into a central “clan deck” of cards that the clan can then level up and use to build a deck for Battle Day. The more players that compete in the collection phase the better the card selection and the higher levelled the cards.

The second day is called Battle Day and now players may only select from the cards they have won at the level that each card is currently levelled up to.  This creates a tactical discussion session where deck crafting from the cards that have dropped can be aided by the clan themselves. You only have one chance to succeed, with each clan member having a single battle.  If they win, they add a sword to their leaderboard and of the 5 competing clan, one clan will be the overall winner and gets a larger chest. Each clan war lasts around 2 days.

Clan Wars – Why do it?

Clash Royale is a mature product and with it there is a mature audience. Most of the players with over 3000 crowns or more will have been playing Clash Royale for 1 or more years. They will probably have somewhere between 80-100% of the cards unlocked and will be grinding the top levels of those cards. This can take months per card. At this point there is a large amount of player fatigue and moving people from new or different challenge keep people entertained. As I spoke about in my GDC talk a game team wants to establish a Lord of the Rings Metric (one KPI to rule them all). An update at this stage should focus on driving the most interaction with that metric as by improving this all other metrics will tend to trend upwards. For Clash Royale I would argue it is Battles per DAU which leads to more engagement in all their other systems, spenders will most likely have a high battle count.

As well as trying to improve your internal KPIs, the mobile marketing is a constantly changing battleground. External factors can have huge effects on your games bottom line and although unpredictable the one thing you do know is that changes will happen.  Just before this update released – Fornites launch has disrupted and captured 80-90% of the market share relative to the previously steady state.

Problems it could solve

Clash Royale is a fantastic mobile game. It creates subtle depth in it’s characters along complex strategic decisions which requiring a low number of active touch inputs but precise timing. This is what makes it so playable on mobile.  However when a game is designed to for many years there are often issues that long term players get stuck in that are not apparent in the short or mid term. Clans Wars has the potential to alleviate some of the more complex issues that most long term players of the game might be familiar with these are:

1. The Archetype Problem
2. The Yoyo Effect
3. Clan Engagement

1. The Archetype Problem

In all competitive games balance becomes one of the major discussion areas for players. Balance issues usually involve overpowers stats of a single gameplay element, a broken combination of 2 or more elements or a game-breaking unforseen bug when using the element.  In each case the collective of gamers dissect and discuss how to gain micro-competitive advantages with their setups – we call this the metagame (the game outside of the game).

An Archetype is usually a combination of cards that all work well together and therefore commonly get picked and combined together.  They are the most powerful implementation of cards and so by using them you are more likely to beat your opponent. Some decks that a Clash Royale player might recognise would be Lavaloon, Mortar-Hog, Bridgespam etc. When you’re a new player you strive to be able to make certain decks that contain legendary cards that you might not own and this drives you to engage more fully.  In each case the decks usually feature 6 core cards and then rotate 2 cards depending on the players taste. However from a long term players perspective, the issue is the boredom of playing the same archetype again and again.  

The challenge for the designer is to provide enough viable archetypes that during a play session of 10 or more rounds you are unlikely to meet the same deck. Currently in Clash Royale I would argue this is not the case, there are around 5-10 common archetypes and at the top end of the game, you see these decks almost every round. This is not an issue only for Clash Royale, but all online PvP games feature this to some extent.

Providing interesting tools to the community to enable quick counters and evolving strategies. This common archetype problem is exacerbated in Clash Royale because of the very short game sessions, meaning you encounter more decks in the same period of time. The Archetype problem isn’t a direct gameplay issue because it provides interesting content for players to talk about, this is one of the reasons why Clash Royale has been so popular on YouTube and Twitch. However, without enough variety in rulesets you can grind yourself out of enjoying the experience.

2. The YoYo Effect

Any person who plays competitive 1 on 1 games will know the YoYo effect. When placed in a competitive ladder where your opponents are matched by a ranking formula, such as ELO, the YoYo effect occurs. You yoyo between a high and low point on the ladder as you win one, lose one in a repeating sequence. In my case I can’t break the 4000 cap and I yoyo between 3600-4000.  This becomes immensely frustrating as no matter what I do I can’t maintain my progress. It also means that if I am at 4000 trophies I don’t want to play more as I fear a loss more than I want a win.

Levelling up a single card has no real difference to your position post 3000 trophies and so rank becomes a measure of skill. If this we’re the only mode in Clash Royale it is likely that I would have churned out a long time ago, but what kept me in was the events. Events applied new rules, new deck combinations and restrictions on the gameplay. This often levelled the playing field. The challenge was then to try to beat 12 individuals in a row with only 3 lives. This removes yoyoing entirely as now it’s simply a challenge to continue your winning streak. A new event happened every week and each week it would engage me to compete.  I personally drifted from the ladder climbing and focussed on perfecting the events with 2 or 3 that I got all 12 wins. Clan Wars could provide a more detailed structure for events, and pit not just player vs player, but clan vs clan in a clan winning streak.

3. Clan Engagement

I would estimate a very large proportion of players in clash royale are in a clan. The clan provides a group of people who share your passion and you can talk tactics and share replays. The most used feature within the clan would be the Clan requests where you can ask for cards from your clanmates. Within this interface currently there is a large stagnation of content. In my clan I would say there is a core of 8-10 people that actively chat or engage in conversations and discussion, with the majority of people including myself who simply make card request.

The more active and engaged a community the more likely they are to stick, spend and promote your game to their friends. From a long tail perspective providing engagement, challenge and motivation to these players is what sustains longer term revenues. However, without an evolving or changing metagame, a variety of weekly challenges or a global event the clan chat can become dull and boring. I feel that the clan structure within Clash Royale provides all the tools adequate to really helping people to share and strategise but I felt the strategy of the game had tailed off due to the archetype problem in recent months.

Clan Wars – The Update

Let’s think about each of the problems above and how the update attempted to solve them. Whether it was a success or how it could be improved.

1. Archetype Solution

Clan Wars made a valiant attempt to remove the archetype problem from the discussion. As the war is split into a collection day vs a battle day.  The collection day is an ability for players to find cards and then level them up for the clan. This is a beautiful solution as it tries to solve the Archetype problem in 3 ways

Firstly, it adds chance of which cards you find. You no longer have a reliable card collection, each Clan War forces you to look at the cards your clan has found and create a well rounded deck.

Secondly the cards you do find level up depending on the number of wins. This creates a wider range of stats with which to vary your deck playing abilities. The decision to take Goblin Barrel level 3 or Knight level 11 can affect your decks build.  

Finally your opponents are doing the same collection phase. This creates a more asymmetrical hidden information that means your deck cannot be built to easily counter.

Each of these 3 factors mean that wilder and less common card combinations are used and sometimes picking the most OP card in your collection (level 12 Barbarians) can truly beat opponents through sheer power. This plays out quite well as each clan war my clan has played a much wider range of decks.

Going Further

I think the solution doesn’t go far enough.  It should be tweaked to put even more pressure on the harvesting day and provide more depth in the War day for clans to strategise. Currently the number of cards dropped and number of level ups needed is the same as the main game. There is no reason to use these numbers apart from familiarity and in this particular game mode you never get enough cards to even see level 11. I would actually adjust the balance of the common and rare drops to provide even more “going for it” level ups, making the choice not just on strategy but stats as well.

