长文回顾和深度解析Supercell十年来的成就

原作者：Miska Katkoff & Giovanni Ducati 译者：Willow Wu

Supercell的目标从来都不是击败竞争对手，而是击败自家游戏之前创下的纪录，显然这样的公司并不多见。迄今为止，Supercell已经发行了多个具有开创性意义的游戏，在市场中创立了多个新子类型，并带来了数十亿美元的收入。这一切都是由300多位的员工共同实现的。

然而，Supercell最新发布的数据显示他们的游戏连续三年都处于下滑状态，新游戏也没能改善这种局面。于是就有人就好奇，Supercell的巅峰期是不是已经过去了。

我们的回答是否定的。在所有的游戏公司中，Supercell是少数几家能够连续创造现象级作品的公司。话虽如此，要重新回到增长状态，Supercell确实应该考虑另寻办法来弥补这种高风险高回报的开发策略。

1. 增强Live Services和绩效营销来维持现有的产品收益，同时继续发行新游戏来拉动增长。

2. 通过并购丰富游戏库，或者利用新技能来进一步优化现有游戏的运营。虽然Supercell在这方面一直都很积极，但实际是，已经过去四年、消耗了大约1亿美元，他们几乎没有任何成果可以展示。

本文的目的是对Supercell的未来进行预测，如果可能的话，我们还会就发展策略提出自己的建议。为此，我们将剖析Supercell之前的战略、产品、文化和并购经历。我们也会讨论过去十年游戏市场的演变以及其对Supercell的影响。

本文是由Deconstructor of Fun的几个伙伴共同完成的。所有数据图表都来源于Sensor Tower，一个超级棒的数据平台。

一、高风险高回报的策略

大多数手游公司都将微创新视为通向成功的道路。他们挑选一款现有的游戏，稍加改进，希望能说服足够多的玩家转向他们的游戏。有些公司会从标杆产品中选择一些元素然后结合新主题，由此来触及新的用户群体或者在现有群体中划分出一个小众市场。

只有极少数公司会试图通过创建新类型或重新定义现有的在市场中掀起波澜。这些人凭借敏锐的直觉、极高的天赋和很大的勇气来实施高风险、高回报的策略。显然Supercell已经地完全掌握了这个策略，鉴于他们已经发行了四款开创性的产品：《卡通农场》《部落冲突》《皇室战争》《荒野乱斗》。这种成就是非常令人震惊的，因为大多数采取这种策略的公司有一款现象级的产品就已经算是很幸运的了。

Supercell目前的成就有：

· 过去六年总收益达到了120亿美元
· 他们的头四款产品，生命周期内的营收都已经越过了10亿美元里程碑（游戏邦注《荒野乱斗》很快也会加入其中了）
· 游戏经久不衰的吸引力——几年过去了它们依然是热门
· 《部落冲突》是有史以来最成功的游戏之一（总收益达到65亿美元左右）
· 世界各地都有Supercell的玩家——2019年，大概有40%的收益来自于美国，15%左右来自于亚洲地区
· 多元化的产品：有模拟经营类、战略类还有MOBA
· 仅靠320名员工就创造了这一切

然而，不管你多么喜欢Supercell（当然我们Deconstructor of Fun的员工也是如此），数据是无法忽略的。在过去几年中，Supercell一直处于缓慢下滑的状态——已发行的游戏增速变缓，而新的游戏还无法填补损失缺口。

二、发展历史&产品分析

这一切都始于《卡通农场》。Supercell的第一款游戏发行于2012年5月，重新定义了触屏设备上的农场模拟游戏。它夺走了Zynga FarmVille的市场——当时FarmVille 2是在Facebook上发行的。在这8年中，《卡通农场》一直都能带来稳定的收益，总计超过20亿美元。

Supercell在触屏设备平台又增加了一项赌注：《部落冲突》，它迅速成为全球热门。尤其令人印象深刻的是游戏在2014年迅速增长——主要得益于到部落战机制的引入。这是证明“社交元素的强大”最有力的实例之一，仅仅几个月，《部落冲突》的收益就从5000万/月飙升到了2亿/月。

紧接着《部落冲突》的成功，在2013年年末，Supercell发行了《海岛奇兵》——它就像是“《植物大战僵尸》与《部落冲突》的综合体”。目前为止，《海岛奇兵》是Supercell唯一一款在全球发行时使用不同策略的游戏。虽然《海岛奇兵》的成绩远没有《部落冲突》那么亮眼，但它的总收入同样也达到了10亿美元。

2015年，Supercell迎来了他们最好的一年——游戏总收入达到了23.3亿美元，主要是得益于《部落冲突》的超强势头。然后在2016年3月，Supercell发行了《皇室战争》，它刷新了各项记录，在发行第一年就达到了10亿美元的里程碑。 2016年对Supercell来说又是大丰收的一年，年收益23亿美元。

但是，2016年的收入构成跟前一年有很大区别。《皇室战争》的成功可能与它跟《部落冲突》的“内战”也有关系：2016年第一季度/第二季度《部落冲突》的下滑表明有些玩家试玩了《皇室战争》后就放弃了《部落冲突》。

2017年《皇室战争》的收入开始迅速下跌，到了2018年底，它的收益只有2016年巅峰时期的50%。有些人认为，发行具有相同IP和游戏玩法的产品，而且吸引的是类似的玩家群体，久而久之只会给Supercell带来负面影响。但我们认为即使没有《皇室战争》，《部落冲突》也会走向衰落（尽管速度会比较慢），所有手游在发行后都得面临“万有引力”的影响，因此《皇室战争》对Supercell来说是完全有益的。

尽管如此，在《部落冲突》之后发行的游戏RPI都没有之前的那么好。对于Supercell来说，他们有必要认真分析下新发行的产品会对现有的游戏产生什么样的影响——尤其是考虑到现有玩家可能会转向盈利能力相对较差的游戏。

最后，在2018年末，Supercell发行了《荒野乱斗》——用的是不同的IP、不同的玩法。《荒野乱斗》是个注重竞技的MOBA动作游戏，所以它不会对Supercell其它游戏造成“威胁”：事实上，《部落冲突》在那时还是挺稳定的，《皇室战争》持续在走下坡路， Supercell 2018年的总收益依然是正向增长的。

Supercell的现象级游戏

无论从哪个角度来说，《部落冲突》的成功都是无可否认的。无论是估计65亿美元的总收益，还是游戏始终稳居营收榜前排，还是它击败了所有试图分一杯羹的新产品。

《部落冲突》的成功是建立在四个要素之上的：

1. 引人入胜的游戏玩法：如果你还抱着“手游能有多少深度”这样的想法，那你肯定还没玩过《部落冲突》。这个游戏的玩法非常讲究策略，很烧脑，平衡也做得很好。这款游戏既适合那些追求超高技能上限体验的玩家，也适合那些只想玩得开心、享受轰炸对手的快感的玩家。《部落冲突》的进阶系统也是非常出色，每个级别的大本营都能解锁新的防御设施、兵种，鼓励玩家学习新的攻击方式、应对游戏的复杂性。

2. 社交体验转型：正如我们之前所讨论的，《部落冲突》从一款非常成功的游戏升级为有史以来最强大的游戏之一，转折点就是部落对战机制的引入。部落对战提供了玩游戏和继续追求进阶的新理由：分享共同的目标、各方一起协作、深入讨论攻击策略。这能让技能高超的玩家起到领头羊的作用，并且展示他们的技能。随着时间的推移，Supercell明智地在这种社交体验的基础上增添了其它特色：例如部落竞赛——基于合作的PVE体验&带有进阶元素的联盟系统。

