💥 Clash Royale’s $57M Comeback: Players cry pay-to-win, Supercell cries $2M a day by Jakub Remiar

When they remove daily lucky drop, they move it to the center of the screen.

Yeah, that's the one that we call it here.

Like normally, you would see it here, where it says lucky drops claimed and all gold claim, and like you would have like these four icons of pretty much instead of for chest, you would have four lucky drops.

Yeah, they did this.

Also, added that you can get cards for winning 10 matches.

I understand.

Yeah, not here, but in the battle mode.

Yeah, not even a month, and they removed that and left us with just the four lucky drops.

So, also, that was removed.

Yeah, chests were removed.

I think it's a pretty important change.

But again, what's happening here

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Hello, hello, this is two and a half gamers, another solo episode.

And yeah, today we're gonna talk about very interesting stuff because we have a nine-year-old game that quadrupled its monthly revenue.

And of course, I'm talking about Clash Royale, which is the latest rave these days.

Because as I'll show you under the graph, that's why I'm talking about this.

It seems literally outstanding that this is happening now because as i said let's say march 2025 revenue for clash royale was 16 million

whereas july 2025 revenue is 57 million so yeah we really need to talk about it uh it took me a lot of time digging through this to understand like how these things are because There's merge tactics being released in Clash Royale recently, and I really wanted to look deep into this.

Like, is it really that impactful?

Yeah, no, we'll get to this.

So, that's there.

Just to put these numbers into context, like why we really need to talk about this now and like revisit this whole thing, is that as I said,

July revenue around 60 million, which was the best month for Clash Royale since 2017.

Yeah, a long, long time ago.

And then

if you look at the overall Supercell portfolio, and this is the kicker here, it's actually the biggest grossing game for whole Supercell for last two months, for both July and June, as Brawl Stars is basically still declining.

I guess a little bit stabilized.

Yep, it's not growing like Shrell is basically now.

So, yeah, Supercell does it again.

Takes an old game and

Skyrch has it to the moon so let's look deeper into this what happened what's there and like what not

so as you know clash royale itself

here we have it got some pretty major reworks and changes done recently like i would say a very very big facelift you looking currently at the screen as i showing you like maybe you're asking like where are the chests yeah so there are no chest timers anymore and uh yeah we'll go one by one on the timeline to maybe try to put this whole graph into context to understand like what are these yeah

are these spikes what's happening where and like why is this thing pretty much doing so much more money than it had before

okay so before i start

maybe let's go really really back somewhere here like 2018

so what happened there is that

207 Fortnite comes out.

It's the era and the season of Battle Passes.

Everybody wants to have a Battle Pass.

And there's this like very,

I know, I think like a famous example.

Joking had a great article on this actually back in the day where Supercell implemented the Battle Pass taught in Clash Royale and Clash of Clans

and it didn't really work well for one of these games which was Clash royale clash of clients worked pretty well there's a great uh lecture actually on that on youtube you can find it uh by aino one of the best product guys there in curcel where he talks about how the economy was restructured and

pretty much tailor-made for addition of the battle bass whereas clash royale didn't really went this kind of the same process and it actually hurt their revenue So because Clash Royale economy is not that deep as in Clash of Class, just by its nature and just how cards are scaled, how

like it's pretty much one progression

back then in the game and much fewer cards also, which means much lower start then.

So that was there.

And then we have this kind of years of decline,

which is

somewhere here.

from 2018 just down down down down there's some spikes here

there are some if i understand

what was it?

Yeah, some interesting events such as the Queen's Gambit

Chess Corporation or some stuff like that.

Like few of these things I

really want to kind of dig that deep into this bump here.

So we leave it for now, even maybe that I'm missing something.

But again, for this kind of a situation, it's not.

that important yet

so what's really important is that why is the revenue started growing here later down the line?

Here we are.

Somewhere here are June 2023.

So what happens there?

Like why did the baseline here, which was oscillating around like 200K, went to like double the baseline?

So what happened as a major feature in June 2023?

other than some like rebalances and changes are evolutions

what are evolutions?

So it's a smart way how to recycle content for Class Rail and pretty much add much more progression, like one more progression vectors.