Currently a player gets 2 attacks in order to earn cards and then their collecting abilities are capped. It would be more interesting if players had a number of lives in collection day, rather than a number of battles. This means that any player could earn exponentially more cards if their skills was high.  In order to limit players who are very skilled at the game the more wins you get the more levelled up an opponent’s King towers could becoming. In a way handicapping the victor.  This would then provide a range between 3-10 matches for each player depending on their skill.

The Clan War battle is also a single battle against a random opponent. In some cases you may have 2 battles, but this is only when the clan sizes are mismatched and you are on the lower tiered clan. You and your clan have no way to discuss or tweak your plays, based on learning from previous battles. It’s an all or nothing affair where winner takes all. What if the clan was given secret information or could earn the rights to see the opponents War Deck by winning challenges. By understanding the cards available for opponents you could again strategise more particularly on your clans deck crafting.

2. Yoyo Solution

Clan Wars does provide an alternative challenge to the ladder. It’s one more thing to do and I believe it would improve the total number of battles each user takes part in each week. However the ladder problem still exists in the single player game. For Clan Wars to be a truly successful update is should actually try to create a larger inter-clan ladder that all clans compete on worldwide ensuring that your personal ladder is of less important than your clans ladder position and you spend more time perfecting your skills for the Clan War.

At the moment this doesn’t feel the case as we’re still establishing clan win rates. However, I dont see a clear display of the Clan Wars leaderboard and no prestige is provided for those who are ontop. This means that overtime the wars fought will become less meaningful and apathy towards the wars might continue. Clan War leagues might be a better solution here, read the C.A.T.S review to understand the promotion and demotion for players and how it drives engagement.

3. Clan Engagement Solution

There is certainly more clan activity since the update. More communication, more replay sharing and an increased discussion about the game itself.  We’ve seen more clan leaders send messages to the group to get people involved and the social dynamics it creates are important. I also was personally congratulated for winning my particular fights in the war and that felt good. People within the group are responding and pushing each other to perform at their best and this is very healthy for the game in general.

Another suggestion here is that rather than creating multiple decks per clan for each war, the clans should craft a single war deck that all clan members would fight with. Clan members could each submit their own deck creations along with a name, and the top picks could be voted on for the war.  You could then imagine clan discussions recounting previous wars and how certain clan mates created crazy but powerful combinations that helped the clan succeed. You would also face the same deck with your opponents and therefore clan members could coach you through each war day.

War Day

For me the actual weakest aspect of Clan Wars is war day itself.  The collection mechanics and the strategic clan chats have geared you up for an epic battle against 5 other clans. However, what actually occurs is a single match against a random opponent.  Once you’ve played this round, the war is over.

The fact that the decks you spent so long collecting and crafting are only used in a single match. War Day feel more like a game of chance rather than skill. I felt this acutely on my first war when I won quickly because I was matched with a poor opponent.  It had built up, to a single battle that was a poor experience even though I had won and then I was left waiting for the next war.

The war could be expanded with a clan tournament.  Taking 8 clans and facing them in a 3 tier round robin tournament where if your clan wins you would obtain even more cards, dynamically shifting your war deck.  A clan would then spend 1 day collecting and 3 days battling to become the ultimate clan of the 8. Also rather than a single battle, each player should have 3 fights with opposing teams giving a bigger range for skill. The further a clan progressed the more involved in chat and strategy they would become. The Archetype issue would actually become a strategic point of discussion as you played more battles you could feedback to clan mates to let them know the opponent is like to drop a pekka. by giving the clan more and more to think about as results pour in.

Conclusion

Clan Wars is a well designed update aimed at solving some of the more complex design issues that occur in older free to play titles. It’s a great solution at solving the Archetype issue that is very apparent in the core game. We’ve also see that it provides some remedy to both the YoYo problem and clan engagement but these are likely to be short term fixes. My largest criticism is that the collecting mechanic and “Going for it” feeling are both underutilised and less important that simply turning up and having your battle with any deck. The clan as a whole feels united during collection day and disjointed in war day. I believe the team should go further to create memorable clan wars that are talked about for weeks or months after the event. Players who create the war deck that win wars will feel proud and acknowledged by the clan and could go down in clan history.  For me this is the weakness with the current Clan Wars update. It’s provided a new game mode that creates a dynamic and interesting deck building environment, but it doesn’t create memorable clan battle or stories. Each clan war fades quickly into the background and the next war takes its place. The more planning, strategy and interaction the clan takes in each war, the stronger the emotional connection will be towards the event and this is what will make players stick for the longer term.

Due to the Star Wars Battlefront II controversy, the industry is taking a far closer look at what monetization practices are ethical, and whether the industry can police itself or needs further regulation to avoid misuse.

In the meantime, it’s likely loot boxes will still be featured heavily in the top charts as the revenue potential of gacha and loot boxes is hard to ignore. Using a random drop system has allowed many new genres and core loops to flourish.

However, designing for gachas isn’t a simple design process. Not all genres and not all types of gameplay can be ported to support a loot box design. We’ve already talked about some of the necessary ingredients:

• Part 1: Ensuring your gacha system has enough depth to sustain drops over time
• Part 2: Ensuring your gacha system has enough width to ensure that each drop is useful to a player

Now, it’s time for the third element: how to handle duplicates. It’s what we call an edge case, but it’s a process that will define how your game will feel over the long haul: Do players feel like duplicates are useful or useless?

Duplicates vs Bad Drops in a Gacha System

The first thing to master when it comes to a gacha system is how to think differently about two situations that can arise; duplicates and bad drops.

For example, let’s assume that we have a Gacha system similar to Overwatch – our boxes only drops cosmetic items. As a result, each item that we drop is permanent (the player keeps it forever and it can’t be “consumed”) and players are chase after the cosmetic items they want for the characters they play as.

In this system, a ‘bad drop’ could be a cosmetic item for a character that I don’t play as – maybe in the future I will, but for the time I’ve been playing I haven’t taken to the character in question. As such, this is most definitely a bad drop.

Ideally, I should be able to convert this item into something of value so that I can eventually get the items that I want. In games such as Overwatch and Hearthstone, this means converting any bad drop into a dust-currency, which allows you to purchase the items you want directly.

However, also inherent in this system are duplicates. In this situation, I receive the same cosmetic item for a character that I already have, which feels like a big loss. It’s doubly frustrating if the game drops a high rarity duplicate (i.e. a legendary skin) as this feels like a massive waste – I was lucky enough to receive a legendary item, but unlucky that it was an item that had dropped before.

As previously suggested, games like Overwatch and Hearthstone handle this by allowing players to convert these items to dust, essentially treating a duplicate the same way as a bad drop. However, the amount of dust dropped is a fraction of the cost of purchasing the skin you want directly, so players still feel terrible when they pick up a duplicate.

As a result, Overwatch eventually went public about adjusting the drop logic to avoid duplicates as much as possible, while Brawl Stars even removed duplicates outright. However, in my view it doesn’t need to be this way. Removing duplicates from your system reduces depth, and puts more pressure on your team to develop more content. Ideally duplicates would be celebrated by players, making this rare occurrence into something of value, rather than serving as a regretful outcome.

In light of this, let’s look at how to build out better gacha duplicate mechanics:

Six Mechanics for Handling Duplicates

#1 Duplicates Aren’t Duplicates

A different way to avoid the pain of duplicates is to make sure duplicates rarely happen.

