Clash Royale: What's it made of?

Clash Royale, the latest mobile game from Supercell, is well on it's way to making USD1 billlion in revenues a year after debuting with USD110 million in the first month. Source: Venturebeat

As a person who spent time studying games and understanding why it becomes such a success, I was able to tell that Clash Royale wasn't an overnight success. A lot of time and money was definitely put in research to understand the behaviour of mobile gamers today, which was inspired from a variety of games made in the last 10 years.

Here are the list of games that inspired Clash Royale:

a) Sangokushi Taisen is a collectible card and real-time strategy game based on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history and the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The first version was released in 2005 and has spawned many sequels and variations such as a Mobile Suit Gundam version.

The game is played with the cards by placing them on a sensitive playing area. Movement in-game is done by moving the cards on the playing field, and card behaviour on the battlefield depends heavily on the card type. The game was widely popular in Japan and some parts of South East Asia, however the game is complicated to play at the start and requires a steep learning curve.

See video below:

b) Samurai vs Zombies Defense was first released in 2013 by Glu Mobile. You get to play as a heroic Samurai to defend your village against hordes of attacking zombies with allies to recruit and build defenses to stop them.

In this game, is a meter that behaves like the Clash Royale's Elixir, allows the Samurai to call more reinforcements to fight the zombies and reinforcements, just like cards the are also up-gradable.

The main difference in Samurai vs Zombies Defense is that the bar is up-gradable to fill quicker and store more whereas Clash Royale is limited to just 10 points.

c) Trading card games such as Buddyfight for instance employ 3 monsters on the battlefield, a center monster, left and right. Clash Royale also has 3: the king's tower and left and right towers. In trading card games, the monsters can be replacement but not in Clash Royale, as the game has been designed to be played quicker in under 5 minutes.

d) Insane level of online Japanese trading cards games: These games have always focused on insane amounts of levelling unlike from the West, like Magic: The Gathering. The leveling system allows users to merge cards of the same type to to improve its abilities, but in actuality, puts in more extended play value but even importantly, forcing a player to sink in time, money and effort in leveling it up. The attachment towards the card and game grows stronger: therefore players are less likely to leave. 

A good reference is Tower of Saviours, based off Puzzle and Dragons from Japan.

So, is Supercell the next Blizzard? 

Blizzard made very successful PC games (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo) based off inspiration from game types such as Dune, Warhammer 40,000, Everquest, Ultima and DOTA, In the recent years, their game offerings have dwindled because there has been lesser PC games to be inspired from as more developers shifted focused on mobile games.

Even if Supercell did rip off games from other genres, they must have put in a lot of time and money in research to understand the behaviour of mobile gamers, to arrive at the current most popular game that everyone wants to play, because the games mentioned above have been around for many years and for Supercell to adapt a game that fits to a global audience is no easy feat.

Up next, I'll share what was the formula for Clash Royale's success.

Clash Royale is currently available on iOS and Google Play Store.

Understanding the Customer Journey

With the internet, with social media and with more choices that can ever be, customers have moved from fragile to brittle.

Earlier today I had a visit from an autogate repairman whom I contacted using Servis Hero. I had a chat with him about it. He had started using recently after his spouse decided to register for him, as he was good in English. He gets a lot of request for quotes and he also replies the quotes through his spouse but the conversion rates were really low, not because of the poor English quotes, but because he felt that his customers didn't understand what was quoted to them.

Customer today can get rattled easily with simple terms, technical jargon's or lengthy quotes, and when this happens they focus their attention on what they are familiar with: the price. 

While a service provider can be genuinely offer a great deal, a customer however has failed to grasp it due to their current brittleness cause by new business environments: the internet, social media and overwhelming choices. In this case, customers rattled by the price could choose not respond and seek out other service providers, but most commonly revert back to the conventional method of referring from a friend.

Time is wasted, but to a customer, time may not be the concern.

It is very important for all startups when trying out new business models, to spend a little time to understand a customers journey and take that into improving a better standard operating procedure, towards a perfect business model. After all, understanding your customer is part of what startups must do today to disrupt the old ways.