Game analysis: Squad Busters update makes radical changes on a quest for lasting success

• Supercell released a new update for Squad Busters with key changes impacting its core gameplay design
• The update saw the games revenue spike however those levels are turning to normal now

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Supercell released its sixth global hit, Squad Busters, on May 29th and has since gone on to pass $50 million in revenue. Now that the game has been out for a few months, the team’s approach to LiveOps will be crucial for its future.

Supercell released a new update for the game, which may appear to be the usual content update for some, but rest assured, there’s more happening beneath the surface. In this guest article, game design expert Jakub Remiar digs deep into Squad Busters’ latest update and its potential impact. 

Supercell released a major Squad Busters update on August 14th. On the surface, this can look like the usual “more content” treadmill, as three new characters were added together with the Lava World stage, but key changes radically alter some of the core gameplay design.

For a start, all consumables, including MEGAs, three types of keys, and rerolls, were removed from the game.

This will score some points with the community as all of the consumables were considered to be ‘pay to win’, giving players who use them a huge competitive advantage over other players. You could basically open character chests without having coins for them and get fused characters right away from them.

All of the MEGAs were turned into actual character skins, and new cosmetic-only currency-style tickets were introduced. The game now puts much more emphasis on cosmetics with the introduction of super rare skins, which have their own emotes.

The lucky find comeback mechanic was iterated; now it gives a random fusion from your team instead of a MEGA unit and can happen more often. This iteration also returns to the standard roguelite feature set, giving the player a clear boost to finish his current build instead of getting a completely new character.

In Survivor.io, there are chests that drop from elite monsters, which exactly gives this an upgrade to a skill that the player has already acquired in order to help him finish his build towards the end of the game. Rerolls can now be used three times per match by default.

The other interesting iteration was done on the chest multiplier mechanic, which was time-based and now can be turned on and turned off based on player choice. It gives 2x, 3x and 4x multipliers on characters given through chests after the battles.

Because these chests follow the usual shard gacha rotation of other Supercell games, players have built websites to track their upcoming chest rarity to turn the multipliers mainly on epic chests. These were clearly not designed during the global launch, as can be seen by some outcomes that the players are sharing on Reddit, with 84 characters given per one chest.

Regarding revenue impact, it seems that the usual baseline revenue of around $250K a day, based on Sensor Tower, increased to $500K during the day of the update but is slowly returning to baseline.

The good news is that the DAU, which was on the decline from the big spike during the global launch, has now finally stabilised at around 1.5 million DAU and is slightly increasing.

I don’t think that the skin economy can fill in the power-based consumable share of revenue, which would mean that even though these iterations radically improve the player experience and quality of life monetisation-wise, it could actually hurt the game in the current state, short term. But as explained below, I don’t think we have seen the full iteration yet.

Looking at these changes, it is clear that they were decided after the June update, which already announced two new MEGA characters that would be released in the August update.

It seems Supercell followed the global launch course until the June update, and afterwards, it is starting to radically pivot the ship to improve the gameplay experience. This update is reminiscent of the Clash Mini soft launch updates, where similar drastic changes to gameplay were introduced during its soft launch.

I think this is just the first of these that we will see, as some of the major challenges, such as the PvP/ win condition issue, remain unaddressed.

I think the next major change we will see, that Supercell will iterate, will be different rewards for PvP wins, making it more viable as a strategy towards win condition and adding a more impactful metagame layer in order to improve the D30 retention of the game, which charts under 10%, the lowest of all other Supercell portfolio games based on Sensor Tower.

For a more comprehensive rundown of these changes, you can listen to the latest Two & Half Gamers podcast.

                                                                            Edited by Paige Cook