One way to do it is to make each piece of content generate in many subtly different ways. For example, a weapon or character can drop, but certain sub-elements are randomized and generated.

Using this method, if a duplicate item drops, there are smaller comparisons that players can make between the drops. This is done when gear or drops are both procedurally and randomly generated and there are enough smaller detailed stats that players actively want to optimize.

For example, in the first Destiny you could get the same piece of gear dropping many times.

However, each drop had randomized stats and perks associated with it, causing players to head into a chase in the end game to find unusual builds of gear. The game included perks that offset the problem of some guns being overpowered in competitive modes like The Crucible. While this obviously went overboard causing severe balancing issues, this shows the power of procedurally generated gear – it deepens the chase and makes duplicates something players actively go after.

However, this system can result in players ending up with mountains of weapons and gear that they don’t want to use. As a result, designers need to find ways of converting all bad drops into something of use to players, such as:

• Gold to purchase more weapons
• Dust to re-roll the weapon perks of your choice
• Resources to upgrade the weapons that the player actually wants

While such solutions put the duplicate issue to bed, it also puts more pressure on the bad drop system.

#2 Repair

One system that hasn’t been used often is the repair system..

Fallout 3 used this effectively by asking players to collect duplicates to maintain their gear. Have an amazing piece of gear? It will eventually deteriorate and be less effective over time. To repair it, you can pay a large amount of currency or find duplicates of your gear to repair for free. If the deterioration is felt as fair to players, this can create a repeatable grind to find duplicates of your gear to maintain its highest possible gameplay effectiveness.

This system is likely avoided because of the consumable feel that drops from the gacha become: The feeling that an amazing item will drop, but one that’s only useful briefly. It’s a feeling that anyone who played Zelda: Breath of the Wild will definitely find familiar

#3 Fusion (Unlocking Potential)

[Source: Both Guns Blazing]

Fusion is the typical way that Japanese and Chinese games have made duplicates relevant. These games typically focus on selling stat improvements over cosmetics, and because of this they focus their duplicate mechanics more on unlocking higher stat growth.

Fusion mechanics are designed in a way that requires the player to receive a duplicate in order to increase the stat potential of a card. As such, while you can upgrade a card up to high level, unlocking the ability to upgrade it even further requires you to “evolve” or “awaken” the card with a duplicate of itself.

When looking at the stacking probability needed to get the highest star rating, it’s easy to see why they do this. You can drive a lot of depth in a gacha system by asking players to chase after duplicates without adding more content.

The problem with this comes in the randomness of the system. Getting a single duplicate becomes so important in this system that players can become very frustrated. Players have no grindable path to unlock the potential for their favourite characters. Hence, designers came up with a new system: Sharding.

#4 Sharding

As duplicate systems changed over time, there was a need to make them more flexible and granular.

To solve the issues of fusion, gacha games started to experiment with shards instead of duplicate fusion, best seen in Western Gacha games like Galaxy of Heroes. With shards, each character can’t be unlocked until you have collected a certain amount of shards. In the above example, Grand Moff Tarkin requires 80 shards to be unlocked.

However, that’s just to unlock the character. To upgrade the character to its maximum potential, the player would need to collect additional shards, so “duplicates” are simply just additional shards needed to progress to the maximum potential.

With characters now needing hundreds of shards instead of single drops to reach the maximum characters, games added mechanics which allowed players to grind for specific shards, so players that are looking to upgrade or unlock their favourite character could grind specifically for it. This wasn’t possible with the fusion system before, since giving a single card could mean massive progress for players. In short, sharding allows clear progress.

However, there remains one big problem: opening up a gacha pack you’ve paid for and receiving mere pieces of a character – nothing that you can use there and then. It’s a transaction the player almost always regrets and, as a result, Supercell came up with a workaround.

#5 Unlock & Upgrade

Clash Royale provided a completely new framework for how to handle duplicates. It took the best of the Shard framework, made the handling of duplicates restrictive, yet still has a gacha system that feels fair.

With Royale’s system, each card is unlocked after getting the first card. This feels far better than shards because getting a new card feels amazing – there’s no more paying for “parts of a character”.

After you unlock the card, the card becomes a duplicate sink. In order to upgrade the card, you need to collect a number of duplicates of that card. It removes any needed management of duplicates, while giving a clear path for players to upgrade their cards.

Due to the design, players will unlock cards fairly quickly (you only need one card), but the majority of the chase is after the (thousands) of duplicates necessary to upgrade your cards to a competitive level. This system has significant depth, allowing Supercell to be generous with the cards it gives out, and keep players collecting for years.

However, despite its perks, this design still has disadvantages. For one, Clash Royale has to work really hard to try to ensure that as many cards as useful to players as possible. Otherwise, getting a duplicate for a card you aren’t using is completely useless (the only way to get value from it is to trade it away to clan mates). This works very well for CCG style games, but many games can’t support this level of gacha width – where every item from the gacha is theoretically useful.

#6 Unlocking Better Cosmetics

All these mechanics thus far are primarily focused on handling situations where duplicates give out better stats – they “unlock the potential” of an item so they can be upgraded further. This works great for games that are RPG-based and are comfortable with players speeding up progression (ex. Clash Royale), but most competitive PvP games can’t do this, such as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and League of Legends. Competitive PvP games can really only sell cosmetics. So, how do you add value to duplicates for cosmetic economies?

This is considerably harder, which is why most cosmetic driven games end up allowing players to convert duplicates into dust (ex. Overwatch) or allow players to sell them on a secondary market (ex. Counter Strike: Global Offensive). League of Legends has even dabbled in at first not fully “unlocking” the cosmetic, but only allowing the player to “rent” the cosmetic. Getting duplicates eventually allows the player to convert their duplicates into a permanent item.

However, beyond this, the only thing you can do is make duplicates of cosmetic gear unlock cooler/better visuals of a cosmetic item. In Counter-Strike: Go (CS:GO), they use a “decay” system to do this.

In CS:GO, each item is dropped with a randomly assigned “decayed” attribute. This could mean that the item looks brand new, or is heavily worn down. Getting a duplicate allows players to find items which have far less wear, meaning that players aren’t just chasing that “item”, but also chasing the best looking version of it. The visual differences between “Factory New” and “Battle Scarred” are striking – making the value of having the highest valuable version of the item very important to players that are chasing after cosmetics.

As such, similar to stats, cosmetics can have a “unlocking potential” of their own – you just need to make sure your cosmetic items can have varying degrees of visual quality.

Summary: Duplicates aren’t Bad Drops

In any Gacha system, regardless if you’re just dropping cosmetic items or gameplay impacting items you, as a designer you are responsible for ensuring that there is as little remorse or regret from players – for making sure that each purchase of a loot box feels rewarding to players.

• Gacha depth helps ensure that you can sustain drops from a gacha.
• Gacha width ensures that each item is as useful as possible.
• However, Duplicates are inevitable, and how you handle them is important to achieve the balance between a system that feels fair to players and doesn’t cripple your studio by producing lots of content.

