The Rise And Fall Of Clash Royale

just like the summer a riveting novel or a great vacation all good things must come to an end wrote the father of english literature geoffrey chaucer in one of his poems way back in the 1380s but does this apply to games have you ever heard anyone say that a game is dead yet it has millions of players still logging on each and every day that's the case with many popular games a few examples like fortnite clash of clans and clash royale for a game like clash reel to be considered dead you'd have to compare it to some great examples like call of duty ghosts where if you log on and want to play a game the chances of fighting a game are slim to none that's certainly not the case with clash royale you can find a person into battle in a matter of seconds a 2v2 partner and a person looking to do a challenge at literally any time of the day no matter what time zone you're in so we've determined that clash reel isn't dead and that's not an opinion it's a fact but clash reel certainly isn't what it was four years ago could it have just been the hype that inevitably died off or was it something else that progressively led to its uphill battle [Music] i haven't played or posted clash royale in two weeks don't feel like i'm in a good place with the game right now there's nothing new in the game there hasn't been anything new in the game [Music] of all clash royale accounts are actually active what is there to do there's nothing else update was a bust [Music] as we all know clash royale was a huge success since its soft launch the game hit its peak popularity in may of 2016 as seen on this graph this graph is broken down by a 0 to 100 scale where 100 is its peak 50 being half as popular and xero basically representing a completely dead game it is also based off youtube searches which usually determines its overall popularity but we aren't here to discuss how a massive success the game was but rather take a look at some of the critical points in the game's history which may have led to where it is today 2016 clash reel was something else there was no doubt in that there was a lot to take in everything obviously felt new and the updates they were coming in so often it felt like every month we had a huge update and it wasn't slowing down new cards in bulk new arena's chest which at the time was still exciting but these very large updates coming so rapidly in the year of 2016 was presumably updates they had already planned before launch and just needed some time to polish and test obviously before a game gets released they have to plan ahead about what they're going to update the game with also the game was just so new ideas were probably flowing through supercell it was a great time to be developing the game it was a great time to be playing and it was a great time to be making videos on it because even if you were a rather small youtuber in 2016 you just needed one brilliant video idea to make the channel blow up with clash royale not all of 2016 was great though just after seven months of release people started making videos of the state of the game youtubers don't exactly speak on behalf of all players though but we can't deny that social influence plays somewhat of a role in how a portion of the community perceives the game when you hear one person speaking of the state of the game i can assure you it isn't just that one person and trust me numbers don't lie either it was around the end of july when clash royale would hit its lowest in 2016. the main problem with clash royale at the time was slow progression win trading and horrible balancing with near cards such as legendaries which by the way felt like they had an impossible unlock rate the game quickly felt like the only true way to max out and win matches was with money involved the casual player had no hope and a pro player who jammed his way to max had other problems to face in the leaderboards on top of that supercell had upset the community even more after announcing that players would have no option to move emotes even though they wanted to and if you know gamers they love their voice being heard and supercell seemed to ignore the issue for over two months other relevant factors to its sudden decline in 2016 was the release of pokemon go the game reportedly beat clash royale by a mile as the fastest game ever on the mobile revenue charts and according to the graph interest in the summer of 2016 had plummeted for clash royale and exploded for pokemon go clearly clash royale's first big summer that was planned was overlooked although the game had gotten some attention for the tournament update at the beginning of july but it failed to keep the players interested and it went downhill even further than what it was before the update yes clash royale already had a few problems its first few months but the game was nowhere near dead it was still extremely popular and even though it would never reach its peak popularity again that's pretty common for new games you get a surge of new players and whoever's still playing months later are the ones that'll most likely stick to playing the following months after the summer supercell managed to get back on its feet so much that it nearly reached peak popularity once again in november part of this was due to them fixing some issues listening to the community a little more and adding new chests and challenges to help free-to-play players get those legendaries and tons of gold that once seemed like an impossible task besides that the updates were just plain old good there was no one really complaining that the updates felt bland or boring this hype carried on well into the golden age of clash royale reaching numbers that it would never come close to again march of 2017 saw once again a peak similar to november of 2016. things were going pretty well with the new clan battles update this kept everyone entertained for a good couple of months but things started to gradually slow down the summer of 2v2 is what supercell called it where we'd have a full month of 2v2 which was a temporary gamemode at the time this seemed like a good idea right before the team's annual time off but the hype for 2v2 died off quick if you didn't know in finland there's sort of like a summer break similar to how we have time off from school it's estimated this starts from late june and ends around the end of august this may seem awesome but realistically the numbers show that supercell doesn't do very well during these times they always try and make a huge update right on time for the