A Tale of Two Games: How Clash Royale and AFK Arena handled their Monetization Differently

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the declining performance of Supercell generally and Clash Royale in particular. While there may be many factors that are contributing to Clash Royale’s decline, most agree that Monetization is one of those factors. And yet Clash Royale has done very little to try and increase the amount of things they can monetize off of over the years, even in the face of declining revenue.

There has also been some talk about the odd choice of features that AFK Arena has recently introduced (Match-3 in an Idle RPG?). While it is hard to be absolutely sure as to why AFK Arena chose to implement this, I believe the decision to add a Match-3 in AFK Arena relates to Clash Royale’s decision not to add new monetizable content. Both Games are focusing on retaining players and increasing engagement. This article takes a look at their different approaches to this and why there is such a large difference in performance from the same approach.

Clash Royale Started Out from a Position of Strength

When Clash Royale first hit the scene, it was an instant hit. Millions of Players flocked to the game, and Clash Royale’s rather shallow Metasystems earned Supercell a lot of money. During the first two years, Supercell mainly focused on releasing new Cards, new Arenas, and new Gameplay Systems. None of it was aimed at increasing monetization, but given that their massive player base was monetizing at an adequate rate, Supercell decided that focusing on things that would keep the player base engaged and retained was the right strategy. And indeed it was for the first few years.

For Clash Royale, releasing New Cards was an effective way for them to sustain their monetization. New cards made the drop rates of cards the Players wanted lower. Thus, releasing new cards required players to open more chests overall. They weren’t meant for Monetization, as Players weren’t pushed or forced to acquire the new cards. But extending the amount of chests Players had to open to optimize their decks means that Players would continue to monetize at their current rate. Therefore, Supercell mainly focused on new gameplay modes and systems to keep their players engaged.

Why this strategy? Wasn’t Supercell leaving money on the table by not more aggressively pushing monetization? The truth of the matter is that once a company makes a certain amount of money, it becomes more imperative to sustain that monetization rather than try to increase it even further. In Supercell’s case, keeping players in the game and spending as they had been would continue to sustain Clash Royale’s initial success. The alternative would be to try and introduce new systems meant for monetization, and that might turn off the player base.

Supercell Took the Wrong Actions when Monetization Started to Decline

Yet, slowly over time as Clash Royale’s monetization began to weaken, Supercell began deprecating the content through certain monetization tools such as Legendary Chests or Fortune Chests.

Deprecating Content creates new monetization opportunities for lesser spenders, and so employing these more effective monetization tools let Clash Royale sustain their Monetization for longer than they should have. The downside is that these effective tools let spenders blow through content faster. Between better monetization tools and fewer new card releases, Clash Royale quickly began to run out of content that monetized. Their disastrous implementation of an overly-lucrative Battle Pass didn’t help.

The fact is that focusing on Retention on a Live Game works when your Monetization is good. But when it is not, focusing on Retention not only will fail to solve the problem of declining revenues, it will also squander opportunities to add more monetizable content to the game.

AFK Arena spent Time Solidifying their Monetization Strategy

In many ways, AFK Arena had the opposite strategy as Clash Royale. Launching to decent revenue, AFK Arena focused early new features on extensions of monetizable content (like Mythic Equipment Tiers), Gameplay Systems that pushed players to optimize Heroes (like Peaks of Time and Voyage of Wonder), and more subscriptions (found in the Noble Society).

Then AFK Arena Shifted Focus to Retention/Engagement

Once they hit their stride, AFK Arena shifted to retaining their players. They knew that as long as Players continued to play and kept getting met with stat checks, they would continue their spending patterns. Here are some examples of odd content that has little or nothing to do with Player progression or spend:

War of Wits:

This is basically a draft-style PvP competition where each player takes turns picking from a pool of cards. After all the turns to pick cards are finished, the players each play their best parties and the player who wins gets points for the leaderboard for that gameplay mode.

Forest Mania:

Basically a match-3 built into AFK Arena with no costs. Seems like a way for some players to kill time and get some rewards?

This is not to say that AFK Arena isn’t pushing monetization at all. But even looking at content they add that can boost Monetization, it is implemented in a non-aggressive way:

Trial of the Gods

Trial of the Gods is a gameplay mode where players can choose debuffs to build up their point score. If they complete the adventure with all the debuffs they selected, they’ll get a reward. Rewards are based for the amount of debuff points they select. While this does give players constant stat checks, there is no pressure for the Player to complete it now. They can occasionally come back to the Gameplay and make progress as they get stronger at their own pacing.

Hero Growth Bundles

Even clear monetization features like Hero Growth Bundles, where Players unlock both free rewards and sales by Tiering up a specific Hero aren’t aggressively utilized in AFK Arena. The Bundle is buried deep within the Merchants UI (Merchants > Heroic Ship). A feature like this would have definitely been more aggressively pushed in other RPGs like RAID: Shadow Legends. But because AFK Arena is in a good place with Monetization, they don’t feel the need to aggressively utilize all their Monetization Tools. They’d rather keep players happy, and let spenders of different strengths spend in ways that suits their play-style.

Monetization and Retention are Two Sides of the Same Coin

In F2P Games, it is a fallacy to completely divorce Monetization from Retention. If Monetization improves and Retention holds steady, the Game Developer is making more money. If Monetization stays the same but Retention goes up, the Game Developer is making more money. While Developers would ideally like to focus on both Monetization and Retention, in reality they can only focus on one. The trick is to figure out at what point can you stop focusing on one or the other.

Clash Royale began by focusing on Retention/Engagement. They could afford to do this because they were happy with the current levels of spend by their player base. The moment that the spend levels began to drop, whether it was because Spenders ran out of content, or left the game, Clash Royale should have immediately turned it’s focus back to Monetization. One might argue that they did with the advancements in the Store and in Gacha that they made. However, those would ultimately speed up the consumption of content. It wasn’t a fix to the long-term problem. If a developer is monetizing off of content and is running out of that content, either they need to make more of that content (i.e. release more cards) or they need to add new content that monetizes.

AFK Arena started out by focusing strongly on Monetization. They added many metasystems to make Heroes more powerful combined with many Gameplay modes that would offer various types of stat checks so that Players would have to optimize a wide variety of Party combinations to succeed. Most importantly, they added a semi-evergreen Metasystem in the form of Max Hero Level being based on the number of Heroes at Ascended Tier. Right now there are 77 Ascended Heroes in AFK Arena. The Max Level is 240+5*77 = 625. Every Ascended Hero AFK Arena adds will further extend that Metasystem. So AFK Arena is not at risk of running out of content for spenders anytime soon.

Given all this, AFK Arena made the conscious decision to pivot towards retention/engagement. Make the players happy and they will continue to engage in the content of that game. And if that content causes them to continue spending, then AFK Arena is in a very good place right now. Should spending from the player base begin to decline, I would fully expect AFK Arena to shift back to monetization, as any other game company should.