There are seven examples of mechanics you can use to handle duplicates and give them value:

• Dust: Allowing players a path to purchase items they want
• Duplicates aren’t Duplicates: Using procedural generation to have subtle differences between drops
• Repair: Duplicates can power up a previously owned item
• Fusion: Unlocking further potential
• Shards: Breaking fusion up into a more granular path
• Unlock & Upgrade: Unlocking higher stat levels with duplicates, no option for duplicates
• Unlocking Better Cosmetics: unlocking better looking versions of the same cosmetic

Each have their pros and cons, but hopefully can help you decide what is the best path for your game.

When Supercell launches a new game, it sends shock waves around our industry and players alike. On June 14th, Supercell released Brawl Stars — and in typical fashion, we all jumped on to give it a try.

But there was something special about when Supercell launched Brawl Stars. The game was Supercell’s first outside of the strategy genre. Brawl Stars is the first action-based multi-player game for Supercell, and notably, the most casual MOBA style game launched for mobile to date. Supercell also publicised the launch, beginning with an e-sport style tournament. This isn’t a typical soft launch; they are already building up a massive community and driving a strong streamer culture around this game. This was a bold move for Supercell. Supercell has been known to stop games such as Battle Buddies, Smash Land and Spooky Pop when they don’t look like they will become a top 10 game. Going into this soft launch with so much confidence is bold.

But weeks after the game has been launched, industry veterans began to weigh in and started noticing the cracks in the design. Many have already dismissed the game as an unlikely game to launch, despite having a massive following already from streamers and e-sport fans. Currently, the game is sustaining in the top 10 grossing in Canada and driving a massive community around it. Despite the concerns, this game could end up being a surprise hit due to the strong multiplayer gameplay.

But ultimately as a game designer, what I see from Brawl Stars is an amazing game that is weakened by a poorly designed gacha system. It fails to deliver on what a gacha system needs to do, and it will ultimately not last in its current incarnation. Comparing the system to Clash Royale, Brawl Stars system is considerably weaker and will result in lower revenue on a per player basis. Even if Supercell can drive downloads organically, this will hold it back from where it could be.

While I believe the game is incredibly fun to play and may just succeed based on its multiplayer component alone, ultimately the game will be weak on a revenue-per-player basis.

From this analysis, it begs the question:

What is it about the Brawl Star mechanics which weakens the Gacha? That comes down to Depth.

“Depth” of a Gacha System

Something to clarify is about how designers look at depth of a gacha system, and why this matters.

The depth of a gacha system ultimately defines how long it will last, roughly what the maximum spend a player could spend to reach the end of content, or how long a player would need to play before reaching the end of content. This is usually defined as the number of drops it takes to complete the gacha.

A “drop” in a gacha is defined as giving away a single item. For example, in Clash Royale a drop would be synonymous with a single card dropped from a chest. Some designers also call this a “pull” — but for this article, I will call them drops.

Keep in mind that a drop does not mean a chest. A Chest has multiple drops in the case of Clash Royale, but a chest in Brawl Stars only contains a single drop. Also, not all drops are alike — a drop from a legendary chest in Clash Royale is not the same as a drop in a wooden chest — since the legendary chest has different probabilities for selecting higher value items. But when roughly measuring the depth of a gacha — you can ignore (average out) the “quality” of a drop.

Drops are important because the ultimate goal in free to play games is to maximise long-term retention and maximise the cap of the economy. To drive strong long-term retention, players need to have a long lasting sustained desire to pull from the Gacha. The more drops this takes, the longer the system will last.

The more drops a gacha can sustain, the more generous a game can be, the higher revenue per player, and the higher the long term retention would likely be.

On this metric, Clash Royale’s system dominates Brawl Stars, comparing their soft launch states. Designers usually have 3 key variables to maximise Depth: Content, Duplicate mechanics and Pacing. In all 3 of these cases, Clash Royale’s systems outperform Brawl Stars.

Problem #1: Content

Content is usually the easiest problem to point to with a shallow gacha system. Brawl Stars has 15 characters (for now) whereas Clash Royale had 42 at their soft launch.

What this gave Clash Royale was a longer period of time in which players were likely to get new content, as well as the ability to control the pacing of the introduction of this content. With 42 cards at launch, Clash Royale was able to pace the pool over time using Arena tiers. So players knew they needed to play for awhile before they could even gain access to some of the upper tier cards.

On top of this, because they were able to launch with this much content, each interaction with the gacha system felt novel and interesting, especially between arena tiers. So playing through arena 1, each time you opened up a gacha chest you typically got new cards. Each time you levelled up to a new tier, you were introduced to a whole new set of cards, all of a sudden the gacha got way more exciting to open (even inciting purchases like the limited offer for each tier!).

For Brawl Stars, with 15 characters, all available in the gacha from the beginning, with only a few as legendary, this leaves Supercell in an inflexible position. They need to keep all 15 in the pool from the beginning, otherwise, players will get duplicates too fast from the gacha. By only having a few legendaries, the path to complete the gacha feels fast. As a paying player of Brawl Stars, I’ve dropped a small amount of money, but already feel like I’ve unlocked a majority of the content that the game has to offer.

With more content, Brawl Stars would have considerably better control over the player experience and make it last far longer.

For Supercell to correct this problem it may not come in the form of new characters. Brawl Stars gameplay is not the same as Clash Royale. Clash Royale’s core gameplay supports and pushes players to have a collection of cards, especially since each battle requires 8 cards chosen. Brawl Stars only asks the player to choose 1 character. If they add too many characters, this may lead to players losing the desire to collect them all. Having too many characters can lead to players just choosing one they like and ignoring the rest. Brawl Stars will need to find new ways of dropping desirable content, and it may not be in the form of characters. Content can come in the form of special abilities, perks, equipable weapons, customizations, which each could add considerable depth to the progression system, and drive players to upgrade more than just their favourite character.

Problem #2: Duplicates

Content typically isn’t a terminal problem on its own. Content is simply the base in which the gacha total drops has to work with. If content were the only thing that was important, Hearthstone’s 1,000+ card collection would dominate over Clash Royale, but this isn’t the case. The fact is that Clash Royale got away with significantly less content than Hearthstone at its launch because of its duplicate system.

Even with a smaller set of content, a strong mechanic for handling duplicates can make a gacha mechanic last.

The most terminal problem that was introduced with Brawl Stars was the mechanic for handling duplicates.

In Brawl Stars, getting a duplicate character in the gacha meant that you were instead rewarded with a single blue chip. This mechanic is similar to Hearthstone, where you can exchange duplicate cards for a small amount of dust. Players can exchange the blue chips in for unlocking characters, although the number of blue chips necessary to unlock many of the rare characters is insane.

As a result, each time I have purchased gacha packs from Brawl Stars I’ve felt completely regretful. After I unlocked a majority of the characters, each chest has a high probability of dropping a single blue chip over unlocking a new character or gaining some elixir (the currency necessary to upgrade your characters). Having a string of gacha packs that just give out blue chips, especially if you’ve unlocked all the content, would surely cause many players to churn.

Clash Royale doesn’t have this problem because it drives significant value from its duplicates. Duplicate cards are necessary to upgrade the card. Getting a single card unlocks the card for use, but to have the fully upgraded version of the card, you need duplicates of it.

This is what makes Clash Royale’s Gacha system last. Thinking in terms of the number of drops, even with a base amount of content of 42 cards, requiring each card duplicate to be found hundreds of times (depending on rarity) exponentially increases the number of drops necessary to reach the end of the economy.