summer but the analytics show that these summer updates failed to keep anyone interested for the entirety of it there hasn't been a single summer update in clash royale history that has kept everyone happy for a long period of time this unfortunately is crucial to the game's health especially in the us market where things for clash royale tend to die off just in time for summer that's not a very good time summer is where you'd expect the most exciting updates to the game and it's actually the opposite things started to pick up around august of that year there were some pretty neat updates like quest touchdown ui changes but it once again kept failing to retain interest at this point a ton of youtubers once again started to express their thoughts on the situation after all 2017 started off as a huge year and ended off as a very stale game that is until december though this would be clash royale's last biggest update according to the analytics reaching more than half of its popularity since its peak it was a pretty big end of the year for the game with a new arena chest and tons of cards but this was also getting a bit boring the same old formula of arenas and cards just wasn't doing it it isn't very clear why this update garnished more popularity than the previous big update which was quest but this can possibly be due to the new chest and cards that had unique mechanics this wasn't exactly like every other update the chests were pretty unique and they also replaced the shop everyone was searching up clash royale to see these chest openings as for the cards they were kind of different they had unique mechanics and obviously that's gonna bring some attention so things ended up fairly nice for clash rio at the end of the year but that was the last time it would ever have reached those numbers supercell had a bad road ahead of them i'd be lying if i said the game was already dead at this point because even though the game had entered a new age of uphill battles and failure the game was still fairly popular see as we mentioned earlier the term dead game is just an over exaggerated phrase used when a player stops playing and thinks the world around him has stopped too one player calling the game dead is nothing more than opinion and nothing more sure the game is less popular but that's as far as things go i started this part of the video with that because this is the year that that phrase was tossed around everywhere anytime you chatted with someone scroll through social media or uploaded a video there'd be one idiot who said dead game as if anybody cared many still play clash royale and 2018 was an okay year firstly the game started off pretty strong in 2018 because of the hype surrounding the previous update in december of 2017. by march though things had hit its lowest point of the year the momentum was picked up once a new clan wars update came out at the end of april which seemed to keep castrio at a steady pace most of that year a few jumps here and there and no huge dips this was pretty strange i guess clan wars was in fact a really good update and this was possibly the last big update also some of the attention was due to the newer emotes instead of the four default ones we've had for a little over two years at the time trading tokens were added tons of cards and by december we ended the year off with a massive update that will make clash royale hit its peak of 2018 star levels and tournament rework a temporary bra stars heist game mode which everyone was excited to try so 2018 it was a great year right well yes but a lot of the things added in 2018 were centered around being maxed and having money as good as these additions were and the tons of hype players knew deep down the free-to-play player was missing out on a ton let's take a look at emotes they were cool they were new and you had to have them it was the ultimate flex but unless you had some extra money laying around you weren't gonna get a taste of it sure supercell had a few free emotes here and there and some challenges but those didn't feel the same because it's the ones that everyone had players love feeling like they have something special or rare and in this case of emotes you had to drop some cash to be able to achieve that that wasn't very fun especially that superstar started introducing these newer and cooly modes and packs of four for 20 making them even more rare and expensive which would later show up in the shop for about two dollars but that's a different story clearly this was a good monetization strategy on supercell's end but it wasn't a good one for the average player on the other hand star levels were supercell's answer to end game content and game content is basically a term used to describe updates for people who were already at the end of the game or maxed this is good for max players and i gave supercell an a for effort because max players were indeed happy they were blowing all their start points on these cool skins but the issue once again remained the average free-play player wasn't maxed these cool skins supercell made an entire commercial about wasn't exactly available to most of its player base it was rather just a cool feature you told yourself one day i'll make it there but when you finally got there it wasn't that great either once you got there you would get a little bit of compensation for the cards you already had upgraded and the only other way to get them was to upgrade cards these upgrades gave you a little bit of start points unless they were going to level 12 or 13 which can cost up to 100 000 gold for just one level at that rate you would need to spend seven hundred thousand gold to get enough for the first year of a star level which by the way if you didn't know the first tier is just a gold border and a gold deployed sparkle not a skin let's say you already had spent seven hundred thousand gold for the first tier and what well tier two that would cost you another one million gold yes one million gold in upgrades for tier two and tier three would be 1.3 million gold in upgrades these are insane numbers for just a casual player and this is just for one card in order to max out all star level tiers in one card you would need about 3 million golden upgrades this can take a few weeks or a few months depending on how much you play and all this just for one card definitely seems a bit insane of course you can get start points from donating but this amount was very insignificant to the amount needed to upgrade those star levels as we mentioned earlier there was a lot of hype