3. 颇具深度的经济系统：如果说《部落冲突》的玩法和社交体验激发了玩家对进阶的无限渴望，那么它的经济则提供了一种近乎无尽的进阶曲线。进阶到最高级别需要花费数年的时间（对高消费玩家也是如此），而对于大多数玩家来说，这只是一个理想而不是真正的目标。游戏通过逐渐提高升级成本来实现这一点——人们不会因为这个而产生负面反应，因为大多数升级都是有意义的——外加更新新的大本营、提高新建筑、单位的级别上限，当然还有新种类。真正厉害之处是《部落冲突》团队能够不断调整游戏设定去迎合玩家的期待，而不是制造消极体验。

4. Live services：多年来，《部落冲突》一直在定期更新内容。更棒的是，游戏团队能够时刻着眼于全局：

· 通过定期调整数值、刷新meta，完美地平衡了游戏玩法
· 创作内容时老玩家和新玩家都会考虑到
· 勇于冒险（比如推出如夜世界及其新核心循环和游戏玩法），真正将时间投入于提升游戏质量
· 处于革新的第一线——比如游戏在挺早的时候就引入赛季通行证了，是mid-core游戏中运用得最好的游戏之一

建议大家都看看《部落冲突》项目主管Eino Joas的这个视频“Clash of Clans: Bigger, Better Battle Pass”，他在视频中讲述了团队遇到的一些困难以及应对策略。（https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAST728YVaA&t=11s&ab_channel=Supercell）

对《部落冲突》的预测：

基于目前的发展轨迹，我们预计《部落冲突》2020年的年营收还是稳定在10亿美元左右，跟2019年持平（2018年是8亿），主要是两方面的原因：

1. 《部落冲突》的玩家非常忠诚，为这个游戏投入了数年时间（和金钱），更重要的是他们已经成为了游戏强大社交联盟中的一员。

2. 游戏的运营团队无疑是业内最顶尖的团队之一。

但或许，之后还会有意想不到的挑战。如果Supercell发行了第三款更加注重4X元素的类《部落冲突》游戏，《部落冲突》确实会因为因此走下坡路。

2016年《皇室战争》发行的时候，腾讯的CEO刘炽平显然是非常喜欢这个游戏，当时Supercell的CEO Ilkka Panaanen说道：

刘先生刚刚掉出了《皇室战争》的全球100强玩家排行榜，他几乎不可能把注意力转回到我们必须讨论的话题上。（摘自华尔街日报）

目睹了《皇室战争》的开门红（第一年的收益约为10亿美元），还有迄今为止的累计收益超过25亿美元，许多顶级发行商都在尝试进入Supercell创造的Tactical Battler领域，比如Netmarble的《星球大战》、Nexon的《泰坦陨落》和EA的《命令与征服》。然而，不管这些竞争对手用的是什么IP，对玩法做了哪些调整，这些精心制作的竞技游戏都没能吸引到足够多的用户，连live services都做不下去了，更不用说做《皇室战争》的竞争对手。凭借其90％+的市场份额，现实证明了《皇室战争》是一个无懈可击的堡垒，成为了这个子类型的标杆产品。然而，从2017开始，游戏的收益迅速下滑：2018年-35%，2019年-15%。

《皇室战争》这样一个在市场中占据主导的产品，为什么下跌势头会如此之猛？

在上文《部落冲突》部分，我们讨论过这个游戏是如何创造出对进阶的无限渴望的。《皇室战争》在这一点上做得并不是很好。换句话说，《皇室战争》在深度上还是比《部落冲突》差一些，不太能有力说服玩家继续投入。促使游戏在早期就获得的成功的某些因素，也成为了后期发展的绊脚石：

1. 技能上限高，天梯式进阶：游戏玩法非常赞，但是也非常复杂，需要花时间才能掌握。衡量玩家成功与否是基于个人的PVP天梯战绩（而在《部落冲突》中，主要是基于部落战和社交部分)，所以玩家会因为害怕掉杯而不愿意更换、尝试新卡牌。

2. 升级所带来的回报不断减少：起初，升级卡牌是很让人兴奋的一件事，因为升级成本低、很容易就能满足条件。然而，玩家在后期获得的回报越来越少，因为升级成本在指数上升，但是他们的卡牌能力只是在线性增长。所以，等到玩家的重要卡牌升级到一个“足够好”的程度，他们投入的欲望就逐渐冷却下来了。此外，有些对战把卡牌等级上限调得比较低，玩家很容易在几个月内就能升到这个等级——这种设计是值得赞扬的，因为这样一来技能成为了主角，卡牌升级成为了次要需求(《部落冲突》当前的联赛系统是鼓励玩家尽可能地升级)。

3.卡牌等级上限：当玩家把常用的卡牌升到满级之后，他们就没有什么动力去升级其它卡牌了，除非他们也很懂得怎么用这些卡。而《部落冲突》通过引入新的大本营——从而解锁新级别的建筑、英雄和军队——不断把球门拉远。

值得称赞的是，《皇室战争》团队曾试图采取一些创新性、冒险性的措施来解决这个问题，例如：

· 推出有趣的新卡牌给meta注入新的内容，还有利用新挑战（例如达阵模式）鼓励玩家使用其它非常用卡牌
· 基于部落的对战，玩家需要熟悉/投入更多卡牌去帮助自己的部落（耐人寻味的是，这里社交玩法的效果并没有《部落冲突》的好)
· 一个非常有趣且混乱的2v2 PVP模式，玩家可以在这毫无顾忌地试验新卡，因为输掉了并不会让你掉杯。
· 引入换卡币，降低了获取珍稀卡牌的难度。

不幸的是，游戏营收的持续下滑表明这些创新并不能解决问题。我们将在后续的文章中进行更深入地探讨（并重点讨论《部落冲突》与《皇室战争》中赛季通行证的不同应用效果）。

关于《皇室战争》的预测

除非《皇室战争》团队能解决游戏经济方面的问题，不然游戏在未来仍会逐步下跌。团队可以考虑：

· 引入卡牌限制，借鉴一下《炉石传说》或者《万智牌》的设计（也就是所谓的“标准”设定）
· 对游戏模式进行创新，鼓励玩家尝试更多卡组。就比如改造一下自走棋——尽管他们需要先解决新游戏类型的盈利问题，就如我们在上文所讲到的。

《皇室战争》不太可能效仿《部落冲突》提高现有卡牌的等级上限，因为把卡牌升到最高级是一件非常有成就感的事，你最好不要再给玩家浇冷水。

在经历了漫长而艰难的测试发行后，《荒野乱斗》于2019年在全球正式发行，第一年就带来了约5亿美元的收益——这就显示出了Supercell的韧性和调整能力。《荒野乱斗》成为了人们期望中Supercell第五款收益破10亿美元的产品。

除了带来可观的收入，《荒野乱斗》还帮助Supercell提高了新用户渗透率，他们在亚太市场地区（尤其是韩国）取得了突破，并且吸引了更多年轻用户。这对Supercell来说是非常重要的，因为这能够在限制内部产品竞争的同时让公司继续增长。

问题是，Supercell所吸引的这群新用户是非常善变的，他们很容易就会转向下一个热门游戏（《堡垒之夜》最近也学到了这个教训）。结果就是，尽管初期表现喜人，但《荒野乱斗》的收益一直在稳步下跌。

那么，这次的问题又出在哪呢？我们认为，收益下跌主要由两个因素引起的：

1. “忠诚度”降低：《荒野乱斗》是一个简单的技能向游戏，当你和朋友们一起玩（能在呆一起最理想）时，乐趣会多很多。社交玩法和卡通艺术风格促使游戏在Z世代中大受欢迎。然而，Z世代是不可预知的：哪里热闹他们就往哪里跑，有新的热门游戏出现，他们会毫不犹豫地抛下手上的这个

