Supercell's New "BOAT GAME" - First Impressions. Cool Idea or Dead on Arrival?

Speaker 1 Imagine Clash Royale would be in the same situation as it was before the scaling phase, somewhere here, like 10 mil a day.

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Speaker 1 Do you know how much River Games portfolio does per month? Quarter billion.

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Speaker 1 Hello. You got a lot of hair, Mate, eh? Jesus, what's happening?

Speaker 1 Is it growing quicker over there? Do you have a haircut? I have a

Speaker 3 haircut tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Don't worry.

Speaker 1 I mean, of course. Are you able to run with that kind of hair? Like, with all the air resistance?

Speaker 3 Yeah, but hair is not the problem. My leg is a problem.

Speaker 1 Seems like a recurring problem here.

Speaker 3 So we are two and a half gamers. Two of the gamers have

Speaker 1 injuries. Yeah, two and a half legs.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I have a broken foot. Matthia has a broken ligament.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no. I'm fine.
It's like actually

Speaker 3 was a heel spur instead of a tendon injured. So

Speaker 1 turned out different, but nobody cares. No one cares.
Nobody cares. It's fine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, nobody cares about our legs. People care about games.
And we do care about games. And we're talking about a new Supercell game

Speaker 3 which is called a boat game. I played this game when it wasn't even...
What is it now? Like alpha testing? Second alpha.

Speaker 1 So I was in the first alpha and I decided not to move forward with the second alpha because, oh my god, I didn't have fun.

Speaker 3 And there is a lot of interesting facts about this game on Reddit and sub-reddits of like like mini clash guys and like loads of other stuff.

Speaker 1 Mini clash guys, you mean clash mini?

Speaker 3 Clash mini, that's what that's matter. I mean clash mini in fans, kind of because there is a lot of stuff happening.
Well, anyway, well, it's a super soul game. Now they closed uh squad busters and

Speaker 3 yes, so a lot of stuff happening, and we have some strong opinions,

Speaker 1 of course.

Speaker 3 So, do do you? I mean,

Speaker 3 I want to say, do you want to play the game, but you can't?

Speaker 1 Because wait, wait, wait. First of all, thank you again and welcome to our episode.
I'm Felix Brauberg.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, my name is Matte Lanceric.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we are your hosts. Yeah, now we're getting carried away.

Speaker 1 I got carried away.

Speaker 1 I think maybe you should show the whole portfolio, right? Because it's been an absolute tear, right? Let's start the game and then.

Speaker 1 You want to start with the game? Hello, everybody.

Speaker 3 Thanks for joining this episode.

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Speaker 3 Now let's get back to the content. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 I have a video of myself, basically, and then some other videos that we can talk about. But yeah, that's a video of yourself?

Speaker 1 There won't be numbers because

Speaker 1 second alpha, so there's there.

Speaker 1 So yeah, so this is basically playing me, and so we can have you look like you. Yeah, so much hair.
But so, well, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 3 You were not able to play this on emulator, but you were able to play it on your phone.

Speaker 1 Yes. Correct? Okay, possibly.

Speaker 1 Okay, fine.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, okay. Because I thought you were not multiple.
There's this central hub. Let's start with just the feature set and what's this all about? Because I think it's a little bit

Speaker 1 mysterious and people don't even understand what's the game about and like what it is. Exactly.
So let's break this. So basically, it's a third-person twin stick action shooter, I could say.

Speaker 3 What stick?

Speaker 1 Twinstick. Twin stick? Twinstick.
Twin stick. Twin stick.
Twin sticks. You have two joysticks to control the character, one for the movement, one for the skill and shooting.

Speaker 1 That's called Twinstick Shooters.

Speaker 3 Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 No worries.

Speaker 1 Three years in the podcast. Cloud, we've sorted that out.
No worries, man. Just don't throw DSPs at me against my DPS.

Speaker 1 Great moment in two and a half history.

Speaker 1 New t-shirt coming. Yeah.
Anyway, so there's this central hub, which is like your base, or not even base, like call it Tortuga or whatever where pirates came.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 most important things that there are: there's this guy that you need to give in chests. I'll get to the chests later, but that's that's like opening mechanism.

Speaker 1 Basically, then there's the recycle building, which is called well of wishing. But basically, it means you click on your old weapons and then you recycle them for soft currency.

Speaker 1 That's it, like not really that much to it. So, there we go.
And then there's the last important thing in the main part of the hub, which is the shop.

Speaker 1 And as I said, this is second alpha, not that many features, so don't be surprised.

Speaker 1 Where you can use the recycled currency to buy chest the let's say the easy way, because this is the easy way and there's the hard way where you actually need to bring them on the boat to the guy and like give it to him.

Speaker 1 So this is how it looks. You get the chest.