about these skins but the truth was unless you've already been maxed for a couple years it would be extremely hard to get all of these cool skins as we mentioned two of the most major additions in 2018 was centered around money and being maxed this may have led to some hype and an okay year but the long-term effects were creeping up on supercell at the beginning of 2019 things started to once again decline and for four months there just wasn't content good enough to match the success of late 2018. it wasn't until april of that year where they introduced a new trophy system new cars and new game modes the trophy road was added not only to help the casual player earn more rewards but it was also to combat the decline of ladder matches players just weren't feeling the latter side of things anymore with many problems such as the meta matchmaking and lack of motivation 2v2 was just better along with 2v2 there were just other options like clan wars and challenges ladder was just kind of like that old thing you just didn't want to do anymore trophy road kind of helped that issue a bit they had some fixes here and there but overall the player was more satisfied with getting the reward and not playing ladder it wasn't a direct fix for ladder because yes even though people were playing more ladder like i said it was just for the rewards fortunately though clash royale maintained a steady high ever since that update presumably because of the new trophy road and very unique challenges we had never seen before it was actually fun this steady high climbed even further with the seasons being revealed this was huge for clash royale they had reached interest numbers they hadn't seen since early 2017 so it seemed like they were back on track but only temporarily there were a load of issues here firstly it seemed like every update at the time was just about past real supercell had gone on their vacation and this was all the content we had and this unfortunately seemed like just another pass like literally every game out there i mean is it free anymore if you have to pay money for something that seems you can't pass up that's debatable the good part is that pass for yo was actually worth it though they did a good job balancing the rewards for five dollars you got your money's worth tons of gold to earn tower skins exclusive emotes and just so many chess to unlock which had strikes to pick which card you wanted pass for y'all being five dollars wasn't like buying a five dollar pack it was a lot more than that clearly this worked out for supercell and some players out there willing to buy it but back to those issues if you remember earlier supercell employees had their summer break around this time so it kind of seems like every update for a while was centered around past real for a large portion of the player base it felt like you had to buy past real to even have a glimpse of any change in clash royale three months fly by with no real content other than past real and we finally got an update this update overall was just a beefy improvement update not really big content this included the party button tiebreaker crown rush and triple draft although cool additions this didn't change the game at all it wasn't until season 5 where we got a real update so for five whole months you can imagine things were pretty slow but back to season 5 the end of november we got a update but again there was no real change yes the update had some big and nice features but that doesn't mean it's going to change the game the main portion of the update was a new card screen where it had cool arts and a video of what the card actually did but for the player who has been playing for a while this seems like just a cool thing to look at for a day or two and it was gone once again nothing actually changed the game if you're seeing a pattern here you're not the only one from june to november we had no major changes and super silver light on pass for yell to keep the excitement going which didn't really work clash royale was once again on a slow decline seeing a jump at every season and it dropped shortly after on december we got yet another update which introduced a new feature called card boost that was it that was the sum of the update i can't stress this enough but the update strategy in clash royale the second half of 2019 was a new low for the game for seven whole months of the year most of the content wasn't pass for y'all sure we had some new cards with the seasons here and there new emotes small features and that one free tower skin for christmas but this was nothing compared to previous updates we had 2020 was no different i understand things were pretty rough for everyone this year but this wasn't actually the cause of clash royale's decline this year at all the first seven months of 2020 followed a similar pattern to the last 7 months of 2019 yes for 14 months updates centered around pass for yellow new cards arenas and small features in case you haven't noticed the magic was already far too gone for this content new arenas were nothing cool anymore new cards didn't change the game and new emotes were roughly the same and throughout these 14 months of a decline balance changes were somewhat of a mess we'll focus more about balance changes later on in the video but for now let's focus on the rest of 2020. the game was in a really bad state and it had one more shot to gaining its player base back they had been working on a big update and it was teased back in march of 2020 because of what happened this year around the world the update kept getting delayed and eventually they went on their summer break and they couldn't really finish it it is believed that this update was supposed to be that big summer update we mentioned a couple times but things didn't go to plan and they had to survive off past ryon but no matter when this update was released one thing is for sure players just weren't feeling it clown wars 2.0 a different take on the original clown wars format was released on september of this year clan wars 2.0 was not the update supercell thought it would be the company finally broke its silence after complaining that the update was just not what they wanted at least one good thing though supercell actually admitted to the failure of the update something the community had taken very well because of their transparency and acknowledgement of the problem the team focused on four main issues with the update a universal war deck reset time which gave players in certain time zones a undue advantage smaller clans