📈 Brawl Stars Nuclear Explosion!
📈 Brawl Stars Nuclear Explosion!
How did Supercell's Brawl Stars drive massive liveops success?
Welcome to Marketwire!
Every Wednesday, I’ll send you an overview of the overall performance of games on the market with a brief overview of a specific game in more detail.
On Monday, I also published the first in a new series discussing game development and entrepreneurial philosophy:
Supercell launched Brawl Stars in December of 2018. Over five years after launch, the game is experiencing a performance renaissance that is rare to see.
Kudos to that team for reinvigorating the title.
We will take a quick look at the game, more below!
Top 10 Charts
At #1 downloads, One Punch Man World is a 3D ARPG featuring the famous Japanese manga IP.
Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle made a huge jump in top revenue.
At #9 top downloads, Hexa Sort is a hyper casual or hybrid casual puzzle game based on a hexagonal grid with color matching. It also includes light builder linear progression as per old-school Talking Tom games.
At #1 downloads, "斗罗大陆：史莱克学院" (Douluo Dalu: Shrek Academy) is a team based battle RPG game with a fairly extensive MMO game experience. The game is based on the Douluo Dalu universe aka “Soul Land” based on the Chinese fantasy novel series written by Tang Jia San Shao.
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
Well Bandai Namco hits #5 on the back of the huge revenue increase by Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle.
Top 10 Steam Games
Palworld continues to sit at #1. Congratulations!
Granblue Fantasy: Relink is another anime-style ARPG. It has positive reviews and allows for solo play and up to 4-player co-op.
🔦 How did Supercell dramatically improve Brawl Stars’ performance?
Brawl Stars is experiencing a dramatic surge in liveops performance. How much?
According to data.ai estimates… by quite a lot!
Looking at revenue data over the past year, from Dec 7, 2023, to Feb 1, 2024, we saw an increase from about $435K in daily net revenue to almost $2.4M, almost a 6X increase.
If we also look at the yearly average for net revenue and downloads, we see a big return to the old days of performance from 2021:
I’m sure 2024 numbers will go lower, as much of 2024 is due to a big holiday spike. However, we have not seen this kind of performance from Brawl Stars since May 2021.
We do a deeper dive in terms of Brawl Stars’ performance, the changes they made, and its potential long-term success in a full discussion below.
What did the Brawl Stars team do to drive increased revenue and downloads?
What kinds of Liveops team changes were done, as Ilkka had discussed in his yearly letter?
What do we expect as the new baseline for Brawl Stars, or is this spike just primarily holiday-driven?
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Anchor
Speakers:
Matej Lancaric. UA Consultant at Lancaric.me and 2.5 Gamers podcast host.
Ken Landen. Director of Product at Hit Factor. ex-Blizzard, Scopely, Kongregate.
Joseph Kim. CEO at Lila Games.
Jakub Remiar. Games Consultant and 2.5 Gamers podcast host.
Content Overview
0:00 Intro
1:19 Panel introductions
2:15 Discussion overview
3:56 Influence of Marketing and User Acquisition
4:30 - Live Operations & Product Strategy Updates
6:00 3 big questions: 1. What did they do?, 2. Liveops team changes, 3. What’s the new baseline?
6:45 - Impact of Influencers on User Acquisition
10:50 Gameplay overview focus on micro vs. macro gameplay
17:20 Ken’s deep dive on how Brawl Stars increased revenue
19:30 Revenue impacting changes
20:37 Monetization and Economy Management
33:48 Future Plans and Improvements
52:35 Matej discusses Brawl Stars user acquisition
1:01:30 Future outlook: answering the big questions around Brawl Stars