Speaker 1 There was first as you saw this like plus five lightning, whatever something. That's basically your overall gear score or something, like how they kind of gate the progression of the whole game.

Speaker 1 That's it, like it's not really something like you would say, like an energy or whatever, which is a number basically that increases. And based on the number, it scales the whole game.

Speaker 1 Basically, you have different locations, different gears.

Speaker 1 So, in every chest, there are two items that can be rare, epic, or common, I think.

Speaker 1 And that's basically it. As you saw, there was also this kind of a clicking mechanism.

Speaker 1 So, there are always two items in the chest.

Speaker 1 We have, I think,

Speaker 3 four slots.

Speaker 1 So, we have primary weapon, secondary weapon, the heart, which is basically HP.

Speaker 1 Yeah, those are weapons in the second. And then there's

Speaker 1 the boat, which has a cannon. The bolt itself is just a skin, nothing really to it.
You can change its parameters or damage or whatever, it's just a skin.

Speaker 1 You can change the skin if you want, but the important part is the cannon on it. So, it's either cannon or rocket or whatever, something like three or four different types of weapons basically.

Speaker 1 And their stat increases. The items are very flat.
I'll get to it, but their progression is very flat, which, in my opinion, is a little bit problematic because usually I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's hard to like second alpha. Come on, I know it's second alpha, but it's already so flat.

Speaker 1 I don't know,

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's there. And then you see, like, I have a better weapon that I can equip, and then this brain thing, which is this wasn't there, the version before.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, so this is basically like a passive skill tree that you get this currency from time to time, and you can then spend it and get some very like hipster stats, like hype, grit, and whatever.

Speaker 1 And who the fuck knows what it even does?

Speaker 1 Gen Z bitch, yeah, this whole game is Gen Z bitch, slay, Yeah, there you go. So, and then you have these

Speaker 1 better fields, which like more effects or whatever.

Speaker 1 But there was this other field, which is like this kind of thing here, which is the chip slot, which actually creates this kind of a big upgrade or big modification to your character with stuff like if poison enemies dies, the poison has a chance to spread to enemies around it.

Speaker 1 Yada, yada, yada. So, pretty powerful effects, and you can get these from the progression pass.
Wow, pretty much. It just looks so weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's so genuine.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Look. So that's there.

Speaker 1 Let me finish. Okay, fair.
Last thing, this is actually the task completion hub or whatever.

Speaker 1 This is basically the main menu.

Speaker 1 So we have the daily quests, which you can complete, get some XP, increase your level, and then another XP chest there. That's it, like standard stuff.

Speaker 1 Then we have

Speaker 1 these like

Speaker 1 back to party pass. So, this is the usual

Speaker 1 trophy road: free pass on the bottom, premium pass on the top. In the current alpha, you get the premium pass by inputting a secret password, which is both are cool.
So, that's it.

Speaker 1 You just input it and you have it. So, I guess it's testing period, so nothing really to it.
In those, you have more, like,

Speaker 1 yeah, this is the thing. You have more chests, more revives, more brain three currency, and like stuff like that.
nothing really to it.

Speaker 1 Usually it's driven by like cosmetic stuff and those chips, you've seen that you get the chips from there.

Speaker 1 So that's there. And then these are these kind of long-term quests that you can get more stuff from,

Speaker 1 which are again like ongoing and the usual ones.

Speaker 1 And then last thing is season packs, which is

Speaker 1 some cosmetics mostly.

Speaker 1 The economy is very, very light to begin with already. So that's there.

Speaker 3 Already, again, it's second alpha. Like, what the fuck do you expect?

Speaker 1 I know it's second alpha, but compare project rice to this with second alpha. Like, how many currencies, how many, like, just the Phoenix feathers, like immediately, the monetization point, right?

Speaker 1 There.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so you get the telephone boots that are on the beaches, which you can summon your boat, so you don't need to walk to them like this.

Speaker 1 That's there.

Speaker 1 After you get out of the hub, you need to go through this like like triangle portal. And when you get out of it, it creates this kind of a fortnight-style

Speaker 1 pretty much level where you can choose which island you need to get.

Speaker 1 As you saw, those are these like islands locked behind the gating mechanisms of you need to open more chests because I guess the monsters that are stronger, yada, yada, you can still go there even if you don't have the thing, but I guess they're curious.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 let's say we choose an island, we go into it, and usually

Speaker 1 those are power-ups which increase the speed of our boat. And usually on each island, there's this some kind of a quest or whatever.
You see in the icon of this eye.

Speaker 1 So for instance, here you need to bring the eye to the middle of the island. It will spawn some kind of random quest.

Speaker 1 Like these are very reminiscent of the quest from Diablo 4 as you go through the world. some random encounter, whatever.
Other players can join you and help you or go against you.