lost any chance of being competitive clans that did not reach the fame threshold received no rewards and finally the issue that is the elephant in the room just a overall faulty matchmaking it's quite worth mentioning that they mentioned this was meant to be the first huge update to be rolled out in two years taking a look at the interest graph clan wars 2.0 didn't exactly peak very high at all that small jump just looks like a regular season update and for a big update like this it was a huge failure welcome to the first ever look at supercell's new game clash royale inside of clash royale players will battle head to head in real time with some familiar faces from the clash universe let's take a look this portion of the video will be discussing other big factors i didn't want to discuss in the timeline because instead of bringing up one point after every update it's better to talk about it as one big issue now we mentioned earlier that we would jump to balance changes we aren't here to discuss every bad card or every op buff ever we're here to discuss the overall issue in card reworks and balance changes let me just get this out of the way it was never perfect and it will never be perfect this isn't only true in clash royale but every game out there you can't make everyone happy and you can't make everything balanced or you would have pretty much cards doing the same damage in the same really everything so it isn't going to work out that way clash royale is notorious for having these issues though starting off in 2016 things seemed to be handled fairly decent at the time there were only 42 cards or so and it was easy to pinpoint the problem and fix its flawed interaction with certain cards that is until legendaries were introduced we already discussed that they started off as this impossible card to unlock but it also felt like they had a clear advantage in the game they felt very powerful compared to other rarities and that may sound right i mean after all they are very rare and they need to be powerful right yes but not in cash real this is not a game where you can just make a rarity and make it more powerful that's completely unfair this caused a serious issue in ladder where players who had legendaries had the upper hand and it was all because they had spent money to unlock these and as you guessed it the community was quick to call the game pay to win eventually these legendaries were nerfed but this is still 2016 and clearly the issue didn't stop there supercell has given some cards some love before because they were very weak and not used by many this has happened many times and it used to take them months to address the issue one perfect example of this was the royal giants this is one big one to sum it up this card was released in 2016. it wasn't a very bad card but it also wasn't popular players thought it was weak for its cost i mean it costs too much and you're not getting too much value for it so on the 23rd of march 2016 the card was giving a 20 damage increase followed by a range increase a couple months later this car became extremely overpowered and dominated ladder quick later that year the car was nerfed twice but that wasn't enough because in april of 2017 they had to nerf it again and a second time later that year finally in 2018 probably like the fifth or sixth time they nerfed it again but it wasn't exactly a nerf it was a rework so in one way it was nerfed in one way it was buffed this was the last time it was ever touched and it was considered a fairly decent rework this car was giving a shorter range and a damage increase of 60 percent but its range decrease made it so that it was easier to counter and distract this may sound like a success story but let's not forget that the royal giant spent two and a half years being balanced due to its broken nature the same story is followed with cars such as the elite barbarians witch expo mega knight that's just to name a few today the balance changes have sort of gotten better but the issue with cards either being too overpowered or too weak is still a problem and really annoying us players tell ourselves that it's gonna get better the next month or the next year and it seems like a reoccurring issue usually a handful of cards dominate the meta and so little is done to fix the issue when there is one card nerf there's another buffed and the cycle continues on usually a few decks are taken over ladder and this isn't good for those who want to experiment with certain cards and feel as though they have no place in the meta with 101 cards currently in the game it feels like a fraction of that is the meta and the other big portion of cards is just extra background noise the game also has no community testing so they rely on statistics social media feedback and in-house testing which doesn't seem to be enough there's certainly more to discuss on the balancing aspect but i'm no pro player and i don't exactly play ladder so i choose not to go more in depth i can probably only speak for the majority of casual players because that's just what i am get on maybe every other day or play a few 2v2 matches here and there and maybe some days i'll do some challenges to earn more rewards but speaking of challenges that's another subject i want to touch there was a point in time where challenges were rather special they were a challenge only the best of the best achieved that final prize it may seem unfair but the point of a challenge was to test your skills and have fun it's not like you would lose a million dollars just because you lost the challenge it's supposed to be a game the spark died off after some time though we got bored of the usual 1v1 and maybe in some challenges you'd have to use this card to get it it got repetitive so supercell started to make more unique challenges like mega deck dragon challenge infinite elixir they were fun and everyone enjoyed them but there was also another issue with these new challenges similar to touchdown release in 2017 it felt like every new game mode was in the game for a short period of time and vanished for months or even years i know that supercell didn't want to bore us out with having these available all the time but it just didn't feel right to combat this issue we mentioned that supercell added a party button but at that point supercell had taken too long to add this like we mentioned we love that hard challenge because if there's a good reward we'd actually try over and over but the issue was that these challenges weren't free either in order to unlock a new card from