You notice these like

shapes around

some cards that you see here, especially here in the collection.

So what what this means that if I go into a card, it has its evolution.

So it's an upgraded version of the card.

If we take it literally by its stats, we see that the basic musketeer has these things.

And if you go to evolution, it has sniper ammo, sniper range, sniper damage,

qualitative upgrades of abilities.

Great example would be with the knight.

So if you go into knight, you see it's pretty much exactly the same, just with the exception that it has 60% damage reduction.

And that's it.

This is really hard to make because you're pretty much essentially creating like an upgraded version of a unit.

Like think heroes of my magic tree like you have elves and then you have grandelves which shoots twice so basically this process so they started dishing out these evolutions one by one in some cycles as i read they were pretty op and of course you need the new currency in order to upgrade them so again more progression there so that's there

But this is not the thing like you see like this again, it's great, but increased the baseline, but really wasn't wasn't wasn't that that much there as like why is this like

to the moon part here

so we go to

March 2024

somewhere here so what happens there is that supercell uh

in

supercell puts lucky drops into the game

again why i have brawl stars in this chart to give you an idea like what's what's happening here is that

there's

we are yeah

there's brawl stars scaling sorry too late.

Brawl stars scaling during this phase.

So that was March twenty 2024.

And of course, BrawlStars is using the Star Chess system, which is basically the same system in Clash Glow.

It's called Lucky Drops.

It's the part where if you go and open the

chest, you just click on it multiple times.

Here we are.

Here we are.

Yeah, like these things, basically.

Don't know if I have an animation here from the team, but somewhere there there should be a lucky drop or no?

So basically it's that thing where you click on the chest and there are chances or like two or three clicks which can upgrade its rarity, which is again the power of gacha.

And the team just introduces this mechanic here in 2024

March.

So that's because BrawlStar is doing what it is currently.

But again, Clash Royale is still not that pumped yet.

How these daily drops were implemented was that you would get two through daily quests.

And that was it.

The game still runs on the chess system.

So if I go here, we would still be having these chests.

We will have season shop.

And we'll get to that and some other things there.

So it's still kind of the old progression.

It's just the initial, like, let's put this from Brawl Stars here.

And we have October 2024,

which is on this chart.

Maybe let's zoom in.

October 2024, somewhere here, where lucky drops were reworked.

There were magic items and cosmetics included in those five-star drops and they were added to past Royal Rewards and events, which means they were added to the battle pass.

And this is the important part.

What does it mean if you add cosmetics into the pool of gacha?

You make it harder because instead of getting the good stuff, you now can get pretty much from progression perspective worthless cosmetics.

So they actually deepen the gacha because again more pieces in it that you don't want, which means it's just stronger, more standard there is.

But still, chests are still in the game.

So then comes the major update in March 2025.

So where's that?

That's right here, right before this rocket ship started to go off.

So I'm guessing this is the one, because what happens here is, as is in the video, no more chess timers, no more chests, like the no more season shop, and this is even more important, no more season shop, and I'll get to that.

So they reworked the progression there, which means that pretty much every kind of progression mechanic that they had there was now obtained like the the sources of the game resources were now obtained through these lucky drops.

So what you get here is that there wouldn't be no more chess timers here.

You would have these, as you see here, the lucky drops.

Yeah, that this is how it rolls and basically click on a few times.

And then afterwards

they would add weekly events with lucky drops.

Set these chests turned on and some more balance changes.

Yeah, there they are.

So basically the whole game was turned into one giant kind of gadget on steroids which is lucky drops and all the kind of chess systems which again

were

very very stable resource generations were taken away what was also taken away was the season shop which was a part of the let's say free-to-play player progression as the players call it it was again some more resources which the guy said they will spread around but they didn't already spread them around so essentially what's happening here like you'd say oh just like taking out chests make this game to go sky high and like everything's just let's just do gacha yeah gacha super important and this whole feeling of like yeah that's very important and don't get me wrong i have the list of like what the guys did throughout the years in order to get there so removal of chests clown chest nerf nerve battle pass because again as we saw before they really needed to nerf it because there was just too much value in it.