Even thinking about maximising a single legendary card can show you that it takes a lot of drops. It’s reported that Supercell drops 1 legendary card 0.43% of the time in their gold level chests. If we use this as a base, and a pool of 6 legendary cards, that leaves the % of dropping your chosen legendary to be 0.0716%. In order to upgrade this card fully, you need 37 drops of this card. So, on average, a player will need over 50,000 drops before their single legendary card is fully upgraded. That’s a system that LASTS.

So for Brawl Stars to utilise its minimal content better, it needs to think about duplicate mechanics similar to Clash Royale. Potentially duplicates increase the max upgrade level of a character. Potentially duplicates unlock new special abilities. Without it, players will simply lose interest in the gacha, or feel as though the high price tag to purchase chests are just not worth it.

Problem #3: Pacing

With gacha systems, designers have one final variable to control how long their gacha lasts: pacing.

Not all gacha systems support a huge amount of drops, but to counteract this, increase the time it takes for a player to get another drop from the gacha. For pacing, game designers typically have a couple methods to use:

• Pace how often the players can open the gacha
• Pace how many drops the gacha gives

Clash Royale gives a lot of drops daily. With free chests, crown chests, clan chests, and regular chests, each day players can get plenty of free drops to feel progress. This is mostly because Clash Royale’s duplicate system multiplied by their high amount of content supports such a high amount of drops.

With Brawl Stars, because of the low level of content and the fact that duplicates aren’t necessary, this left Supercell designers in a bind. They had to pace their gacha significantly slower. They did this by tying chests to coins, and by making chests only give 1 drop each. Comparing this to the experience of opening a chest in Clash Royale, Brawl Star’s gacha boxes are far less rewarding. The reward pops up, you get a single currency of something, and then you’re left feeling — “That’s it?”. This problem is magnified when each drop can be amazing or terrible feeling. If I get a new character or some elixir — this feels good. If I get a blue chip… I feel like all the time I put into collecting coins for that box was worthless.

Clash Royale’s chests on the other end can guarantee rare or legendary cards, and even if I get a duplicate, it still feels beneficial. So even as I reach the mid-game and end-game where I have a majority of the content, every time I open a gacha I feel like I’m making progress, and I have a chance for big gains.

Supercell had pace Brawl Stars chests this harshly because their economy only supports a certain amount of drops. If they increase the number of drops a chest will give, this will mean they either need to increase the pacing (increase the cost in coins to purchase a chest) or they will be allowing players to speed through content significantly faster — something they can’t afford with the low amount of content they have so far.

The Path Forward

Supercell’s Brawl Stars is an amazingly fun game to play. As the community has shown, there is a huge desire to play an action-based MOBA on mobile, and clearly, Supercell has capitalised on this with Brawl Stars. This game has a strong chance of succeeding simply based on its rabid community building around its multiplayer core gameplay.

But as we know in free to play, a strong core gameplay is only the first step towards success. For Brawl Stars to become a Supercell-sized success, it’s about how long their systems last.

Improvements could come with more content, it could come from better pacing of the gacha, but driving more sustainable drops likely will need to come from a better mechanic for duplicates to avoid a content treadmill. Taking a page from Clash Royale’s system and finding a way to make duplicates a key part of reaching the end of content for its gacha mechanics. Doing so will exponentially increase the lifetime of their gacha systems, plus drive stronger retention and monetization from their user base.

Brawl Stars has the DNA of the next Supercell hit. They may just need to make some last minute adjustments to make it the next billion dollar game. I’ll be cheering for them.

Creating a novel mobile experience is a hard task. So when a novel mechanic appears it’s a breath of fresh air from the consistent Match-3 re-skins or Clash of Clones that more frequently release on a Thursday… The hardest part is making it stick. Getting people to come back and play everyday is the area that companies focus on during a soft launch.  Those prototypes with the highest retention usually make it to market.  Stickiness is slightly different from retention.  It’s usually measured by DAU/MAU and I like to think of it as how many loyal fans are in your game. The more similar your DAU is to your MAU the stronger the loyalty.

Zeptolab’s C.A.T.S. – Crash Arena Turbo Stars is one game that has shown great potential to earn money and downloads, yet it’s slipped slightly down the charts. A recent update on June 7th has done a good job of stopping this slide where they corrected some of the basic frustrations but how to keep those loyal users playing each day is what we’ll investigate in this post.

C.A.T.S. – Gameplay

C.A.T.S. is a game which is unlike many others.  In it you must build and battle incredible contraptions out of scraps and components that you find.  There can be only one winner in the PvP battles and it’s a fight to the death, with the first player to 0 health loses.  The rounds last between 2-15s, so feel lightning fast and the game encourages you to test and play with configurations.  The rounds are completely pre-determined with no inputs needed from the player during an actual match.  You sit back and watch your contraption fight in an entirely automatic way.  Each part has a feel or structure that affects the way it will work.  As a player, through trial and error, you learn what works best.

The gameplay seems simple, but the skill is in countering or playing the scraps that you have that have the highest stats and therefore are more likely to beat your opponent.  The games novelty hinges on an epic (24 league) but very succinct leaderboard system.

Stickiness is a measure of how many loyal fans there are in your game.

League System

You start your game within level 1 of 24 different leagues.  Every 4-5 leagues are grouped by materials with wooden, through to metal all the way upto carbon parts.  Each of these parts then has a maximum stat available measured by a standard 5* system.  You want better materials with higher stars if you want the best stats.  The league system provides an incredibly clear objective and a clear sense of progression.  Each league is its own challenge, every time I beat a league I unlock better parts and I have a real sense of achievement.  This solves a common issue of players not understanding what to do next? Here it’s laid out in a perfectly ordered and linear path towards the top players and leagues.  Positive reinforcement leads to stronger uptake and a clear and tangible reward awaits you at the end of each league – a permanent unlock of better stared parts!

Leagues also do a great job of putting you in better match range with similar skilled and similar paying players.  This is used to great effect in most competitive PvP games such as Clash of Clans, Chess or League of Legends on PC.  ELO and it’s variants are used when a score based method matches people of similar scores.  C.A.T.S does this in a different way, with a progressive win funnel.  Progress in the game is reliant on you either winning 14 matches in a row, or being at the top of a division when that division ends every 24-48h.  Once you progress you have made it to the next division and there is no way to drop back down, leagues are used more like a progression mechanic than a competitive mechanic.

The rewards for progression are clear, better stats for your gear and at certain points unlocks of better gear itself.  Progressing from one league to another is the most rewarding point in the game and instantly as a player you’re drops are more likely to be better.

League progression is also tied directly into a timer of around 36h.  When the timer hits 0, whoever is top of the league will progress.  This is a great retention mechanic that is further leveraged by a push notification 1h before the league finishes, encouraging you to log back in and play.  Creating a repeating timetable with an incentive to compete day to day is one of the best drivers of mid-term retention.  I remember that Wooga’s Diamond Dash had a weekly competition that worked well on Facebook but on mobile they saw a number of players only logging in once a week  to submit a single high score, win the league and get the rewards.  Shorter league cycles work well on mobile, but only when their is still enough progression between leagues to provide enough runway for your top spenders to keep wanting to spend to progress.

Parts System (Stats + Luck)

There are at least 30 different parts in the game.  All parts drop via crates that drop when you win matches. The rarity of the part and the exact placement of certain attachment or wheel placement points are randomly dropped. Having a rare part with a large amount of energy and lots of slots is the luckiest thing that you could have.

