Analysis of Supercell’s new hit: Clash Royale

Supercell brought out their latest game, Clash Royale, to worldwide release on January 4, 2016.

How long did it take this mobile game to crash the Top 5 grossing rank on both Apple store and Google Play store? Clash Royale make it happen in just days of its launch (To be honest, I contributed $10 on it). (See Venture Beat article: Clash Royale is already the top-grossing iOS game in the U.S.)

A study shows that iPhone apps need to earn about $5,000/day to get into Apple store’s top 10, so you can image how much revenue Supercell has gained reaching the number one position so quickly. Supercell definitely made another hit after Clash of Clans and its other games, and they shifted Clash fans into this new game successfully.

What App Users are Saying

In this blog post we will examine customer feedback of the game itself, analyze the app reviews on both IOS and Android platforms, and see how users compare it to other Supercell games. We collected the latest ~5000 reviews from each app platform. Android users wrote more reviews than Apple users — The Google Play store received more than 5000 reviews in just 3 days!

Our Signals data analytics platform calculates user sentiment on three level — word, sentence, and document. The graphic above shows the sentiment between two platforms, and where the holistic sentiment on Google Play is higher than that in the Apple store. This sentiment is consistent with the ratings — Google Play got much more 5-star reviews than the iOS platform.

IOS vs. GooglePlay

When looking into reviews of 1-star ratings, the common complaints on both stores are that players have to pay to win, and user felt Supercell just copied everything from Clash of Clans to this new game. Other than that, many Apple users discussed the game strategy such as how they destroyed by baby dragon, bomb tower, skeleton army, and other cards in the game. They also think this game cheats, since the opponent always have more resources than themselves.

“1-star” ratings Buzzword, IOS vs. Android

Pay to win?

Yes and no. It depends on how faster you want to upgrade and which level is your expectation. Players spend money on this game more or less, but who cares? Users have a lot of fun with it! Otherwise, why would Clash Royale make so much money from fans? For those who want to spend less money and gain more return, here is the something you should know:

Success = Deck Choice + Combat Exercises + Card Level

Money will let your cards level up, but, with the little luck, you still can get them from the free chests. More important, your deck choice and combat exercises hold the leading position.

What do people say about the cards?

• Building: Players complained that these cards have too much power. It is annoying for some players when opponent used them in the battle, so they want Clash Royale to shorten the life time or weaken the power.
• Troop: People get frustrated by not having certain cards like prince and baby dragon at the beginning of the game.
• Spell: Spell is very helpful when choosing the right troop cards or building cards. For instance, many players mentioned that it’s super powerful to combine hog rider and freeze spell together.

Connection issues are annoying for a real-time game. It’s cruel to watch your competitor destroy your tower and you can’t do anything about it. The temporal trend tells us it’s a consistent issue over time.

Connection issue temporal trend

The game stuck at 50% loading screen when opening the app with a weak Wi-Fi. And it won’t continue loading if Wi-Fi backs to normal. Player need to force close and open the game again. People may give up and uninstall the game after a few minutes waiting time.

Connection issue feedback details

Compare with its previous success — Clash of Clan

Different from Clash of Clans, fans enjoy being able to play Clash Royale as many times as they want — which means no limit for the play time. Also, there is no previous Clash of Clans experience necessary to learn to play this game. On the other hand, fans wish Supercell would bring the clan wars into Clash Royale as well.

Signals helps lots of app developers and managers collect feedback and find issues from IOS and GooglePlay just in a few minutes. See our previous blog post: Engaging Your App Users. We also provide other data connectors like Amazon, YouTube, and Facebook to gain insights from customers (see Data Connectors for Customer Analysis).

Sign up today for a free 14 days premium account or contact us at clientsupport@tasteanalytics.com.