a challenge you needed to pay 100 gem feed and sometimes there was a first time free entry but you still had to pay a hundred gems every time you lost which is the equivalent of a dollar and by the time you probably got the card you had maybe spent five or ten dollars on retrying the challenge eventually you could continue a challenge where you left off and not start over which was okay but when supercell added pass real things were made way too easy you could continue any challenge where you left off for free as long as you had the pass it almost felt like any player could get that final reward this made special challenges not so special anymore it was rather more of an incentive to get players to buy the pass and some players complaining that they should remove the continue button and just start from the beginning but the damage have already been done if you've removed something that you offered for months the community will also be mad so you can't make them happy in this situation another thing that's lost its specialness is legendaries at one point in time epic cards were the highest rarity but when legendaries came out it was the new hot item in town it was way more rare expensive and powerful like we mentioned before this wasn't particularly good but that didn't stop the community from getting hyped every time they got a legendary i mean it felt like you had won the lottery over time though they kept adding more legendaries which wasn't a problem in itself but they had also made it easier to obtain them new chests for it trading cost reductions in the shop trophy road and challenges littered with legendaries it was everywhere and the one very special rarity probably the most special thing in the game was now just as common as any other card without a new rarity or a different solution supercell has dug its own grave on this one there's no way out of this and it's maybe too late to address the issue even if you add a new rarity today how many people would actually care this next topic is global tournaments i don't think this one plays a major role in the game's downfall but it is kind of an issue supercell mentioned that these were added to allow players to get free rewards simply by playing in these tournaments you earn free rewards and the catch is you gotta be good but it seems like the catch here is that almost all good rewards are behind a paywall the free rewards usually stop at a lower number of wins and you don't get a reward at every win either of course if you want all those good rewards you're supposed to get for winning you have to pay 500 gems or five dollars it's like buying another pass now i can't lie the rewards are usually worth it supercell is good at making things seem like they're worth it but the issue here isn't if it's worth it or not it's the fact that they have claimed to make a feature for free rewards but most of the good rewards are behind a paywall it seems very silly of them considering we already have so many cool things behind a paywall like past reality modes and challenges i mean they already make a lot from very rare chests you're better off just buying unless you want to wait a while to get one and challenges where if you don't have pass for yell you better hope it's raining money to keep playing heading over to the next segment is cards we've seen a number of cards added over the years the game started off at 42 and we're now over 100 there's no doubt that supercell was adding a ton of cards in 2016. i mean we were getting four cards at it at once but at the time it was great everyone loved these new cards it's it was so hype worthy fast forward to maybe mid 2017 or 2018 it felt like we were now getting a remix version of already existing card if you count the number of goblin cards it almost seems like super so oversaturated it new cards didn't create the same hype anymore so supercell slowed down the releases of cards and we now started to get them maybe every two or three months the new addition of cards today seems okay but just in the early days i feel like they mishandled these releases and once again they literally over saturated it too many cards that didn't play a significant role in the game were added which led to reworks later on and cards being removed for something better perhaps the team should have taken a step back and slowed down a little earlier rather than shoving a huge amount of cards too soon speaking of big numbers the clash reel team definitely isn't one as you may have heard in my supercell graveyard video teams on a certain game are usually five people it's unclear if supercell has changed their approach on things but the contrarial team still remains rather small the issue though is that maybe this is doing more harm than good clash royale updates take extremely long balance updates aren't always great maybe if they just had a bigger team things would have turned out better in the long run maybe we would have gotten updates a bit quicker and bigger features a lot faster and smaller features in bulk instead of spreading them out with seasons other games in comparison are able to push out major content every month or two this keeps players happy it keeps them fed and makes them want to keep playing and as we mentioned before at one point it took them 14 months to release anything major this is truly embarrassing and could have been solved in many ways but the damage has already been done [Music] it's unclear whether clash royale will ever succeed again it's had way too many bland updates horrible balancing oversaturation of cards cash crap moves and its latest and biggest update was a flop we don't know when we'll get another big update because it seems at this point their focus is to fix clan wars 2.0 but with all that being said it isn't too late to make things right games have risen from the dead many times clash of clans being a perfect example it's quote-unquote died many times but still a tremendously popular game to this day i can't give advice on what to do because that's beyond my expertise but i can say the community still cares and we still hope that there will be a massive update in the likes that we've never seen before an update that'll bring us all back and give us that feeling again that magic that spark it may be a very hard uphill battle but i believe the team has what it takes mistakes are proof that you are trying and there's no doubt in that failure is just a bend in the road not the end of the road you just have to learn from failure and keep moving forward [Music] [Music] you