Nerf Lucky Drops as they were iterating them, which means adding the cosmetics, that was what I read.

So even Lucky Drops themselves were nerfed.

Remove daily streak, lucky drop, remove daily tasks that lucky drop were given before.

Remove season shop, this is, I think, the biggest hurdle for players that are currently struggling with the new update.

Remove books from challenges, nerf overall rewards on challenges, nerf events into being emote and banner

emote and banners again cosmetics worthless from progression perspective.

Nerf events remove gem offers and replace them with real money offers.

We've seen what this nice change did with Brawl Stars.

Supercell was always very very generous with their economies and it seems like the same person who rebalanced Brawl Stars finally got their hands on Clash Royale.

Nerve Masteries, nerve monthly new game mod rewards, promises more live events as before but we still get the same amount.

that is literally what's written there and uncap level in clown wars and rank up so you can go against over level players most of the time which means you lose

forgot to mention when they remove daily lucky drop they move it to the center of the screen yeah that's the one that we call it here like normally you would see it here where it says lucky drops claimed and all gold claim and like you would have like these four icons of pretty much instead of forces you would have four lucky drops yeah they did this also added that you can get cards for winning 10 matches, which I understand.

Yeah, not here, but in the battle mode.

Yeah, not even a month, and they removed that and left us with just the four lucky drops.

So also, that was removed.

So,

yeah, chests were removed.

I think it's a pretty important change.

But again, what's happening here

on the sidelines, and like this, I think, should be the main idea of this whole podcast: of like what are we looking at?

They're making their economy much more tighter.

Like, you get less stuff.

So you need to pay for more stuff if you want to be competitive.

Simple as that.

It worked great for Brawl Stars.

It seems it's going to work great for Clash Royale.

And it seems community is just going to take that.

That's how it is, basically.

The notion that they introduce a lot of these other gacha-based mechanisms, which means lucky drops, is great.

But

again, it wouldn't work if the economy would be broken or let's say too generous from that perspective.

So in my opinion, it's a great rebalance, even though players are hating so much, I'll show you.

For instance, here, no more chess timers, no more chess, no more daily tasks, best way for progression remains credit card, they're finally killing the game, we had a good run boys, they're just killing the game with every update, the Clash Royale dev team needs to be fired, man, no season shop is going to hurt me a lot of as free to play player, it was one of the things that allowed me to keep up my levels.

And these comments that you saw, each of them have like 3,000 likes.

So exactly what I said.

Like, yeah, it's much more casual and much more expensive to just go there.

Because who would have thought if you make the game more expensive that you can squeeze out more money out of it, even if it's a nine-year-old game?

Yeah, this is happening.

So it's very similar to the pretty much stuff that happened with

Brawl Stars here.

But as Brawl stars already peaked there, I think this is also temporary.

We'll see what happens there.

The other important part regarding this, and this was the first question we wanted to answer during this

hypothesis, was that

merge tactics was added into the game.

Merge tactics basically means Clash Mini was integrated into Clash Royale.

So how it's done, why it is, and why I think it has literally zero impact on revenue.

And it's just a great mode there is with like adding more engagement maybe.

But yeah,

this really isn't the like the key part of like why this game is making so much more money than before.

It's the economy.

So

Clash Mini in so we can actually look at it.

you have the modes button here now where you have the game modes you have the trophy road that's the main one that's like you know typical clash royale here nothing really to it then you have the merge tactics which is already unlocked from arena 3 here

and then you have the other events such as the fire spirit king level 8 ranked classic 2v2

The very important part how they implemented the merge tactics game is that it fuels your pass royale progression same as the main clash royale core this is super important so you can pretty much choose if you will play clash royale or merge tactics and you will still pretty much complete your goal or like the main progression which is the pass royale now and the units themselves are basically the same

so

if we go here

and and again i'll show you how the mode works, we're using exact same units that are in the game, basically.

So yeah, which one do we choose?

Yeah, there we go.

Yeah, so that works perfectly.

So it's integrated much better than, let's say, for instance, the AutoChest mode in the Hearthstone,

which is called Battlegrounds, which basically broke the game because people didn't have to buy new cards.