Each part’s stats can be improved by fusing older parts into the part itself to level it up.  Therefore each part has a Start Stat and a Max Stat.  The Max Stat is slightly arbitrary as parts seem to be able to fuse an infinite number of time, but they get proportionally more and more expensive to do so.  This creates a theoretical efficient maximum of around a level 10 fusion levels per star.  The game balances the Start Stat of the next league part level with roughly a level 6-8 part, meaning as a player you always want a higher star part as it will eventually give you much better stats as you level it up. The graphs use interpreted numbers and are just used to visually demonstrate the curve, they are not the numbers from the real game.

As you play the leagues you notice the contraption parts begin to change colour and texture. Texture changes with each new material and colour changes every 1*,3* and 5*.  This visual clarity immediately helps you to understand why certain contraptions beat you.  You get a great visual representation of the power of each element and you know by looking when it’s time to change your parts.

A really nice feature added in the most recent update is to allow people watch a video ad in order to earn a guaranteed max star part for the current league you are in.  This is a great use of the Unique Ability mobile video monetisation method I described in the Futureplay video ads article.  It allows Zeptolab to generate revenue from a feature that has almost 0 direct cost to the balance or progression systems within the game itself.

Fusion (More Stats)

Fusing parts is a common mechanic in RPG games, the Gem system in diablo II comes to mind.  It gives every drop, no matter it’s rarity or stats a value within the game and as you build up any one item some of the value is maintained and can be consolidated into your next item.  This form of system works very well as every drop of parts, no matter the star level, has value.

Fusion systems work on exponentially increasing costs matched with linear gains to the stats of the item itself. Usually the growth curves might have varying values depending on which aspects of the game the balancer wants to make feel valuable/punishing.

If there was only a fusion system, you would always want to combine every old part into the highest stared new part. However, there are also certain characteristics that do not change or grow in stats, Energy Cost, Direction/Configuration, Part Bonus. These 3 items change the way the part physically works in game.  Certain builds work better with certain parts.  To clearly identify very valuable parts, they established Legendary parts that always give 100% bonus if used on the correct vehicle.

Unlike classic RPG games where players usually combine or combo certain parts so that they have positive reinforcements during gameplay, C.A.T.S. has very limited interaction between parts.  For instance you don’t have a damage over time element that could be combined with a slow.  Fusion really becomes a method to clean your inventory rather than an interesting or unlocking mechanic. If parts grew and changed their functionality, Rocket launchers might speed up their fire rate or spinning saws grow larger, then fusion would have a further purpose than simply growing the stats.

Every drop of parts, no matter the star level, has value.

Configuration (Skill)

The only aspect of the game that requires skill, is placing which parts where and choosing which base to use with any particular machine.  At first this is interesting, you are quickly unlocking parts and discovering new items that work well together, but this quickly dries up as most drops become duplicates.  I found that unlike other games whereby a metagame is created around countering other players configurations by using a configuration that punishes it, C.A.T.S. lacked this meta.  The configuration and skill required was greatly outweighed by the larger stats, winning.  Therefore the game never became about building a configuration that beat your opponents, but building a configuration that produced the best stats.

Certain configurations compliment each other, for instance the boulder which is a short but stocky base works better with spinning discs, or the titan which is a large but high HP tower works well with ranged weapons.  So choosing compliments helped.  However, never was this more obvious when I landed two weapons that both boosted my titans attack points.  The boost was so large that it was a more effective contraption if I left the wheels off and thus increased the distance my opponent had to travel before reaching me.  This let me get 2 clear shots off with 2x rockets leading me to level up 4 ranks in quick succession.  Although this is a form of Configuration, the skill involved was nowhere near as beneficial to me as my boosted weaponry.

Stickiness: the balance of Stats, Skill, and Luck

The game features all 3 elements that help to make a great game fun.  However, the ratios and balance feels weighted too heavily towards stats. At the start of the game, 7-14 days this miss balanced system isn’t apparent as you are upgrading at a great rate and earning more and more interesting parts.  However, hitting the mid-game is where you start to notice the reliance on high stat parts. The main progression loop feels like:

1. Players get a drop of a powerful part (good configuration, high star value)
2. Players use this to combo and get a very high value machine that win’s tournaments
3. Players progress 1,2 or 3 leagues quickly.
4. Players now face much harder higher part levels and their old configuration is useless.
5. Players must now wait or pay with the hope of getting a new powerful part.
6. Their old powerful machine is redundant and must be merged into new parts.

Powerful strategies become completely redundant through stat progression, not skill progression. During the early game this progress loop continues to happen fast and redundancy isn’t as noticeable as your parts quickly get upgraded 3 or 4 levels.  However, when particular high value parts or combo parts are needed, the loop grinds to a halt.

Powerful strategies become completely redundant through stat progression, not skill progression.

If you compare this to Clash Royale’s card system, rather than your old cards becoming redundant, the metagame (the discussion of the game outside of the game) progresses each week with cards that combo well together to counter popular decks. No card ever becomes redundant, cards shift in popularity.  The stats of cards become less and less important as you progress as it takes such a long amount of time to collect enough material to fuse and power-up your card, that skill and deckbuilding become the primary factor that determines which league you are in.  This creates a much more loyal and engaged fanbase.  So much so that the metagame has moved to other channels such as YouTube or Twitch.  People are now more focussed on learning what decks to build than which stats are needed to beat other players.  

This is noticeable to players, and affects their loyalty.  PvP games need to always strike a balance between allowing spenders to pay to win, but no allowing spenders to dominate because they paid. C.A.T.S. biggest issue is that no matter what my skill level I always do better with better stats cards.  Therefore the veil of fun is pulled clearly off revealing the power that a purchase of new cards will provide, better stats. Your players notice this and can’t engage, encourage or create a meaningful metagame around your game.  If the only skill is in configuration and everyone has different drops, what is there to really talk about, buy more crates to win?

Conclusion

C.A.T.S. looks to be ZeptoLab’s next big hit on the AppStore. They’ve shown they can innovate and create novel game experiences, and this is translating into big growth on the AppStore.  It shot directly into the top 10 downloads and it’s top grossing is still in the top 100 three weeks after release.  The unique gameplay, great visuals and smooth interactions are a pleasure to play.

But whether the game will stick on the grossing charts will be based on it’s balance between stats, skill and luck. Currently C.A.T.S. has favoured stats too strongly for it’s win condition.  The other two elements become mere footnotes in the shadow of a 100% bonus or a 1,000 damage rocket launcher.  As games are only 20 seconds long, you’re exposed very quickly to what beats what.  Once the novelty, beauty and intrigue has been exposed and the progression of ever increasing numbers becomes your only focus, the game loses some of it’s fun factor.

The success of any online PvP game is driven by it’s metagame (The C.A.T.S. reddit).  For metagames to work they need to be constantly evolving, skill led and fair. Fans become loyal if each of these factors is present. C.A.T.S. needs to encourage more discussion around the skill of contraptions.  They need to consolidate pieces so that players retain their redundant parts for future build configurations and they need to ensure that stat progression is kept within limits so that the game feels fair for both payers and players.

I still see a bright future ahead for C.A.T.S. as there is no other game like it and it’s great fun building cool fighting machines. Giving their fans more to talk about and obsess over will help to build out a loyal community that can actively engage for years.  If Zeptolab can get that right i’m sure we’ll see C.A.T.S storming the chart yet again!