Speaker 1 I'll get to it. And yeah, you get chests from it.
Your boat has three slots, four chests that you need to load there and get to the safety to the hub and then open there with the guy.

Speaker 1 That that's and people can steal your chests or what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that's that's that's the interesting part because again, I was trying to kind of go around and see some players, but in this kind of a playthrough I wasn't able to see, so I was just roaming the island because I wanted to show you the PvP mechanic.

Speaker 1 So you see this red thing on this right thing, it's called like going bad,

Speaker 1 which means it activates PvP and the possibility to steal chests.

Speaker 1 It's quite important, but yeah, you get your ASCII immediately if you don't know what you're doing, as you will see in a moment.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I wasn't able to find any players. This is how it looks on just dry run.

Speaker 1 You press it, it says you gone bad, now you can PvP and steal. You flash red, other players see you flashing.

Speaker 1 Whole screen pretty much says like it's a little bit similar to something like Ultima Online Online when you just went

Speaker 1 PK player killer character and then it unlocks a little bit different choices for you but other players the good ones can still kill you like immediately get even a reward for your head if you kill someone and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So I was trying to find somebody wasn't able to.

Speaker 1 So I went back to the hub actually and reset the the matchmaking so I went to to like two islands and see like here you can see other players moving there. So I went there.

Speaker 1 There are actually four of them which was not the good choice. So, here I'm going with another player

Speaker 1 going to the island. Monster starts attacking me.
Yeah, not really good timing.

Speaker 1 And I went PvP basically, and the guy immediately shoot my ass. Why not?

Speaker 1 So, yeah, there's a little bit of a PvP fight which didn't go pretty well. And yeah, if he would have chests here on the boat, I would can like steal them, take them, put it to my boat, kill him.

Speaker 1 Yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 1 If you're dead, as a player killer, you cannot respawn on the island. If you're a good player, you can use the power up, the revenge.

Speaker 1 Like this is the Phoenix Feathers, as I was talking, the consumable. So you can respawn there and get revenge.

Speaker 1 If you are a player killer, you can just go home because, again, this is, I guess, the griefing prevention of stronger players, just farming lower players. That's there.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 I guess that's the end of my playthrough, but let me first show you

Speaker 1 one of the guys here who actually did that.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's just like looking on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so for instance, here he goes bad and started killing other players basically.

Speaker 3 Which it looks like this guy actually knows what he's doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's know what he's doing. So he even has this PvP chest, which is increased by the number of kills that he gets.
I think where is he? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he goes, see, this is the beginning of the encounter. So he goes here.
He sees the guy that he has this chest. He wants to steal it.

Speaker 1 Literally said it like, I want to steal it because it says, you can only steal this chest if you go bad because that's a special like kill other players' chest. So he goes bad and then

Speaker 1 kills the guy and kills few more guys and just run away with it. So that's there.
This is the end and you see it goes like wanted there's a bounty on your head now.

Speaker 1 So other players can kill you and kill players to upgrade so it's like a typical pvp chess like these mechanics i've seen in lineage like ten years ago so not that revolutionary but uh the problem that you see immediately is like aiming is fucking hard in a twin stick mobile shooter and like i hate these things i'm i'm sorry like i don't play any shooters on mobile and in my opinion it's a very painful experience but yeah whatnot like you see the guy's hands here on the bottom how he's aiming i just like hate this shit

Speaker 1 But anyway, the PvP seems pretty interesting, and like it's this kind of PVE VP VP pretty much setup because monsters,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 monsters can still kill you in between the fight. This is this is the main problem.

Speaker 1 And then you see, even the guy himself, like, he has very, very low HP and barely manages to escape with the chest. So, yeah, it's it's really, really not that easy.

Speaker 1 And then he goes again, as I said, to the hub. He goes to the

Speaker 1 whatever, the opener NPC, opens the chests, and that's it. And again, it just scales up and that's it.
Nothing really to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's pretty much the feature set of it. Like, as I said, there are different encounters.
So there's, for instance, this kind of egg encounter. that

Speaker 1 he kills someone else that you join this quest and see he's stealing other people's shit so if you know what you're doing, you can get pretty fast, I guess.

Speaker 1 But the progression itself is still kind of very flat. Like, it's just numbers increase on these items, like, not really that big of a difference.

Speaker 3 So, again, what are they trying to achieve with this second alpha?

Speaker 1 Oh, hello, hello there.

Speaker 3 I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode.
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Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Like that's the thing. That's my main problem with all these alphas and betas and whatever.

Speaker 1 But I think

Speaker 1 lots of these things were already there, if I understood.

Speaker 3 Nah, I think it's different. Although I played it for like an hour and it wasn't fun.

Speaker 1 But it was what, like February, start of the year or something?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was a long time ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1 When they launched November, we were kind of, yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay. Oh, I see where you were going.