It's like all the cards were unlocked for them in that mold.

so yeah great job supercell team this is how it should be so it's now complementing the main game basically which is great because it's

you can just choose that that that's only you

some differences and

some some of the people aren't that happy as you would think basically

so what happened is

What happened is that the game is simplified a lot.

This is not Clash Mini.

This is a very, very simplified version of Clash Mini.

There's no positioning, as you can see, you can move units, you just buy units.

Even though there are four people instead of 1v1 mode, which makes it a little bit of like a tournament mode.

Okay.

But yeah, this is definitely not the thing that you would expect from like people that were promised that Clash Mini will live now forever in Clash Node.

This is just a water-down version.

But it's fun, it's casual.

That's that's like what the game is now aiming for and I guess they need to sort out the community themselves.

So regarding the game itself as you see like you go from round to round, you upgrade all these units.

There are shit ton of these modifiers such as for instance this one.

Rollers gain 40% mode XP and of course each time you're picking some of these guys to can add to your current composition or combo you should be wary of that and pick based on these basically because again like for instance this increased the held of my guys by 50% so I guess we'll demolish this guy

yeah so that's there works pretty well I think it's nice schedule experience that like adds to the current you know if if you get bored of the current metagame or I mean like Clash Rail or the main core and you know it's implemented perfectly because again you feed you the same progression so that's there

I guess this will just live on and should be pretty good because

that was the main problem with auto chess and like with every other single thing there

that we saw just give me a second

uh with auto chess because auto chess is a great game but cannot monetize now finally collash royale can monetize so you know you put it into college royale and you have two games for one basically so that's there

works pretty well in my opinion Same, it's basically the same model that

League of Legends uses with Team Fight Tactics, like Team Fight Tactics

in the main Western client lives and League of Legends client.

So

not the Asian one, the Fight for Golden Statue, that's a different case scenario because it's Asia.

But here in the West, like I don't think so.

Any other auto chess game based on that model will make it.

So this is a good implementation, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's shallow, but again, what can you do?

I guess that wasn't the best move, but let's see.

Yeah, so that's there.

And

in the meantime, as we play these games, let me just look at the chart where this was added in.

So this was June 2025.

So if we go into our favorite graph, it's basically here.

which was already past this kind of a giant scale when the game is already doing 1.3 million a day.

Now it's doing something like 2 million a day baseline with spikes going all the way up to like 3 million.

So, yeah, Clash Mini is definitely not the case why this game is revived basically and getting on top of the Supercells portfolio.

Clash Mini, I think, is a great addition to the current setup and

what's there and everything.

But

yeah, I wouldn't really

put it there.

This is the best thing ever.

Let me just sort some stuff.

Some people on the bench.

Yeah,

so

yeah.

I think it's great what's happening here.

I wasn't really expecting that.

People really need to understand why economies work like they work and why being generous means your game will fail because you won't have enough revenue and you won't be able to support UA, yada, yada, yada, yada.

Even though

people or especially supercell says that they don't have UA, yes, they have.

It's called influencer marketing because they have armies of people on YouTube doing videos for them.

So, yeah, they have UA.

Okay, let me just finish this one match so that works great and yeah i can't wait what happens with the game itself and like where it goes and pretty much how much

this spike will write and how sustainable it will be it's gonna be very interesting that now after all those years slash rail is gonna be the most uh revenue making game in

Supercell's portfolio, but let's see.

And you know, if Supercell can create any

super successful new games maybe they can do this old trick which already worked two times for them which is revive their old game so yeah I I'm not expecting heyday to to be next with like

spiking to something like thirty million a month but who knows let's see.

Anyway.

Yeah, I hope you find this useful so you don't need to search and like uh go around the place and like what's this and why was this updated and was that.

I guess I'll do a post about this with the nice graph and timeline on of this anyway.

But uh yeah,

it's a great example of like fixing economies.

Makes your game make much

fixing an economy will make your game make much more money, basically.

Yeah, that's it.

See you around.

If you have any questions, join the Slack channel and feel free to add those there.

Yeah.