2. 盈利能力降低：《荒野乱斗》的RPI是Supercell所有游戏中最低的。一方面是因为游戏经济（深度比不上《皇室战争》《部落冲突》），另一方面是年轻群体不确定性太强。

就像《堡垒之夜》一样，《荒野乱斗》每个月都要费力把玩家召回来。要做到这一点，Supercell就得专注于提供新鲜的Live Services内容，并在电子竞技、联动、社区等方面加大投入，增加游戏的曝光度。然而我们认为，要扭转收入快速下滑的局面，Supercell也需要提高盈利天花板、增加游戏经济的深度。

关于《荒野乱斗》的预测

我们认为随着游戏在中国发行，《荒野乱斗》将会创下新高。毕竟，这是一个腾讯游戏（有意思的是它是由游族发行的）。尽管如此，就长期而言我们认为《荒野乱斗》的下滑趋势还是会继续的。我们并不认为Supercell会为了深化经济而对这个游戏做出重大改变。此外，考虑到Supercell希望保持小型规模，在保证live service内容输送的同时，他们在游戏内部创新和外部推广上可能也很难做出什么大胆的举动。

在这些midcore游戏屡创佳绩之前，Supercell也曾在模拟农场领域施展过魔力。从平台和游戏玩法两方面来说，发行于2012年的《卡通农场》极大地改变了玩家的游戏方式（《卡通农场》是最早登陆移动平台的农场游戏，订单机制对这一类型来说是有革新意义的）。在发行近八年后，《卡通农场》依然是移动设备上最具标志性的农场游戏（尤其是iPad）。

尽管长时间以来《卡通农场》一直都是收益最高的农场游戏，但是在过去两三年，《卡通农场》的市场份额在逐渐减少。尤其是2018年Vizor的《克朗代克大冒险》发行后，《卡通农场》的收益就开始走下坡路了。这个趋势延续到了2019年，Playrix的《梦想小镇》跟《卡通农场》并驾齐驱多年之后，前者的UA优势在这一年开始不断扩大，收益比《卡通农场》多出了一倍。

《梦想小镇》的安装量在去年剧增，而《卡通农场》的下载量则一直处于比较稳定的状态，或者说只是略微下滑。这可能是因为游戏通过绩效营销获得的安装量非常少，许多所谓的“经典游戏”经常会出现这样的情况。

关于《卡通农场》的预测

鉴于《梦想小镇》和《克朗代克大冒险》的增长，《卡通农场》现在在这个子类型的只能排到第三位了，以后还会不会滑到第四，这得看Farmville 3的后续反响了。但是考虑到现在竞争激烈程度的上升，《卡通农场》的下滑速度应该说还是非常缓慢的。这意味着《卡通农场》的核心玩家留存情况还是不错的，《梦想小镇》和《克朗代克大冒险》很难把玩家“偷过来”。

最后，由于《卡通农场》似乎并没有特别依赖于绩效营销，越来越高的单次安装成本（受Playrix发起的“安装战争”影响）对游戏的市场表现几乎没有影响。然而，没有营销支持，Playrix的产品和《卡通农场》之间的差距将会越拉越大。

那么Hay Day Pop呢？（游戏邦注：这款游戏在2020年年末被砍，原文发布于五月）

在2020年的第一季度，Supercell测试发行了他们的第二款解谜游戏Hay Day Pop。从表面上看，发行这样一个游戏似乎算是比较聪明的决策：Supercell为模拟经营玩家带来了一个解谜游戏，有着熟悉的角色（只是给他们“整了个容”）。Hay Day Pop就像是《梦幻水族箱》和《卡通农场》的结合体，包含了砖块爆炸机制。从各方面看，这是一个不错的游戏。但它并不是一个出众的游戏。它展现出的是其他游戏公司所致力的微创新，而不是Supercell的颠覆性创新。

Zynga在2015年的时候把Farmville做成了解谜游戏。它也是一个不错的游戏，但是无法与King的saga系列产品抗衡。在2020年，Supercell带着Hay Day Pop进入了产品密度不大但竞争程度更为激烈的解谜领域。

通过观察Hay Day Pop的设计元素，我们发现它在核心和meta部分都有一些非传统的、有趣的改进：比如把赛季通行证当作是进阶的关键媒介。在另一方面，它的主题、艺术风格和UI都体现出了对现有游戏元素的巧妙重复利用。另外，叙事的缺失会让这样的游戏显得有点枯燥——你在游戏中所做的一切似乎都是毫无意义的。从某种程度上说，它就像《梦幻水族箱》一样，是开发团队作品中最弱、最过时的解谜游戏。

然而，鉴于执行方向把握得当，如果Supercell能够把CPI压得足够低（这是目前的一个主要未知因素），那么这款游戏的成绩也不会糟糕到哪儿去。不然的话，Supercell就需要提高游戏的盈利能力，但从当前的游戏设计模式来看，这应该不在他们的计划范围内。此外，Supercell还需要组建一个团队来进一步发展Live Services活动，来维持用户粘性并从中盈利——这就会导致团队规模变大，从而产生这样的疑问：我们是否应该投入十年的时间打造一款top 200的游戏？

关于Hay Day Pop的预测

鉴于游戏目前没有展现出多少新意，我们认为Hay Day Pop并不会在解谜领域掀起什么波澜。然而，要是有引人入胜的故事和新颖的营销策略，Hay Day Pop可能会成为一个优秀的益智解谜游戏，带来可观的收入——尽管可能跟Supercell的其它游戏不在一个量级，无法到10亿美元的“门槛”。

那Supercell的第一个解谜游戏呢？我们早在几年前就谈论过了。有兴趣的可以看看我们之前的文章：《解析Supercell Spooky Pop的失败原因以及益智游戏成功的六条重要原则》（https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/blog//2015/01/supercells-spooky-pop-and-six-rules-of.html?rq=spooky%20pop）

三、（不算是）秘密配方

那么，Supercell是如何创造出这么多开创性游戏的呢？这不是什么神秘的故事。基本上就是Ilkka Panaanen在访谈中所说的那些话，还有在博客中写的那些。根据他的话——更为关键的是公司的行动——我们可以看出他们的战略旨在实现三个目标：

1. 创造有利于创新的环境
2. 创造建设性对抗文化，内部开发计划必须经过同级评审
3. 关于游戏，公司赋予团队自主权，他们甚至可以自行决定砍掉游戏

这三个目标是为了创造尽可能多的射门机会，这很重要，因为大多数想法是注定会失败的。与此同时，这能够最大程度地避免项目失败带来的后果，确保Supercell在不受严重影响的情况下继续尝试新东西。

刚看到这三点的时候，我们很容易会忽视同时实现这些目标是多么困难。实现一个目标所需要的东西（即激情和创造力）与实现另一个目标所需要的东西（即严谨的分析和砍掉项目的决心)是截然不同的。大多数游戏公司一般只擅长实现其中一个目标。有些公司擅长产出点子，但他们“考虑”得太久了，执行阶段看似遥遥无期。还有就是他们经常会因为项目范围失控，必须在开发中途再次校正方向。很多公司都会错过黄金机会，因为市场是在一直变化的，等他们做完游戏后，人们的关注点已经不在这类游戏上了。取而代之的是，大多数公司选择着眼于短期，封闭了自己的创造力。