Supercell has dropped a bomb on the mobile gaming market. Their new game, Clash Royale, soft launched just as 2016 got started. They have soft launched in only 8 countries, but this game is already a sure success. Supercell has already committed the game to a global launch in March.

Supercell has made a lot of smart choices with this game. They have a fun, competitive, forward-thinking game that exemplifies what modern free to play design should feel like. Previously I’ve talked about just how difficult Multiplayer on Mobile is to get right, yet here Supercell threw out the rulebook. They’ve now proven that Synchronous multiplayer can work on mobile. Many have even gone as far to say this is the first successful MOBA on Mobile.

Whatever you want to call this game, it will be a success, and it did so while breaking many of the rules.

But enough praise for the game, today I’d like to talk about my favourite subject when it comes to mobile game design: sessions. Specifically, where I think Clash Royale succeeded in creating session design that pulls players back each day.

They did so with 2 clever systems:

• Free Chest Systems
• Chest Slot System

Overview of the Game

Clash Royale is a card-based real-time strategy game. The best way to explain it is to watch:

Player use cards to spawn various units to attack opposing player’s towers. The goal is to destroy their towers before they destroy yours. The strategy is in choosing when and where to place your cards: to counter your opponent’s units, and to ultimately press the opponent enough to destroy their central tower.

Overall it is a hectic strategic game that lasts only a few minutes. It feels like a real-time hearthstone match mixed up with the clash of clans gameplay.

The Core:

• Winning a battle will reward you with chests (in various ways)
• These chests give you random rewards: gems, coins, and random cards
• Cards can be upgraded with enough duplicates of the same card, and enough coins
• To win, you need a variety of Levelled up cards

The Goal:

• Players want a collection of competitive cards
• To win as many matches as possible
• To get as many crowns and trophies as possible
• To reach highest Arenas
• To reach the top of the leaderboard (With your clan or by yourself)

The loop is focused on collecting and gathering cards. Not unlike Hearthstone. The big modification though is the ability to upgrade these cards.

To upgrade a card, you need to collect duplicates as well as coins. The real key comes in the rarity of the cards. Some cards are inherently better than others (ex. the Giant), and since they are RARE or EPIC, they drop a lot less than others. So not only do you want to collect these rare cards, you also need to collect a lot of them to fully upgrade the card.

This strong desire to collect and upgrade your cards is what drives all systems in the game. Each session is about attempting to get as many chests (and thus cards) as possible. To collect cards the fastest, the player has to play by the rules that Supercell desires to drive retention and monetization.

#1: The Free Chests System

To analyze Clash Royale’s sessions, let’s start with the most obvious system: how Clash Royale starts and ends its sessions.

For any game, good session design is marked by two things:

• You’re rewarded each time you come back to the game
• The game quickly gives you a short-term goal, that can be accomplished within that session, or at least within a few sessions

This is usually accomplished in most games by a few things:

A Rewarding Start:

Good sessions always start off with a instantly rewarding mechanic. Most games aim to have a collection of resources each time you return or a Daily Reward System. This gives the player a good feeling instantly after starting up the game.

Short Term Goal:

But having an instantly gratifying mechanic isn’t enough. The player must quickly form a goal which will drive the player further into the game. They need a goal which asks them to engage in the core gameplay.

This dynamic is usually created by a Daily Mission system or wanting to use up all Energy.

Clash Royale creates these 2 dynamics with 2 systems: A free chest every 4 hours, and a crown chest after collecting 10 crowns.

The free chest system marks the beginning of your session: you come in, open up your free chests. It feels rewarding just to come back.

Secondly, the crown chest. To open you must collect 10 crowns from opponents. This gives me a nice short term goal. Even if I am far away from ranking up, I want to collect 10 crowns so I get the crown chest. Realistically this goal can be accomplished in 1 session, or at least within a day.

This is perfect for driving a strong session length. A clear goal as soon as they’ve opened up the app. Something that the player feels good for accomplishing.

This chest can be opened once per 24 hours, which gives a strong daily goal for players. Players wanting to get the maximum number of chests come back each day and play enough matches to collect 10 crowns.

These 2 chests, which take up a small portion of the UI, incentivize strong sessions per day and strong session length.

#2: The Chest Slots System

Secondly lets look at the Chest Slot system.

Each time you play a round, if you win (score more crowns than the opponent), you will receive a chest. This chest is randomly chosen from Silver, Gold or Magical. Each chest takes time to open: 3h, 8h or 12h. You can only open 1 chest at a time, and to restrict things further, you only have 4 slots to store chests.

No other game on mobile has used this pattern for pacing players. This is the first I have ever seen someone attempt something like this. Instead of pacing the players through energy or construction timers, they went with a system that limits the rewards players get. Players can play as often as they like, but in order to progress and upgrade their deck, they need to pace themselves.

This system can only work if they know that :
#1: players won’t grow tired of playing their game… no matter how much they play
#2: their matchmaking and card upgrade system can prevent players from progressing into the higher leagues too fast

#1 is no easy feat, but I believe they accomplished it. Clash Royale is a game, like Hearthstone, that has a shifting meta, no clear answers. Every battle feels different, especially because its synchronous multiplayer.

#2 is based on the big change they made over a pure Trading Card Game system. Because you can upgrade each card, eventually the player will be confronted with decks that are stacked against them. No amount of skill will be able to defeat a deck with higher level units. Because of this, players will eventually need to play the chest opening game. There’s no avoiding it.

Matchmaking aside, what about the overall feeling of the sessions?

This system fulfills the goals of Flexible Sessions. Rather than blocking the player from playing the game, they ask the players to be smart about how they spend their time.

But what about having to come back every 3 hours to clear out a single chest? Why not allow for chests to be opened up automatically? Opened up in queue?

My guess is that Supercell knows the pain that the chest slots creates, and this is intentional for retention and monetization purposes. Players have to organize themselves to hit all their timers. This uncertainty of hitting their Chest Timers drives players to come back, and pay to speed up the timers when they know they won’t be able to return optimally. I know for myself this chest slot system has converted me into paying to skip timers.

But regardless if you’re chest slots are full, the player can continue to play, which really is what drives the flexible sessions. Even if you’ve filled up your chest slots there is a lot of productive things you can do in the game:

• You can continue to play and push as far up the leaderboard as you can go with your current cards
• You can continue to collect crowns for the Crown Chest
• You can donate cards and request cards from clan mates
• You can chat and read messages from other clan mates
• You can watch other battles from around Clash Royale (and be teased of late game content or tempted to speed up progression…)

So although the Chest system is restrictive, its not nearly as restrictive as a straight up energy system. And having this “soft” restriction allows highly engaged players to opt-in to leaving the game when they feel smart about it.

Conclusions

Supercell have a big success on their hands with Clash Royale.

They crafted strong sessions with 2 systems:

• A Free Chest system that gives rewards just for arriving and setting a strong session goal
• A Chest Slot system that effectively paces players without energy

This base of strong session design is driving strong retention and monetization. I don’t expect Supercell to change much as this game moves towards global launch. I expect that they are mostly focusing on making their end game deeper and more competitive. This will drive the game even further up the Top Grossing charts, and drive even stronger long term retention. This game will be on the charts for a long time to come.

