Working with gacha on the example of Brawl Stars and Clash Royale

Adam Telfer

Every time Supercell releases a new project, it creates a shock wave that goes through both the industry and the players. So it happened this time. On June 14, Supercell released Brawl Stars and, as if following the fashion, we all rushed to play it.

The launch of Brawl Stars is not like the launches of the previous games of the Finnish company. There are two points that strongly distinguish him.

Firstly, Brawl Stars is the first Supercell game that does not belong to the strategy genre. Brawl Stars is an action-oriented multiplayer game and, remarkably, the most casual MOBA of all released today for mobile devices.

Secondly, the pre-launch of Brawl Stars was loud: the company timed an esports tournament to coincide with the softlonch. This is not like the usual soft launch: the company immediately began to build a gaming community and stimulate the development of a stream culture around the game. A cool step for Supercell.

Everyone knows that the company closed such games as Battle Buddies, Smash Land and Spooky Pop when it became clear that they would not enter the top ten in terms of revenue. Launching the game at an early stage with such confidence is very brave.

But a couple of weeks after the launch of the game, industry veterans began to notice design flaws. Many have stopped playing at all, because the game can not be started (due to problems with the servers). Some users leave even despite the numerous fans among both streamers and esports players.

Now the game is in Canada in the top ten most profitable games (the original was published on July 6, but by the 26th the situation has not changed) and is building up a huge community around itself. So, despite the criticism of the professional community, this game can be a hit thanks to good multiplayer.

As for me, as a game designer, I see Brawl Stars as a great game, the weak side of which is an unsuccessful gacha. She does not succeed in fulfilling the role that is prescribed to her.

Compared to the gacha in Clash Royale, the one in Brawl Stars is much weaker, which, ultimately, can lead to lower revenue per user. Even if Supercell is able to actively attract organics, the earnings from it will be significantly less than the game could have had with a different luck.

So what’s wrong with the gacha in Brawl Stars?

It lacks depth.

Gacha depth

The depth of the gacha is usually determined by the number of drops to complete the gacha. It can also be determined by answering these questions:

• what is the maximum amount a player can spend to reach a stage where there is no more content?
• how long does a player have to play to exhaust all the content in the game?

The drop in the gacha is one dropped item. For example, in Clash Royale, a drop is a synonym for one card that fell out of a chest.

The chest itself is not a drop.

The chest in Clash Royale has several drops, and the chest in Brawl Stars contains only one drop. Plus, not all drops are the same. A drop from a legendary chest in Clash Royale differs from a drop from a wooden chest, since the legendary has different probabilities for the loss of more valuable things. But when you roughly estimate the depth of the gacha, you can ignore the quality of the drop.

Drops are important because the main objective of freeplay games is to maximize long-term retention and the size of the economy. In order for the game to have a good long-term hold, players must really want to get something out of the gacha. The more drops it takes, the longer the system will work.

In this regard, Clash Royale surpasses Brawl Stars, judging by the results of the softlonch of both games.

Designers, as a rule, have three key variables with which they can maximize the depth of gacha: content, working with duplicates and working with the rate of output. On all these points, Clash Royale bypasses Brawl Stars.

Problem one: Content

Usually content is the easiest problem to solve, if we are talking about a weak gacha.

What’s wrong with Brawl Stars’ content?

There are only 15 characters in the game. For comparison, Clash Royale had 42 cards at the launch stage.

Thanks to this, in Clash Royale, the stage during which players received new content for themselves was longer. Also, developers could control the pace of the submission of this content.

The presence of 42 cards allowed the game from the moment of launch to distribute the available content in terms of time by dividing the game into stages – arenas. The players understood from the very beginning that they had to play for some time to access the new maps.

Since the developers launched the game with so much content, every interaction with the gacha gave the player new emotions. Interest in the results of the issue increased especially when moving to a new arena, since the player, along with the new arena, had access to a new set of cards.

15 Brawl Stars cards, each of which can fall to the player from the very beginning, put Supercell in an awkward position, which will be problematic to get out of.

The developers are forced to keep all the cards in the gachi pool from the very beginning. Otherwise, players will start receiving duplicates of existing cards too quickly. Plus, a small number of legendary (very rare) cards leads to the fact that the content in the game is quickly exhausted. Being a paying Brawl Stars player, it was enough for me to invest a very small amount in the game to feel that I had discovered most of the content offered by the game.

The solution to the problem here should not be reduced to adding new characters. The gameplay of Brawl Stars is not similar to that of Clash Royale.

The root process of Clash Royale supports and stimulates the player’s desire to collect cards, especially considering the fact that each fight requires the player to choose 8 cards. Brawl Stars requires the player to select only 1 character.

If developers add too many characters, it can lead to the fact that players will have a reduced desire to collect them all. Too much choice will create a situation in which players will choose one favorite and ignore other heroes.