Supercell的公司文化让他们能够同时去追求这些目标。具体来说，他们的成功秘诀少不了公司文化中的这三个元素：

· 使命：“游戏受众要尽可能地广，可以玩上好些年，能够被铭记”——这不同于一般的收益目标
· 自主权：Supercell的员工可以自行组队执行某个点子，并负责所有与游戏相关的艰难决策——包括效果不好的话就砍掉
· 小规模：这能够减少不必要的官僚作风，在招聘时严格筛选（选择T型人才而不是某一领域的专家），只优先考虑最好的创意，就算是新点子效果不好，他们也不会有多少损失，可以迅速重组开发团队。然而，小规模也带来了艰难的挑战，我们稍后会讨论这个话题……

基本上就是这样。你会觉得很奇怪，不是吗？毕竟，大多数公司都有成为业内最佳的理想，而且几乎每个公司都表示他们的公司文化很注重自主权，或者以精益的方式运营。

所以Supercell到底不同在哪？嗯……他们是真的在实践这种文化，而且所有的决策似乎都与他们的文化价值观相符。以下是来自Supercell CEO的博客，还有其它文章的所提到的一些实际情况：

· Ilkka说自己是“业内最没权势的CEO”
· “有些Supercell员工会公开批判《荒野乱斗》这个游戏”（注意是“公开”）
· “Supercell曾就公司规模问题进行过讨论，因为很多员工觉得规模增长过快就很难维持文化了”
· 关于Rush Wars停服，Ilkka表示“为团队做出的决定感到骄傲”，也很理解这个决定有多么艰难，但这无疑是正确的
· 最高管理层一直在支付高额的税款（芬兰高收入者的税率超过了50%)，树立了公平和透明的榜样

在决定效仿他们的文化之前，你还得思考下Supercell文化中经常被忽视的两个重要因素：离职率很高、反馈很坦率。

1. 离职率：Supercell在这一方面可是臭名昭著。有消息称，在某些年间，多达50%的新员工在入职的头6个月就被解雇了。这你得站在Supercell的角度去考虑，他们只雇佣最顶尖的人才。你必须满足那些超级优秀的同事的要求（而不是管理层的要求），这就会产生非常大的压力。然而，Supercell的文化并不是有毒的——只是你必须一直维持超高产能，要不然就得离开。

2. 反馈：我们这里所说的“反馈”是指那种冷酷无情的反馈，尤其是针对还在开发中的游戏。无论是游戏画面还是游戏感受，“好”的标准都是非常高的，而反馈并不需要什么高门槛。试玩正在开发中的游戏、给出反馈，这不仅仅是大家鼓励的，而且几乎可以算得上是强制的。毕竟，同事给出的意见往往比高层的更有效。

四、市场演变对Supercell的影响

在过去的几年中，手游市场可以说是有了天翻地覆的变化。新游戏数量大幅下降，而且这些游戏也越来越难保住自己在营收榜的排名席位。

市场的成熟是由F2P游戏商业模式本身的发展和游戏开发者的日益增进的技能水准共同推动的，就比如说：

消费深度：大部分增长来自于付费玩家的消费额增加，而不是更多玩家进入市场（至少在那些关键市场是如此）。言下之意就是你要在市场中突围就需要足够深的经济来带动LTV和其它系统，从而留住现有的玩家

“赢家通吃”：竞争逐渐成为一种跨类型的“赢家通吃”游戏——排名前三的游戏通常占据了60%~80%的市场份额，那些规模响度较小的游戏根本就没有多少空间。

在mid-core这个高度密集的大类中，Supercell在三个子类型领域都是赢家：《部落冲突》所在的Build &Battle领域、《皇室战争》所在的Tactical Battlers领域以及《荒野乱斗》所在MOBA领域。
先发优势：成为最早进入某一类型游戏市场的公司之一，这一点变得更加重要了。因为这些游戏抢占了优势，可以通过以下方式创造较高的转换成本：

1）社交：就比如说，你的朋友都在玩《堡垒之夜》，那你基本就不会考虑去玩别的Battle Royale游戏，除非它的玩法有本质意义上的不同，或者是你更喜欢它的IP。

2）进阶：意思就是说，你已经为这个游戏的进阶投入很多时间和钱了，那你基本不会考虑去玩另外一个类似的游戏，费力去从头学习所有东西。

这一趋势造成的重要影响是，现在留给发行商进入新类型领域并取得成功的黄金时间变短了。换句话说，游戏开发节奏必须加快。

Live Services是至关重要的：如今大多数的Live Services都能比过去更深度地娱乐玩家，最终促使玩家在这些游戏上投入更多时间，于是新游戏就更难“挖墙脚”。拥有强大的Live Services是达到所需LTV目标以负担不断增长的CPI的关键。然而，提供Live Services的成本是非常高的，而且需要不同的技能、多样化的系统设计。

用户获取可能演变成一场激烈的战斗：现有开发商可能会通过用户获取战争把其他人都“压死”，让用户注意不到他们的存在，只有那些LTV最高的游戏才有能力承担不断增长的CPI、经受得住时间的考验，在数年后收获成果。这意味着，跟很多有一定名气的竞争对手进入同一个空间，你要面临比以往更加艰难的挑战。

这些趋势所导致的情况就是大多数成功的手游发行商都有四个共同特点：

1.有Live Services
2.对用户获取投入很多
3.有不同类型的游戏产品
4.对特定类型尤为擅长

Supercell在这四点上都做得十分出色。尽管在最近几年，发行商并不总是能够跟上现代Live Services的需求。原因是现在的服务型游戏逐渐偏向于以内容为主导，需要更大的团队来制作。而正如我们所知，Supercell并不打算往大团队方向发展。

对Supercell的影响

上述大多数趋势都意味着通过微创新进入top100是越来越困难了。相比于发行另一个《皇室战争》克隆游戏，Supercell制作开创性游戏的方法更易于实现商业成功。显然，Supercell的战略并不适用于所有人，因为这需要相当高的创作天赋、创造力、敢于冒险的精神和长期专注的心态——顺便说一下，这就是为什么当初Supercell着手于Rush Wars、Hay Day Pop这样的微创新项目时，我们并不看好。

另一方面， Supercell似乎在Live Services上遇到了困难， 正如我们在上文讨论《荒野乱斗》时所分析的那样。他们保持小规模的意愿与维持现有游戏运营所需的巨大投入无疑是冲突的，同时还要考虑组建新团队为未来的项目做规划。每年一次大更新并不足以留住那些投入最多的玩家。

Supercell保持小而灵活的理念跟运营需求产生了冲突，这个情况已经在多个工作室出现了（如上海、旧金山和赫尔辛基）。正如Eric Seufert在他的文章“Building a virtuous cycle between product and marketing”所分析的那样，我们可以说Supercell这种将营销和产品开发分开的做法是过时的。

如果扩大团队不在Supercell的选项内，那么外包和外部化可能就会成为他们的对策。Supercell已经在朝这个方向走了，但这样一来就需要走更多的流程，需要做更多管理工作，这可能会在一定程度上牺牲自主权和速度——这对于Supercell的文化来说，就如同在吸血鬼的饮食中加入大蒜。

另一种办法是将《海岛奇兵》这样的经典游戏转手给Space Ape做live services。这会是一个双赢的策略，但Supercell应该是不会考虑的。

比起绩效营销，Supercell更擅长在营销漏斗的上层发挥优势。拥有像《部落冲突》这样玩家基数庞大的游戏，他们的这种策略选择也是可以理解的。

最后一点就是UA资源。说到资金，Supercell所拥有的量可是远超所需。说到人才，Supercell也有办法去雇佣他们。说到网红主播，Supercell从2012年开始就在关注、投入这个领域了。说到内部增长，大家都喜欢Supercell的游戏，愿意下载安装。尽管如此，Supercell在绩效营销方面的表现可能还是非常有限。Supercell被认为是绩效营销典范已经是很久之前的事了，因为他们已经将注意力转移到漏斗的上层和网红上。在某种程度上，Supercell的营销策略更像是“地毯式轰炸”，而不是战术行动。这种方法适合受众面广、大范围发行的游戏，但不太适用于有针对性地寻找新玩家。