Speaker 1 But this is

Speaker 1 this is this is what Supercell does, right? Because if they release it on their accounts, they can't trust the retention numbers because people just play it, right?

Speaker 3 But now they can, because this is the same thing. They're just like letting people in who is their fans.

Speaker 3 Like, honestly, if this

Speaker 1 wasn't

Speaker 3 a Supercell game, we wouldn't even care.

Speaker 1 I mean, like,

Speaker 3 can you imagine a small studio going to pitch this to VCs? They would fucking laugh. Like, everybody was like, what is this? But seriously, just think about it.

Speaker 3 If this hasn't, yeah, if this didn't have the Supercell stamp on it, like,

Speaker 1 even the art doesn't look like Supercell.

Speaker 1 Like, in my opinion. But then

Speaker 1 I don't like the art, to be honest.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. This doesn't say a Supercell at all, which.

Speaker 3 But like when you were talking about the Gen Z,

Speaker 3 I mean, and this is not the first, I mean, also, Moco is kind of in that Gen Z category and like definitely aim for younger players because we are getting old, like, no shit.

Speaker 3 And, like, then, like, what's the strategy for Supercell now? Is it just like, you know, trying to look into the future and try to start to build the games for young players?

Speaker 1 Honestly, this looks like a streamlined version of Fortnite to me a little bit.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, which I mean, it's quite popular among the generation, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 3 I'm still can't wrap my head around this. What are they trying to do?

Speaker 1 Because honestly, like, this.

Speaker 1 What's the issue when you're playing a Jakob? Is it just like you're kind of wandering around aimlessly and it's not hard enough?

Speaker 1 No, no, like, you know, the biggest problem here was matchmaking. Servers were kind of heavily crashing for me for a few days, so I couldn't even play it, honestly.

Speaker 1 But I guess, again, it's second alpha, so do you remember

Speaker 3 was this exact problem with rice

Speaker 3 maybe remember i i wasn't able to

Speaker 1 able to match make with anyone i mean it was just this is the this is the thing with supercell all of like nearly all of their games are pvp based which means matchmaking need to be fucking flawless otherwise these things don't work like they don't work with bad matchmaking so either you don't see anybody or you see two strong people for you

Speaker 1 yeah it's not fun

Speaker 1 if matchmaking and we've seen it, like

Speaker 1 even asynchronous games like Battle Legion, this would work well if the matchmaking broke down.

Speaker 1 And this is synchronous PvP, so it's like 10 times harder to do.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 I get that. I get their philosophy because these games, if they're done properly with matchmaking, players produce the content.
Players are the content. So they're not that content demanding.

Speaker 1 A smaller team can maintain them. That's great.
Yeah, it's going to be. But in order to build them, it's much harder to begin with.

Speaker 1 so yeah let's

Speaker 1 who is this who is this for like who's the target audience that's my biggest is it really gen z like baby i don't know like as i said like seems to me like a casualized version of fortnite basically

Speaker 1 and this is what what people want i don't know and and and i didn't get the thing with this bolt combat to be honest because like you barely

Speaker 1 have the wrong yeah you can shoot like you have like one slot of the inventory it's just the shooting on the bolt but the thing is that because the bolt is so fast, nobody shoots at no one because it's just like so hard to shoot people.

Speaker 1 You need to aim. You see, you have one power-up built into it, then you have these balls on the on the on the water that like basically speed power-ups, so you can get so fast.

Speaker 1 Like, how can somebody even shoot at you?

Speaker 1 I don't get this. Like, why does this even have the naval combat to begin with? You just

Speaker 1 hoping against the. I don't know.
Maybe if

Speaker 3 you play the rovio game, which was Battle something.

Speaker 1 Battle Bay. No.
Battle Bay. Yeah.
Yeah, that didn't go well.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But here, I don't know. I would expect, for instance,

Speaker 1 if you have full cargo, that it would slow you down or something. Or I don't know what.

Speaker 1 Some kind of dynamic or mechanic to work around the ship, but it's just like a ship and it moves. That's it.
Nothing really to it. And as I said, it's very hard to aim to begin with.

Speaker 1 Even harder to aim at the speedbolt.

Speaker 1 So what are they testing now in the second outlet? Do you think back to this, right? Yeah, I think they're testing like engagement metrics in a way-like how many

Speaker 1 chests per day people complete, kills per day, and all these other things, weapons, balancing, stuff like that, I guess, internal metrics.