Channel: HaVoC Gaming

Views: 1,579,574

Keywords: Clash Royale, clashroyale, clash royal, clash, royale, royal, havoc gaming, The Rise and Fall of Clash Royale, supercell, Clash Royale state of game, state of Clash Royale, Clash Royale dead game, clash royale 5 more years, cwa, why is Clash Royale dying, chief pat, supercell graveyard, is Clash Royale dead, worst Clash Royale updates, Clash Royale funny moments, Clash Royale best deck, Clash Royale clan wars 2, clash royale tournament, Clash Royale season 17, Clash Royale Update

Id: 8rns5xXSC6Q

Length: 35min 26sec (2126 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FearlessSand3]

Best video so far, on history of clash royale

[u/expand__donghoon]

the dankest channel

[u/Ullaspn_2003]

Not mistakes of cw2 alone but all the mistakes from the beginning.

[u/[deleted]]

Nice video, I appreciate his candor. We will forever be baffled that the dev team thought this was gonna be a great update, let alone a good one. All of the decisions that went into it and not one person on the dev team saw how obviously flawed this was going to be??? It’s really sad all that has happened to this once great game. Thank you for sharing the video and here’s to hoping for better days to come!

[u/solar_guy01]

This video was very nice by our dawg havog...it's really a good job

[u/MesozoicCaveman]

Big respect to HaVoC for putting this video together. Very informational.

[u/[deleted]]

u/Supercell_Drew

[u/Utertoq]

I just watched the video, and yea i guess it represents exactly what the whole playerbase is going through. I wonder if anyone on SC will watch it but I'm sure they wouldn't care at all. And congratulations for the creator, it's a very well made video in my opinion, a lot of time and work was put on that.

[u/TryNstopME024]

Nicely put havoc! I want to see that spark again. Something we want to see that we've never seen before. Take some risks.