五、并购策略

尽管Supercell一直都在创造游戏，在市场中依然占据着强势地位，但他们在并购方面一直都是平淡无奇。4年过去了，Supercell投入了1亿多美元，然而他们并没有什么成果可以展示。这就是因为Supercell没有完善的并购策略。

一般来说，并购策略是围绕着协同效应和扩大规模而构建的。

2016年，Supercell开始投资其他公司，就如他们以往的做事风格一样，没有大张旗鼓，但却引发了更多人的关注。2017年，Supercell的联合创始人Mikko Kodisoja对Venture Beat这样说道：

“我们在寻找外部团队/工作室的时候，我们首先看的就是团队本身。团队应该拥有跟Supercell类似的文化，开发游戏的人们有绝对的自主权。

我们想让旗下的产品变得更多样化，投资一些真正跟我们不一样的团队。

他们的愿景必须跟我们的一致。我们希望自己的游戏能够让用户玩上好几十年。人们会记住这些游戏。我们投资的工作室都必须有这种心态。”

总结来说，这个策略可以解读成这样：Supercell会选择的投资对象就是看起来、听起来、感觉起来跟自己差不多的，那些梦想成为另一个Supercell的公司。

这种策略好的地方就在于简单明了，将重点放在文化契合上，由此一来任何形式的合作都会相对顺利一些。你很容易就能知道跟你合作的这个公司究竟符不符合要求，因为你寻找的这些特征是你已经拥有的。此外，也有很多公司在尽其所能去模仿Supercell——为什么不呢？毕竟，在一个以团队为优先的公司中，用一个小团队创造出一个伟大（最赚钱的）的游戏是每个开发者的梦想。

然而，从理论上来说，Supercell迄今为止投资的公司都是能从Supercell那里受益颇多的，但反过来看Supercell从对方那里几乎“捞不到什么好处”——从并购战略和生产成果两方面来看都是如此。实际情况则更加糟糕，因为收购的公司似乎并没有如他们所期望的那样获得Supercell的“秘籍”。再考虑到只有300人，可以用来传授“秘籍”的时间也是非常有限的。

为了更便于理解，让我们来看看Supercell目前为止的投资：

· 2016年：约1000万美元收购Frogmind 51%的股份；约400万美元投资LBS手游初创公司Shipyard
· 2017年：约6000万美元收购Space Ape 62%的股份
· 2018年：约500万美元收购Trailmix （前King团队）；约600万美元收购Redemption Games；约600万美元收购Everywear Games（曾因开发Apple Watch游戏而为人熟知）
· 2019年：约400万美元收购Luau Games；约100万美元收购Wild Games；还有Ritz De·li（数额未知）

就目前来看，这些公司带来的成果还是十分有限的，比如：

· Frogmind发行了两款画面精美的游戏《迷失之地：乱斗》和《雷鸣之星足球》，并借助Super Scale平台扩大游戏规模。从表面上看，这似乎表现出了Supercell的助攻能力。然而，对于开发商来说，真正的挑战在于当你没有足够的资金或专业人才来推动和维持游戏增长时，你该如何扩大游戏规模。

· Space Ape以其精益live services而闻名。被Supercell收购以后，Space Ape曾公开谈论过他们是如何转变到一种更具创造性的工作模式。然而，在经历了一段漫长的测试发行期后，Space Ape被迫砍掉了Rumble League——这是一款非常类似《荒野乱斗》的游戏。

· Redemption Games从AppLovin那里获得了战略性投资，他们投资的很多公司都实现了增长。由此可以得出的结论是，Supercell的投资能够帮助公司引进人才，磨炼公司文化和工作方式。但是在增长方面，Supercell似乎并不是这些中小型开发工作室的最佳拍档。

另外一个问题就是退出策略。毕竟，从创始人的角度来看，创办一家公司要承担很大的财务风险。风投会推动公司增长，最终在价格合适的时候出售或进行IPO。Supercell没有必要这么做。就比如说，谁会去买Space Ape剩余的股份？这些可能就是创始人和重要员工所持有的股份。现在Supercell拥有了多数股份，Space Ape团队的上升空间似乎就变得不太明显了。在这种情况下，你努力后得到的成果或许就没有典型初创公司的那么令人兴奋？但另一方面，Supercell确实能够给这些公司带来很大的稳定性，这就促使这些中小型工作室更容易雇佣到顶尖人才。

展望未来，Supercell要修正并购战略，我们认为有三种方案可选：

1. 更注重投资组合管理/开发者关系。这意味着要建立一个分享网络，跟他们当前&未来的投资公司分享关于游戏开发、营销的知识。

2. 专注于投资那些真正独立、有成绩的公司，比如Peak Games、Tactile Games、Lilit。这些公司不需要照顾扶持，还能为Supercell带来增长。

3. 停止并购。Supercell现在的策略感觉有点散乱。Supercell应该保持他们做游戏时的那种状态——只关注最好的人才、只瞄准最好的作品。

六、Supercell的2020以及之后

推动颠覆性创新，这从时间和结果来说都存在着极大的不确定性。就如我们之前所说的，Supercell是少数几家最有可能在成熟的手游市场中发行开创性热门产品的公司之一。尽管Supercell的方法是尽早扼杀那些潜力不足的游戏，但他们的这种创意工作流程并不能保证他们的产品收益能持续走高，一年比一年更好。但好消息是到目前为止，他们发行的游戏都一如既往地出色。

所以，根据Supercell的短期财务状况来评估他们长期创造“独角兽产品”的能力并不靠谱。真正有参考价值的应该是跟他们所做的决策以及所发行的新游戏关联的一些指标。目前，Supercell并没有转而采取保守策略，通过微创新来保护自己的市场份额，而是保持攻势，依然只发行开创性游戏。砍掉Rush Wars就展现出了他们的决心（你再看看Hay Day Pop是什么下场）。

尽管如此，Supercell确实可以利用一些机会让游戏的市场表现更上一层楼：

1. 更加重视Live Services，增加现有游戏的可持续性
2. 在绩效营销上多下功夫
3. 并购要成为增加用户基数和收入的跳板

当Supercell考虑到这些（以及其它）机会时，他们将不得不思考如何才能在不失去他们最宝贵的文化的前提下扩大公司的规模。

至此，我们想用一个思考题来结束此篇分析。想象一下，在另一个平行世界里，Supercell从未被收购，除了内部增长之外，公司还积极地进行收购。他们可能会收购像Giant或/和Gram这样的工作室（或许Peak、Playrix也有可能）。Supercell会成为一个完全不同的公司——不仅是规模，还有文化层面。虽然它不太可能成为如今全世界开发者瞻仰的对象，但有一件事是肯定的——我们不会讨论Supercell的巅峰期（从收益角度来看）是否已经过去，以及发行商应该如何做才能回到增长轨道上。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Supercell is one of the rare companies that doesn’t try to beat the competition; rather, it tries to beat the high score set by its own prior games. To date, Supercell has created multiple genre-defining games and generated billions in revenues — all with little more than 300 employees (!).

However, the latest numbers released by Supercell confirmed that its portfolio has been declining for three years in a row and that new games have not been able to offset this trend. As a result, some are wondering if Supercell’s “haydays” are behind them.