Overall Supercell clearly have opened up new doors with their designs. It shows that synchronous multiplayer can work on mobile, and energy is not needed to pace players properly. Lets see whether this ushers in a new “Clash of Royale Clones” or developers can apply these design lessons to new games on mobile.

When it comes to free-to-play, ensuring your game has strong multiplayer gameplay is essential to driving long term success. Multiplayer on mobile drives strong long term retention for obvious reasons:

1. Multiplayer gameplay always has the uncertainty of what the other player will do. Each time you play in a multiplayer game, there is an element that you can’t predict, making the game always interesting. Because multiplayer games have this degree of uncertainty, players don’t need a massive amount of content in the game to enjoy it. Compared to a single-player game which a developer has to hand-craft months of content for the player to enjoy, in a multiplayer game, the a developer only needs a fraction of that content. Multiplayer games are far more efficient at pacing.
2. On top of pacing content, multiplayer focused games always have strong long term retention because you have this feeling of being in a living, breathing community. These games create real social interactions between players. Players build social norming bonds. Playing with real people makes it socially acceptable.

But creating truly social multiplayer gameplay is not trivial on mobile. Creating a well balanced multiplayer is a massive task on designers, add on top the constraints that the mobile platform creates: smaller screen, shorter session lengths and intermittent connections. Because of these constraints, fully synchronous multiplayer has not really seen massive success on mobile except for a few key games: Hearthstone, 8-ball Pool and World of Tanks. Even with Hearthstone, arguably the best at “lean-back” synchronous multiplayer, I know that each time I play I must be completely focused and I can’t quit within that time. The game is not great for handling distractions or allowing players to leave at will. I’ve gotten in trouble enough times for getting stuck in a Hearthstone match when real life needed my attention.

While I’m convinced that games will slowly move towards fully synchronous multiplayer, in the meantime, smart developers will be trying to find ways to create the same benefits of synchronous multiplayer (social gameplay, repeatable content) with systems that are more adapted to the mobile constraints.

Today I’ve put together 3 key ways that developers build multiplayer on mobile currently:

Faked Synchronous

Many free to play games create the feeling of synchronous multiplayer without actually delivering on it. When players are matched up to other opponents, a bot plays in the place of the actual player. Game designers rely on players not being able to feel the difference between a live player and a bot player. Which is difficult, but not impossible.

Contest of Champions by Kabam relies on this. Even though it feels like multiplayer, each multiplayer fight is actually against a bot. By doing this, they cut out problems that come with matchmaking and handling a fully synchronous fighting game with intermittent internet connections.

CSR Racing also does something similar. When you race against another player online, they either use stored ghost of the player or a bot to race the player’s car. Because of CSR Racing’s gameplay, player’s can’t affect the other player’s race. So playing against a bot or a live player is really no different.

But of course, this is the bare minimum of synchronous multiplayer. Just racing against something you can’t effect doesn’t really feel engaging. Real Racing 3 tried to fix this. Taking a recording of another player’s race, they allow you to race against their ghost. During the race, you can bump into their car and send them off course, but their ghost will magically re-adjust to where the original player was racing. Its about as close to synchronous as you can make it.

Overall this approach allows you to have the easiest matchmaking, handles connection stability and players can engage in quick sessions. However, true interactions and the feeling of playing against a live player is lacking.

Simultaneous Multiplayer

Simultaneous multiplayer is something that not many mobile games have used. It originates mainly in browser based games and Fantasy Sports games in the late 90s and early 2000s (see Travian, see Hat-Trick).

Simultaneous multiplayer is done by asking players to prepare their strategy in advance, then both strategies are played out at the same time. With this method, players can come to the game any time before the scheduled turn and make their choices. Players don’t have to be online at the exact same time to interact and compete with each other.

Top Eleven by Nordeus is one of the few games that have implemented a simultaneous multiplayer system. Each match is scheduled at a set time. Each player sets up their team’s tactics, formations, strategies beforehand, then waits for the scheduled match to commence. Regardless if the players are active or not, the game is run.

What’s really nice about this approach is that it provides natural pacing of the gameplay:

• Player’s feel like the pacing is fair: everyone in the world can only the same amount of actions per day.
• Session design revolves around scheduled times, building habits and keeping a rhythm

However, this system also leads to a lot of design problems for free to play:
it is extremely difficult to offer monetization in this system without making it feel pay-to-win. Each day each player has the same amount of actions. If payers get more actions than non-payers, or are offered anything that would give them a leg up in the gameplay, it will be felt quickly by other opponents. Matchmaking becomes very important.

Session design feels pretty limiting. After you’ve set up your strategy, there’s not a lot to do before the next scheduled turn. So it becomes a difficult decision for a designer to choose between very rapid turns (anxiety inducing) or a long time between turns (boredom inducing). This system suffers from being too scheduled and not giving players much flexibility if they miss out on a round or want to engage more in the system.

Asymmetrical & Asynchronous

The most popular way to create multiplayer on mobile is focusing on asynchronous multiplayer.

Games like Words with Friends or Draw Something have full asynchronous multiplayer. Each player takes a turn, then waits for their friend to finish their turn. While this is engaging initially, the most games that go for this style of asynchronous have failed on the mobile marketplace. Mostly due to matchmaking, session design and monetization limitations with the game design (see our post on eliminating energy and building social mechanics). But async doesn’t have to be designed this way. They can also be designed as asymmetrical asynchronous.

Asymmetrical Asynchronous games focus on two types of gameplay, usually active and passive, and making each as engaging as possible. When players are active, they engage in one facet of gameplay (mostly the attacking gameplay), when players are inactive, they passively engage in the other facet (defending gameplay). Of course this is shown in the Clash of Clans, Rage of Bahamut or King of Thieves style games.

The key with this style of multiplayer is how to make both gameplays engaging and balanced. Ensure that players must engage in both systems in order to progress. Usually this comes in the form of loss aversion: players need to engage in the defending game to ensure their resources are protected from other players. Players also need to engage in the attacking game to retrieve these resources quickly enough to build and progress.

So far in the mobile world, asymmetrical games have all been constrained thematically to Clash of Clans style “Attacking” vs “Defending”. There’s been some attempts to change up this formula with games like Zombination, where the player can decide to focus more on attacking (zombies) or defending (humans). However for the most part these games fall under the “clash of clones” style game, yet this system clearly has room to grow for new games.

Looking into new ways to apply this formula (Passive vs Active gameplay) to new genres and new gameplay is the key to opening up new opportunities on mobile. King of thieves is the best example I’ve seen to date.

Conclusion

There are other types of multiplayer that can work on mobile.

You can go full synchronous like World of Tanks and Hearthstone, but these have session length problems and critical mass problems.

You can go fully asynchronous like Words with Friends, but this creates critical mass, player inactivity, and further session issues.

You can just stick with leaderboards or other “tacked on” multiplayer competitions, but if you want the real benefits of social multiplayer, you need to tie this into your core gameplay.

Thus far mobile has existed in the middle ground — trying to get the advantages of synchronous multiplayer, but without the constraints that are felt on mobile.

To build multiplayer on mobile there are 3 options :

• Faked Synchronous
• Simultaneous Multiplayer
• Asymmetrical Asynchronous

Each can create strong session design, work with the constraints of mobile, and still feel like living vibrant community. Each have their own problems and their own opportunities.