Speaker 1 Actually, the secondary KPS, not the primary ones, like retention, RPU, and stuff like that. No, no, I mean, like the retention here is

Speaker 1 matters. So, all these things are kind of gone.
My guess is because balancing can be pretty good in a way, that you can like polish out a lot of things like these quests the monsters

Speaker 1 gating and the scaling mechanism like these things can be polished pretty well i get that so that that's pretty valuable you know what is really interesting so they're trying i mean they're working on this game for

Speaker 3 i let's say six months but i would say year no it's announced february so it definitely needs to be a year at least is exactly exactly because this is this is production heavy so this is second

Speaker 3 second alpha. You don't have retention KPIs.
You have some engagement metrics. You don't have CPI, so you don't fucking know if this works in terms of the CPI situation.

Speaker 1 Even if you finish it.

Speaker 3 Even if you finish it, exactly.

Speaker 1 But they don't spend money on UA. We talked about this.

Speaker 1 Now they spend money on UA a lot.

Speaker 3 But not on this.

Speaker 1 Not on this. No, not on this.

Speaker 3 Sure. Of course.
Yeah, they do.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 3 we can see that. But this is the different approach.
And I find it pretty hard because, I mean,

Speaker 3 what if this doesn't really work on the CPI side?

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know. So,

Speaker 3 this could have been killed already and just moved on to something else. You have fries, you have what else?

Speaker 1 But let's get what you have.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So, there's this thing on Wikipedia, by the way, which is super handy.

Speaker 1 But for everybody that's tracking what Supercell is doing, Wikipedia is like your way to go resource to be honest, because Supercell Graveyard, somebody

Speaker 1 is really keeping up with the graveyard i think they need to be a little bit faster because code busters is still not checked out yet but it will get soon

Speaker 1 will get soon but yeah today i was doing a post about this anyway so we can use my chart here pretty much wow so yeah this is this is the newest graveyard i'm not counting stuff before like all these other things pretty much because there's not that many games that before like there's the initial three that all died and hey day is basically iteration on farm will clash of clans is iteration of Backyard Monsters, Boom Beach is an iteration of Clash of Clans, Spooky Pop.

Speaker 1 I was mentioning one, one of those is Monster Strike, the other one is I don't remember what. Clash Royale is really the original push.
That's like hands-down,

Speaker 1 in my opinion, the most innovative game the Superstar ever did. And then Brawl Stars is a simplification of Mobus, which magically 10x its revenue

Speaker 1 last year.

Speaker 1 So that's there.

Speaker 1 And then the graveyard basically goes on

Speaker 1 from 2019. Like, Brawl Stars is the latest game that was like the billion-dollar a year, the youngest game.

Speaker 3 You know why, because from the launch of

Speaker 3 Clash Royale until the Brawl Stars revamp,

Speaker 3 I think they were not able to do anything with the monetization or the LTV or anything. So, when you launch a game in 2010,

Speaker 3 you have an LTV, let's say $5, but your CPIs are 10 cents.

Speaker 3 If you launch a game in 2025 and your LTV is 5, your CPI is fucking 20.

Speaker 1 So there's a problem.

Speaker 1 There's your equation.

Speaker 1 There's an equation.

Speaker 3 So like if you're doing this alphas bullshit all over again, like

Speaker 3 you should do the CPI

Speaker 3 test first and then kind of

Speaker 1 who just copy games from Steam because they work on their creatives and risking their normal games.

Speaker 1 It's enough to do the biggest game of the year.

Speaker 3 Well, come on, you say you just said it like it's like it's

Speaker 1 easy peasy.

Speaker 1 Of course, it's easy peasy. Easy peasy for them.
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so this is the current graveyard.
So Rash Wars killed very fast. Hey Day Pop killed kind of not so fast, but again killed.

Speaker 1 Then we have the April Fools thing, which nobody believed when there were three new games announced on April 2021. Clash Heroes, Clash Mini, Clash Quest.
Yeah, farewell to all of those.

Speaker 1 Everdale, the hidden game that was on the different account, which was the Forex Without Fighting farm stuff, which again didn't make it easy. It worked super well.
Yeah, didn't work.

Speaker 1 Boombeach Fraudlines, again, same thing here.

Speaker 1 Then Squad Busters, which was killed last month. Flood Rush, which in my opinion...

Speaker 1 That was way better than the Squad Busters, right? I still

Speaker 1 yeah, for me it was better, but what what do I know?

Speaker 1 And then Clash Mini was killed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, to be precise, Clash Mini was actually integrated into Clash Royale as merge tactics, which I think is a good salvage operation, works pretty well. It feeds the same power

Speaker 1 the Royale pass progression, which is really good because you can literally choose if you want to feed your battle pass with if you know more information about this i can watch the second you can you can watch the podcast click here go there click here yeah that's there yeah clash heroes was

Speaker 1 in a similar manner resurrected as project rise that's literally what they said this is kind of undead now

Speaker 1 uh which i think we was project ice already passed second alpha or second beta or second something we we did like two podcasts on it already exactly yeah exactly moco had the weirdest launch of them all because Moco just was like invite only, and then suddenly it wasn't, and that was it.