Our short answer is no. Out of all the gaming companies out there, Supercell is one of the few capable of shipping consecutive monster hits. However, to return to a growth path, Supercell should also consider additional levers to complement its high-risk, high-reward development strategy:

1.Strengthen Live Services and performance marketing to stabilize its existing portfolio, while continuing to drive growth through new releases

2.Leverage M&A to add new titles to their portfolio or new capabilities to scale how they operate existing games. While Supercell has been active on this front, in reality the company has spent four years and around $100M with little to show for.

The objective of this analysis is to provide a prediction on Supercell’s future and, where possible, make suggestions on their path forward. To do so, we will deconstruct Supercell’s strategy, portfolio, culture, and M&A efforts. We will also discuss how the market has evolved in the last 10 years and discuss the implications of this evolution for Supercell.

This post is the collaboration of several Deconstructor of Fun members. All the data is derived from Sensor Tower’s fantastic data plarform.

#1 THE HIGH-RISK, HIGH-REWARDS STRATEGY

Most mobile gaming companies bet on incremental innovation as their gateway to success. They make marginal improvements to an existing game, hoping to convince enough players to switch to their game. Other companies take elements from benchmark titles and combine them with a new theme to reach a new audience or carve out a niche within an existing audience.

There are only a handful of companies that try to disrupt the market by creating new genres or redefining existing ones. Disruptors rely on gut feeling, an extremely high level of talent, and… a lot of courage to pull off this high-risk, high-reward strategy. Supercell has clearly mastered this strategy so far, since they can be credited for creating 4 genre-defining hits: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars. This is an astounding achievement as most disruptors are lucky to produce a single hit of that magnitude in their lifetime.

These are just some of Supercell’s incredible achievements so far:

·$12B in total gross revenues over the last 6 years (mic drop)

·Its first 4 games passed $1B in lifetime revenues (and Brawl Stars will soon join the club)

·Long “staying power” of its games, as they remain relevant for years

·Clash of Clans is one of the most successful mobile titles ever (revenues estimated ~$6.5B)

·Global footprint (in 2019 ~40% of revenues came from the US and ~15% from Asia)

·Well diversified portfolio across genres (from simulation to build & battle and MOBA)

·Currently only 320 employees to achieve all of the above

However, no matter how big of a fan of Supercell you are (and we at Deconstructor of Fun for sure are), you can’t overlook the numbers. In the last few years, Supercell has been on a gradual decline, as existing titles have slowed down and new launches haven’t been able to fill the void.

#2 HISTORY & PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

It all started with Hay Day. Launched in May 2012, Supercell’s first game redefined the farming genre on touchscreen devices. The game took over the market from Zynga’s FarmVille, which at that time launched FarmVille 2 on Facebook. In its ~8 years, Hay Day has been a stable business with an estimated $2B+ in lifetime revenues.

Supercell’s bet on touch-screen devices continued with Clash of Clans, which quickly became a global hit. In particular, it’s truly impressive to see its acceleration in 2014, driven largely by the introduction of clan wars. This is one of the cleanest examples in the industry of the “power of social”: it took Clash of Clans from ~$50M to ~$200M/ month in a few months.

On the back of Clash of Clans’ success, in late 2013 Supercell released Boom Beach, a “PVE version of Clans”. To date, Boom Beach is the only game Supercell ever globally released with a differentiation strategy . While Boom Beach never reached Clash of Clans’ performance, it topped $1B in lifetime revenues.

In 2015, Supercell had its best year with $2.33B in gross revenues, propelled by Clash of Clans’ breakaway success. Then, in March 2016 Supercell launched Clash Royale which smashed every record with $1B in gross revenues in its first year. As a result, 2016 was another amazing year for Supercell with $2.30B in revenues.

However, the revenue composition of the company in 2016 was very different from 2015. Clash Royale’s success was likely fueled also by a cannibalization of Clash of Clans: Clans’ decline in Q1/Q2 ‘16 suggests that several players tried Clash Royale and then did not return to Clans.

In 2017, Clash Royale’s revenues started falling quickly and by late 2018 were ~50% of their 2016 peak. Some argued that launching a game with the same IP and a gameplay that appeals to similar players was net negative for Supercell over time. Instead, we think that Clans would have declined even without Clash Royale (albeit at a slower rate) due to the “law of gravity” that all mobile games face after launch and, therefore, that Clash Royale was net positive.

Nevertheless, since every single game released after Clash of Clans had a lower RPI, it is important for Supercell to carefully consider the impact of new launches on existing titles – and in particular the risk of existing players migrating to those lower monetizing titles.

Finally, in late 2018, Supercell launched Brawl Stars, with a different IP and a very different gameplay. Brawl Stars is an action-packed, esports-focused MOBA and thus it didn’t cannibalize existing games: in fact, Clash of Clans remained stable, Clash Royale continued its rate of decline, and Supercell’s total revenues in 2018 grew.

Supercell’s Genre Defining Mega-Hits

Clash of Clans’ breakaway success is obvious from all angles. Whether we’re looking at the (estimated) $6.5Bn in lifetime revenues, the game’s consistency at the top of the grossing charts or the way it has demolished all the new entrants attempting to take a piece of the gigantic revenue pie.
Clash of Clans’ success has been built on 4 elements:

1.Compelling gameplay: Whoever thinks that mobile games are not “deep enough” clearly hasn’t played Clash of Clans yet. This game packs some of the best balanced, nerve- wracking, strategic gameplay on a mobile device. It manages to be relevant to players who seek an extremely high skill cap experience as well as to players who just want to have fun and blow up the opponent’s base. Clans also has an extremely smooth progression. Every town hall unlocks new troops and defenses, encouraging players to learn new attacks, while managing complexity.

2.Transformational social experience: As discussed, the introduction of Clan Wars was the tilting point that transformed Clans from a great success to one of the top mobile games ever. Clan Wars provided new reasons to play the game and to continue chasing progression: sharing a common goal, coordinating efforts, and having deep discussions on attack strategies. This allows top players to “carry the team” and showcase their skills. Over time, Supercell wisely built on social, adding new flavors to it (e.g., Clan Games, a cooperation-based PVE experience, and a league system with progression).

3.Very deep economy: If Clans’ gameplay and social experience fuel a never-ending desire to progress, its economy provides a quasi-never-ending progression curve. Maximizing your progression takes years (even for high spenders) and for most players it represents an aspirational goal more than a real target. The game achieves this by gradually increasing upgrade costs (and can get away with it since most upgrades feel meaningful) and by releasing new town halls, unlocking new levels of buildings and units (plus new ones). The true masterpiece here is that Clans continuously moved the goalpost in a way that players look forward to (to progress more…) vs. a negative experience.

4.Live services: Over the years, the game hasn’t lost its step and has continued to provide fresh content regularly. Even better, the team has showcased a holistic focus on the game:

·Masterfully balanced the gameplay with regular nerfs/buffs, refreshing the meta

·Designed for both elder and new players, often forgotten by mature games

·Took risks (e.g., the Builder Base and its new core loop and gameplay) and spent real development time on quality-of-life improvements

·Stayed at the forefront of innovation (e.g., introduced battle pass relatively early and with one of the finest implementations in the mid-core space)

We encourage everyone to watch the fantastic presentation by Eino Joas, Game Lead of Clash of Clans as he explains the challenges and the team’s approach to solve them.

Prediction for Clash of Clans:

Based on the current trajectory, we expect that Clash of Clans will continue at a steady course generating about ~$1B in 2020 as it did in 2019 (up from ~$800M in 2018) due to two reasons:

1.Clans’ players are extremely loyal, having invested years (and money) in the game and, more importantly, having become part of its strong social network

2.The game is undoubtedly run by one of the absolute best groups of professionals in the industry.

But there may be a curve-ball coming. In case Supercell releases a third Clash title with much stronger emphasis on 4X elements, Clash of Clans will experience decline driven by cannibalization.