For this reason, Brawl Stars needs to find other ways to drop the content desired by the players. And it is not necessary that the characters act as a drop.

These can be special abilities, perks, weapons, customization. All this can add the required depth to the progress system and encourage players to improve not only their favorite heroes.

Problem two: duplicates

In itself, the problem with a lack of content is not so critical. Content is usually the basis with which gacha works. If content was the only thing important to gacha, the 1000-plus Hearthstone collection of cards would dominate Clash Royale, but that’s not the case. Clash Royale took off with much less content than Hearthstone thanks to the duplicate system.

The main problem of Brawl Stars is the mechanics of working with duplicates.

In Brawl Stars, if a player drops an existing character as a drop, then it will be converted into one blue chip. This mechanics is close to the same in Hearthstone, where you can swap a duplicate for a small amount of dust. Brawl Stars players can swap blue chips for heroes, but it takes an insane amount of this currency to unlock many rare characters.

Because of this, almost every time I buy chests with gacha in Brawl Stars, I get very upset. After all, after I have opened most of the characters, there is a high probability that the next chest will bring me not a new hero or an elixir (currency for upgrading characters), but a single chip. A series of drops, which boils down to getting blue chips, especially if you have opened all the content, of course, leads to the outflow of many users.

Clash Royale has no such problem, because duplicates in the game have great value. They are necessary for the improvement of maps. One card gives you the opportunity to use a certain type of troops, but to get the upgraded version of the cards, you need thousands of copies of it.

This allows the gacha in Clash Royale to work successfully. Even with only 42 cards, the need to get a lot of its duplicates exponentially increases the number of drops needed to reach the point where there is nothing to pay money for in the game.

In Clash Royale, the drop of the legendary card from the golden chest is 0.43%. Based on this, as well as the presence of a pool of 6 legendary cards, the chance of getting the legendary card you have chosen for pumping is 0.0716%. And in order to pump the legend to the maximum, you will need 37 drops of this card. That is, on average, a player needs 50 thousand drops to get a full upgrade of one lenendarki. This is really a working system.

So, in order for Brawl Stars to use its few content in the best way, its developers need to think carefully about the mechanics of duplicates in the spirit of Clash Royale.

Potentially doubles can increase the maximum level of the character or unlock new abilities. Without this, players will simply lose interest in the gacha or feel that the chest is not worth the money that is being asked for it.

Problem three: the pace

When using gachi, designers have another variable with which they can control the depth of gachi: tempo.

Not all gachi support a large number of drops. Some systems prevent this by increasing the time it takes the player to get a drop from the gachi. Designers usually have several methods to work with the tempo.

• Limit the frequency with which players can open the gacha.
• Limit the amount of drop from the gacha.

Clash Royale gives a lot of drop every day. With free chests, a royal chest and chests for winning every day, the player receives a large number of free drops, thanks to which he feels progress. Using the system of duplicates described above allows you to issue such a number of drops.

Brawl Stars puts Supercell designers in a difficult position due to the small amount of content and the lack of need for duplicates. They are forced to limit the gacha as much as possible. This is done by converting duplicates into blue chips and the rule “one chest – one drop”.

Therefore, the gacha in Brawl Stars is much less worthwhile compared to the gacha in Clash Royale.

You get a reward – a chest, get one unit of currency out of it and then feel disappointed.

This feeling is enhanced by the fact that each drop gives either joy or disappointment. If I get a new character or an elixir, that’s great, but if I get a blue chip, it seems to me that all the time I invested in collecting coins to get a chest was not worth it.

Chests in Clash Royale, on the contrary, can guarantee the receipt of rare or legendary cards, and even if I get a duplicate, it’s good. So even when I get to the stage where I have most of the game content, every time I open the chest, I see progress, I get something worthwhile.

Supercell was forced to so severely restrict the issuance of chests, because its economy supports only a limited number of drops. If they increased the number of chest drops, they should either increase the prices in coins to buy chests, or allow players to consume content faster – something they can’t afford with the amount of content they have today.

In continuation of the topic

Brawl Stars is a very exciting game. And, as can be seen from the reaction of the community, people really want to play MOBA on mobile and it is clear that Supercell benefits from this with the help of Brawl Stars.

This game has every chance of success, if only thanks to a giant community building around the root multiplayer gameplay.

But as we know, in fritupley, strong root mechanics are only the first step to success. Whether Brawl Stars will become a comparable game in terms of success compared to other Supercell projects depends on how inexhaustible its systems are.

Borrowing successful solutions from Clash Royale and finding the right way to work with duplicates is a key task for the project today. Its implementation will exponentially increase the life of the gacha, lead to improved retention and improved monetization of users.

Brawl Stars has all the makings to become the next Supercell hit. Developers only need to make a couple of amendments to make it their next billionaire game.

I’ll be rooting for them.

A source: mobilefreetoplay.com