Speaker 1 And now it looks like where we are. Yeah, here we are.
Like, Moco launches, then Moco suddenly, like, oh, by the way, it's gold launched.

Speaker 1 It's literally like it's gold blanche, and then like, and then step. And, and, like, what now?

Speaker 1 This is the future.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so because Squad Busters got killed, players got so anxious about Moco getting killed immediately after it, because it was all kind of obvious, that the team now had to explain and do some kind of public statements that, like, don't worry, we're not getting killed yet.

Speaker 1 And they said they'd do like a major overhaul of Moko in Q1 next year. So that's then, which

Speaker 1 when you're going to overhaul, the game is not working. I don't know.

Speaker 1 In my opinion,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 we pretty much had an episode on every one of these games except

Speaker 1 Rush Rush Wars and Hey Day Pop, if I understand. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 So, so you can go and check it out. We played those games.

Speaker 1 Also, Boombeach Frontlines, we didn't get.

Speaker 1 We played most of the latest ones, so you can go and check it out.

Speaker 1 But in my opinion, Moco won't work because the itemization system for extra RPG needs to be deep, and those are only good as the itemization system, which is not shallow.

Speaker 3 I find it really hard again.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 the Clash Royale and Sprawl Stars, I can understand the target audience. for all these new games.
I just

Speaker 3 don't get it.

Speaker 1 I think this is the main crux of the problem here. Because if you look at like this is, let's just take new games.

Speaker 1 We can always look at like the big four that's are currently driving Supercell portfolio, but there's no continuity.

Speaker 1 Like there's no continuity behind the old portfolio and new portfolio. This is the again main part of the problem because Supercell was always and is always creativity first, tackling new genres,

Speaker 1 putting stuff

Speaker 1 up.

Speaker 1 It worked very well, you do it perfectly. The problem is that this strategy doesn't accumulate long term because you always start from scratch,

Speaker 1 which worked before, not now.

Speaker 1 There's no benefits from the Chinese with like microphone with our templates. There's none of us, right? You need to start from scratch every time.

Speaker 1 So they start from scratch every time, like go all the directions, all the studios, all the, you know, every like there's not like, for for instance did you see any like strategies lately which are by the way their best performing games like clash royale and clash of lands like exactly there's no strategies here zero

Speaker 1 no strategy no strategy game you mean yeah yeah like strategy genre game zero

Speaker 1 so which is which is weird like i don't get super good session with like action rpgs and action shooters and like why

Speaker 1 like i don't get that you know.

Speaker 3 It's all always reminded me this: like when we were at Pixel Federation, and everybody wanted to do a new game, and everybody wanted to do a new Diablo, but we didn't have money.

Speaker 3 These guys have money, so they are just doing crazy stuff.

Speaker 1 I get that, like, you need to be bold and do crazy stuff and everything, but at some point, you kind of need to make games that make money. Okay, and then sure.
I mean, they

Speaker 1 are making money, yeah, exactly. Get their portfolio up, man.
Sure, like they are making money, of course. They're making money.
The problem is that all the girls where you draw the line seven years

Speaker 1 all the gold is seven years at least seven years old not all

Speaker 3 yeah but you know what what's the what's the vibe now uh you know what we're just we'll just wait until next year we just revamp revamp uh because imagine imagine

Speaker 1 imagine clash rail would be in the same situation as it was before the scaling phase somewhere here like 10 mil a day so it would be like this and this is what like 60 mil even if i if i push it with clash rail now which is having the third best month since forever which is now doing like 80 mil a month it's 140 mil do you know how much river games portfolio does per month quarter billion

Speaker 1 and it's old for the whole whole thing that we see is like four years old in the west it's just giant bullshitting yeah so i'm not saying supercell is gonna die or whatever they're just gonna be

Speaker 1 sidelines yeah

Speaker 1 they're not gonna die come on they're so good at retaining users man they've been doing this for so long they're not getting new users, they're retaining users.

Speaker 3 Sure, but like, what's yeah, and then they launch seven new games and they kill them immediately because they're not good enough. So eventually, they're going to be fucked, which they are already.

Speaker 1 They need to change the strategy. Yeah.
The biggest problem, like, one is this kind of genre continuity, no accumulation, no templates, no, no, nothing.

Speaker 1 But as I said, all these Chinese companies, all these other things that we see growing lately, it's based on very aggressive UA. Like, yeah, super aggressive UA.

Speaker 1 We've said this a million times on this podcast. The most important thing in mobile is not your game anymore.
It's not your monetization. It's how you market it.
But this is your UAE, right?

Speaker 1 Last three years. This was not the case before.

Speaker 3 But wait a second. Felix, you're putting it in a very different direction.
Like

Speaker 3 how you work with UA or how you incorporate UA into the product. That's the main kind of strategy here.