When Clash Royale was released back in 2016, Tencent’s CEO, Mr. Lau, was apparently such a fan of the game (among millions of others) that Supercell’s CEO, Ilkka Panaanen, reported:

Mr. Lau (CEO of Tencent) had just dropped out from Clash Royale’s global top-100 players leaderboard, and it was almost impossible to get his focus back to the topics we had to discuss.
（from an article in the The Wall Street Journal）

Clash Royale’s explosive initial success (~$1B in its first year) and cumulative revenue of in excess of $2.5B to date lured many top publishers to try to break into the Tactical Battler sub-genre created from scratch by Supercell (e.g., Netmarble’s Star Wars, Nexon’s Titanfall, and EA’s Command & Conquer). Yet, no matter what IP or gameplay modifications the rivals made, none of these well-crafted competitive games was able to carve enough audience to even continue live services, let alone compete against Clash Royale. With its 90%+ revenue share, Clash Royale has proven to be an unassailable stronghold and effectively defines this sub-genre. However, since 2017 revenues have been declining rapidly: -35% in 2018, and -15% in 2019.

So if Clash Royale is such a dominant title, why did it drop so fast?

In the Clans’ section we discussed how the game creates a “never-ending desire to progress”. Clash Royale doesn’t quite achieve this. In other words, Clash Royale lacks the spend depth of Clans, due to some of the factors that make it so successful earlier on in the player’s life cycle:

1.High skill cap with a ladder-based progression: The gameplay is amazing, but very complex and requires time to master. Because the measure of a player’s success in the game is defined by an individual PVP ladder (while in Clans it’s all about the Clan Wars and the social dynamics explained earlier), players are disincentivized to switch decks and try new cards for fear of dropping trophies.

2.Diminishing returns from upgrades: At first, upgrading cards feels exciting, as it’s cheap, frequent, and material. However, players eventually experience declining returns from their investments, as upgrading costs grow exponentially but their cards’ power progression is linear. So, players see that their key cards reach a “good enough” level, and their desire to spend slows down. Also, several competitions take place at a low card level cap (“tournament standard”) easily achievable in a few months. This is admirable as it celebrates skills, but lowers the incentives to upgrade cards (vs. Clans’ current war league system encourages players to upgrade as much as they can).

3.Card level caps: Cards are capped at a certain level. When spenders max out those cards, they don’t really have an incentive to level up other cards, unless they are proficient with them as well (i.e. whales’ spend is skill-capped!). Clans, instead, keeps moving out the goalpost by releasing new town halls that unlock new levels of buildings, heroes, and troops.

To their credit, the Clash Royale team has tried to solve this problem by introducing several creative and risk-taking innovations, such as:

·New interesting cards to switch up the meta and new challenges (e.g., touchdown) to encourage players to enjoy more cards than the ones currently in their deck

·A clan-based competition, where players need to be familiar with/ invested in more cards to help their clan (interestingly, social here hasn’t worked as well as it did in Clans)

·An extremely fun and chaotic 2v2 PVP mode, where players can freely experiment with new cards, since losing doesn’t cost any trophies

·Trading tokens, making the most expensive cards more easily achievable

Unfortunately, the game’s continued decline suggests that these innovations did not fix the economy problem. We’ll explore these points (and also focus on the different outcomes of Battle Pass in Clash of Clans vs. Clash Royale) in more depth in an upcoming article.

Prediction for Clash Royale

Unless Clash Royale addresses its economy, it will continue to gradually decline in the future (e.g., 10-15% in 2020). Some of the ideas that the team could consider include:

·Introducing card restrictions, taking a page from Hearthstone’s or Magic The Gathering’s playbook (i.e. the “standard” format)

·Innovating with new game modes to encourage players to develop a broader collection. One of these could be a re-imagined version of Auto Chess (though they would first need to solve the monetization issues of the new genre, as discussed previously)

Instead, it’s unlikely that they will follow Clash of Clans’ example and introduce higher caps for existing cards, because of how vanity is tied to reaching the max level of a card.

After a long and difficult soft launch with multiple pivots, Brawl Stars launched to global success in 2019 and raked up ~$0.5B in its first year. This shows Supercell’s tenacity and ability to adjust. As a result, Brawl Stars is set to become Supercell’s 5th game to reach $1Bn in life-time-revenue.

In addition to the massive revenue stream, Brawl Stars enabled Supercell to increase its penetration of a new audience in terms of both geography (Asia Pacific and, in particular, South Korea) and demographics (younger players). This is very important for Supercell as it allows the company to grow while limiting cannibalization risks to its existing portfolio.

The problem is that this new audience Supercell connected with tends to be quite fickle and prone to moving en masse to the next hot thing. (Something Fortnite has learned as of late.) As a result, despite the strong start, Brawl Stars’ revenues have been steadily declining.

So what’s the problem? We think that the revenue decline is driven by two factors:

1.Lower “loyalty”: Brawl Stars has a simple, skill-based gameplay, with a fun factor that scales up when friends play together (ideally nearby). The social gameplay and the cartoonish art style helped the game become popular with the younger Gen Z audience. However, Gen Z is an unpredictable audience: they are all about the hype and will move to the next hot game without a second thought (something Fortnite has learned lately)

2.Lower monetization: Brawl Stars has the lowest RPI in Supercell’s portfolio. This is driven both by its economy (less deep vs. Clans or Royale) and its young audience.

Just like Fortnite, Brawl Stars needs to win back its audience every month. To do so, Supercell focuses on fresh Live Services content and on investing in esports, partnerships, community, and other top-of-the-funnel marketing campaigns. However, we believe that to reverse the rapid revenue decline, Supercell will also need to unlock a higher monetization ceiling and develop a deeper economy.

Prediction for Brawl Stars

We believe that 2020 Brawl Stars will reach new highs with the launch in China. After all, it is a Tencent game (though interesting enough is by Tencent and Yoozoo in China). Nevertheless in the long-term we believe that Brawl Stars’ decline will likely continue. We don’t foresee Supercell making radical changes to the game to deepen its economy. Also, given Supercell’s desire to remain small, the team may be hard pressed to drive bold in-game innovations as well as promotions outside of the game while maintaining the content treadmill needed to support live services.

Prior to hitting consecutive home runs with mid-core games, Supercell had also been waving its magic wand in the farming space. Launched in 2012, Hay Day changed the way players engaged with this type of games in terms of platform (Hay Day was first to mobile) and gameplay (e.g., the Order Board revolutionized farming games). Nearly eight years after launch, Hay Day is still the most iconic farming game for touchscreen devices (in particular on iPad).

Despite being the highest grossing farming game for a long time, Hay Day has been gradually losing market share in the last 2-3 years. In particular, Hay Day’s revenues started to decline in 2018 when Klondike’s Adventures (from Playrix’s Vizor) was released. The decline continued in 2019 when Playrix’s Township, after having been neck and neck with Hay Day for years, started to scale up UA leading to a situation where Township is twice as big as Hay Day.

While Township’s installs have significantly accelerated in the last year, Hay Day’s downloads have been flat/slightly declining. This is likely because the game receives very few, if any, installs through performance marketing, which is usually the case for many so-called ‘legacy titles’.

Prediction for Hay Day

Due to Township’s and Klondike’s growth, Hay Day is now the 3rd player in crafting sub-genre, and may drop to 4th, depending on how Farmville 3 fairs when it launches in 2020. Still, Hay Day’s decline is quite slow when considering the competition’s growth. This implies that Hay Day’s core players retain well and that it will be hard for Township and Klondike to “steal” them from Hay Day.