Speaker 1 Because if you run the campaign,

Speaker 3 it's just like

Speaker 1 part of the campaign. Everybody can run fake ads, but not everybody can scale on fake ads.

Speaker 3 Everybody can just run aggressive, like spending shit ton of money and then just run all the channels. Doesn't mean it's going to succeed.

Speaker 1 That's the thing.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 as I said, like, I was, as I said, in the article that I've written recently, I literally said, like, I was expecting

Speaker 1 Clash of Clans IP to go Forex like five years ago.

Speaker 1 Why didn't they go Forex? It's a strategy.

Speaker 3 Because they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to do it.

Speaker 1 But they

Speaker 1 have like two of the biggest strategy games on the market.

Speaker 3 Which is still not Forex, man.

Speaker 1 I know it's not Forex, but it's at least kind of similar to the same genre. It's close.

Speaker 3 It's close, but you know, like, it's a different mentality again.

Speaker 3 You know, you remember the days where they, you know, get rid of the loot boxes?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. So the shooting into the food they into the food, exactly.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, come on, like, how they can work with Forex. Like, you know, what's going to, oh, it's too aggressive monetization.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 1 Like, I guess, except Brawl Stars, maybe, but again, it was pretty tightened lately. And same goes for Clash Royale.

Speaker 1 Like, this whole scaling of Clash Royale is because, like, they tighten the economy so much. Yeah.
But

Speaker 1 finally, bought Heyday, bought Clash of Clans, bought Boom Beach, bought Clash Royale. Like, they have very, very deep economies.
Super deep.

Speaker 1 Clash of Clans, there's like hundreds of thousands that you can spend there, literally,

Speaker 1 even without gacha.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but you know,

Speaker 1 can you imagine that game like Bold Game can create like at least

Speaker 1 spend depth?

Speaker 1 40 euros.

Speaker 3 40 euros.

Speaker 1 That's it. I just can't imagine, like, how can they even push for this? Because the LTV, the CPIs are so high that you need to just like change the equations.

Speaker 3 Well, we don't know the cpis because nobody knows honestly especially when you don't run like a proper ui like proper ua for for gaming soft launch i mean there is no ua except like seven videos on on youtube which are kind of half ua but it's not like the main kind of marketing strategy for this right

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 I still hope that like some of the

Speaker 1 some of the new projects that are definitely there and we just don't see them like Supercell always have like shit ton of projects in production that are not announced.

Speaker 1 I just hope that at least one or two of them are strategies or some kind of thing with a deep economy. Otherwise, we just end up with this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. We are making a shit ton of money on strategy game.
Let's do an action RPG.

Speaker 3 Makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Let's not make a strategy game anymore.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 four Forex games beside each other, all scaling up. Century, two Forex games beside each other, all scaling up.

Speaker 3 I mean, they also like the merch portfolio and the rest of the microphone, five merge games beside each other, all scaling up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're right. Like, you could see, you could never see Supercell doing like a microfun strategy and having multiple titles in one genre, right? Like

Speaker 1 on the cards. And keep in mind that Supercell, by the way, is owned by the biggest Chinese company on the planet.
By the way,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 If you haven't noticed yet, okay. So,

Speaker 1 Project Rise, what do you guys think there is going to happen? Project Rice, we're going to get second, third, gamma, beta, whatever, something. It's just like so far.

Speaker 1 This is the problem that all these other things got killed with Codebusters, which was the again, the game that were the furthest. It was like the biggest surprise for everybody.

Speaker 3 Like, how this got green lit and not the others?

Speaker 1 And also the vocal. I mean, come on, like, yeah, let's just forget that for now.
But the thing is that there's no new things immediately waiting to scale. No, like Project Rise, at least half a year.

Speaker 1 Bold game, at least a year.

Speaker 1 Moco is kind of, in my opinion, will be killed after the if Miracles doesn't happen, or I don't know what, after that rework.

Speaker 3 They won't happen because the game is not suited for the like the L T V or like the echo copy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's not there.

Speaker 1 It's not there.

Speaker 1 Either half of the planet gets urged to play Moco or like that's it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because it's going to happen exactly what happened with Code Wasers. It's just

Speaker 3 you can't spend that much.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I really hope that at some point,

Speaker 1 maybe start of the next year, like January, whatever, like, oh, we have a new strategy game. Please, please have something like that.
Dude, also,

Speaker 3 even if that's true, I hope you're right. That's January 2026.

Speaker 3 First alpha, second alpha, third alpha, beta, whatever. It's 2027, and we are not even scaling it.

Speaker 3 That's my biggest problem with this company. Like, what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 1 Like, how many employees Supercell now has? Like, 800 probably

Speaker 1 900, something like that. They can pull off this shit out of the

Speaker 1 game.

Speaker 3 It takes so long. I don't fucking get this.

Speaker 1 But you know, you don't know. You don't know.
Maybe they're working on it for two years already.

Speaker 3 Which is even worse.

Speaker 3 Which is even worse.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 3 Any moment, but you still need to be in soft launch for at least three months. And if you have a strategy game, you are three months in soft launch.

Speaker 3 How do you think those cohorts are going to match over time? It's three months, it's not going to be even enough for saying, like, is this going to work or not?

Speaker 1 You look at what happened to the business. That's the other issue here that

Speaker 1 Glash Royale kind of hit the peak. So now it's kind of obvious that it hits the peak.

Speaker 1 And it was very similar to Brawlstars actually because it was nearly identical nine months of like super scaling and now it's

Speaker 1 there next to it? Just show it

Speaker 1 on add-ups. I can't really show it to it because it's different date, but

Speaker 1 yeah, you see it. It's like very, very steep increase and then slow fall.

Speaker 1 But only fall afterwards. And don't get me wrong, this is mainly powered by UA.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what I would say. Like, guys, come on.
Like, Like, this is UA.

Speaker 1 It's just

Speaker 1 monetization conversion because, again, Gem Pass and all these other things were just cut off. But you still see, like, yeah, 11, 10 million downloads a month.
That's not cheap. But that's the fancy.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, of course. Especially for bro stars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So, especially for the strategy on the creatives they are doing, like brand and brand only,

Speaker 3 which is great,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 1 you know, but here you can see see it,

Speaker 3 yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, it's also UA, yeah, and it's like what, like, half a million downloads a day still.

Speaker 1 That's all the money, that's that's all the money, not cheap even for Supercell,

Speaker 3 exactly.

Speaker 3 And you still need to make money, and you still need to make new games, which they don't.

Speaker 1 So, we'll see

Speaker 1 is the ball

Speaker 1 going to change TLDR. Supercell will need to change its strategy and product strategy.
That's it.

Speaker 3 We said this 10 million times already. This is not a TLDR.

Speaker 1 The thing is, they don't need to change as quickly as normal companies because they're sitting on this gazer of money.

Speaker 3 They do, they do.

Speaker 1 Because you're not going to feel the pressure to the same degree as a company who has

Speaker 1 Kodak yourself, man.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Exactly. They were also sitting on a pile of cash.

Speaker 3 Exactly. That's what I want to say.
Because it's a fair point, because if you are not kind of pushed by your PML or to the edge, then it's just not going to happen.

Speaker 3 And you're going to sit on that pile of cash until there is no pile of cash. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It works until it's...

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's, but in this case, it's not quite a lot of time.

Speaker 1 The thing is, it's so much cash, it can be 10 years, can be 15, it can be 20. It can also be three, right? Man, at some point, you lose so much kind of a...

Speaker 1 potential on state-of-the-art knowledge and all these other things it's just downhill from there.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Also, don't you think the people working there are just going to get annoyed by this

Speaker 3 to the point, like, oh, we are not even

Speaker 3 shipping the new games. Everything gets killed and all of this.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's quite frustrating.

Speaker 1 They can get overpaid by Netflix or Saudis.

Speaker 3 Oh, Saudis, yeah. Oh, I mean.

Speaker 1 I think you're underestimating how hard it is to live in Finland in winter, you know. I will.
You can get over that. You can get over that.

Speaker 1 I was there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. All right.
So, Bo Game, you think it's going to make it to a full global launch? No. For now, I'm not really convinced, to be honest.

Speaker 1 I need a little bit more spin on either uniqueness or some kind of feature because, like, it sounds or it plays very generic to me.

Speaker 1 I'm definitely not the audience because I hate Twin Stick shooters, but even the mechanic and everything around it, it's just like,

Speaker 1 yeah, streamlined Ford.

Speaker 1 That's it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right, guys. So that's pretty much it.
There's no UA, no ads.

Speaker 1 There you go. No monetization.

Speaker 3 No monetization whatsoever. If you have similar opinions than us, let us know.
We've seen.

Speaker 1 If you think we're full of shit, let us know as well. Let us know as well.

Speaker 3 I mean, there is something which we said that is already in that

Speaker 3 Clash Mini subreddit. So some people are just like, what the fuck is this?

Speaker 1 Some people are like, oh.

Speaker 1 Because because Crash Mini went so well and for so long that people are very annoyed by the fact that it didn't get green lighting and other games.

Speaker 3 That's the main point. I know, I know, I know.
So, but anyway, so let us know what you think if you played it. Like, how do you feel about it?

Speaker 1 And by the way, Clash Mini was great, it's just the genre itself is a problem. Yeah,

Speaker 3 and see you next time. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Ciao.