Lastly, since Hay Day doesn’t seem to rely much on performance marketing, the increasing CPIs (driven by the “install war” started by Playrix) have little impact on the game’s performance. Yet, without marketing support, the gap between Playrix’ titles and Hay Day is going to grow.

What about Hay Day Pop?

In the first quarter of 2020 Supercell soft-launched their second title with a puzzle core – Hay Day Pop. On paper, Hay Day Pop seems like a smart move from Supercell: it’s a puzzle game for a simulation audience with a familiar character that got a face-lift. Hay Day Pop is Fishdom meet Hay Day with a tile blast mechanic. By all accounts, it is a good game. It’s just not a great game. It represents the type of incremental innovations that other gaming companies focus on instead of the “oh wow” disruptive innovations that Supercell used us to.

FarmVille extended its IP to puzzle back in 2015. It was a solid game but it couldn’t stand up to King’s saga titles. In 2020 Hay Day Pop is entering less concentrated yet even more competitive puzzle genre.

Looking at Hay Day Pop’s design elements, there are several unconventional, fun improvements to both core and meta – such as the use of battle pass as the core progression vector. On the other hand, the theme, art style, and UI are all proven, smart re-uses of existing elements from other games. Also, the lack of narrative in a game like this makes it a bit boring and mechanical: there’s no silver lining behind what you’re doing. In a sense, it’s just like Fishdom, which is the weakest (still highly successful) and oldest puzzle game in Playrix’s portfolio.

However, given the spot-on execution, this game is not going to perform badly, if (and that’s a major unknown right now) Supercell can get low-enough CPI. Otherwise, Supercell would need to improve the game’s monetisation, which doesn’t seem to be in the cards given its current form. Also, this would require standing up a team to drive Live Services events to sustain engagement and monetize this game. This will lead to a bigger team. And a bigger team tends to lead to a question – should we even launch this game and commit to 10 years of content cadence for a top 200 game?

Prediction for Hay Day Pop

Due to its current low level of innovation, we don’t see Hay Day Pop disrupting the puzzle genre. However, with a compelling narrative and a creative marketing strategy Hay Day Pop could become a solid puzzle game that can generate significant revenue – though at a lower scale than the other games in Supercell’s portfolio likely missing the company’s ~$1B “minimum” watermark.

Oh, the first Supercell puzzle game? Please check our deconstruction from years back:
Supercell’s Spooky Pop and the Six Rules of a Hit Puzzle Game

SECTION 3: THE (NOT SO) SECRET SAUCE

So, how did Supercell create so many genre-defining games? Well, it’s not a mystery. It’s basically all that Ilkka Panaanen talks about in interviews and writes about on his blog. Based on his words and on, more importantly, on the company’s actions, it is evident that their Supercell’s strategy is designed to achieve three objectives:

1.Create an environment that fosters innovation
2.Create a culture of constructive confrontation where internal development has to go through a gauntlet of peer reviews
3.Give team the autonomy to make key decisions about their game – including the decision to kill their own games

These three objectives aim to generate as many shots on goals as possible, which is key, since most ideas are destined to fail. At the same time, these limit the consequences of failed ideas as much as they can, which enables Supercell to try again with limited impact.

At first glance, it may be easy to overlook how difficult to achieve these objectives at the same time truly is. What it takes to achieve one (i.e. passion and creativity) is quite different from what it takes to achieve the other (i.e. rigorous analysis and a firm hand in pulling the plug). Most gaming companies usually are good at pursuing at most one of these goals. Some companies are great at ideating, but they “toy” with ideas for too long and then take forever to execute them – often, having to course-correct mid-development because the project scope got out of control. It’s also common for companies to miss the window of opportunity as the market evolves and their game is no longer relevant. Instead, most of the companies focus only on (so-called) safe, short-term bets and shut down their own creativity to start with.

Supercell’s culture enables them to pursue all of these goals; specifically, these three elements of their culture create the secret sauce:

·Mission: Making games “for as many people as possible, that will be played for years, and remembered forever” — this is very different from a financial goal

·Ownership: Supercellians can team up organically to pursue an idea and are in charge of making the hardest decisions related to their game (including killing it, if it doesn’t work)

·Small size: This enabled them to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, be extremely selective in hiring (t-shaped generalists instead of specialists), prioritize only their best development ideas, and reshuffle development teams easily when new ideas don’t work out. However, their small size also poses key challenges, which we’ll discuss later…

That’s basically it. Seems strange, doesn’t it? After all, most companies have an aspirational mission to be the best, and pretty much every company says that they foster a culture of ownership or that they operate in a lean way.

So what’s different at Supercell? Well, they actually live their culture and all their decisions seem consistent with that culture. A few examples from Supercell’s CEO’s blog or other articles can bring this to life:

·Ilkka defines himself as being the “least powerful CEO in the industry”

·“Some Supercellians were openly against Brawl Stars” (the key word here is openly)

·“The company had a discussion about their size, as many employees felt that it would be hard to maintain their culture if we grew too fast”

·Regarding the shutting down of Rush Wars, Ilkka said that he’s “proud of the decision the team made” and primarily empathized with the team for the hard, but right decision

·Top management continues to pay outrageous government taxes (Finland’s tax rate goes well above 50% for top earners), setting an example of fairness and transparency

But before you decide to adopt their culture as well, consider two important elements of Supercell’s culture that are often overlooked: high turn-over and very frank feedback.

1.Turnover: Supercell is notorious here. Word on the street is that in some years up to half of the new hires were terminated during their first 6 months. Which you have to put into perspective considering that Supercell hires only the absolute top talent in the World. This creates a culture of extreme pressure to deliver demanded by one’s Supercellian peers instead of the management. However, Supercell does not have a toxic culture: it’s just a culture where you have to hyper-deliver all the time or leave.

2.Feedback: By “feedback” we mean a ruthless level of feedback, especially for games in development. The bar for what looks and feels good is extremely high, while the bar for giving feedback is low. Playing games in development and providing teams with feedback is not only celebrated but nearly mandated. After all, when your peers tell you “do better”, it feels way more powerful than hearing it from executives.

SECTION 4: IMPLICATIONS OF MARKET EVOLUTION FOR SUPERCELL

In the last few years, the mobile games market has changed radically. The amount of new games entering the market has plummeted and there have been fewer new games entering and sustaining their position in the top grossing charts.

The maturation of the market is driven by the evolution of the Free-To-Play business model itself and the increased sophistication of game developers, such as:

Spend Depth: Most of the growth (at least in key markets) comes from increasing paying players’ spend instead of more players entering the market. The implication is that winning requires creating deep economies to drive LTV and systems to retain existing players

“Winner-take-all” dynamics: Competition is increasingly a “winner-take-all” game across genres, where top ~3 competitors typically take up 60-80% of the market, leaving little room to smaller players. Just look at our 2020 predictions with a breakdown of top competitors by genre

As can be seen from all the red, Mid-core category is highly concentrated. Supercell is actually one of the biggest winners controlling three sub-genres with Clash of Clans (Build & Battle), Clash Royale (Tactical Battlers) and MOBA (Brawl Stars).

First-mover advantage: Related to the prior point, being one of the first few companies to enter a genre has become even more important, because the first few games have the best chance to create high switching costs for players through:

a) Social networks: e.g., when all your friends are playing Fortnite, why would you switch to another Battle Royale game, unless its gameplay is meaningfully different or you like the IP much better?

b) Progression: i.e. when you have invested a lot of money and time to progress down the (power/ skill/ vanity) curve, why would you switch to another similar game, where you have to re-learn and re-earn everything from scratch?

One of the key implications of this trend is that publishers now have a shorter time window to launch a game in a new genre and win. In other words, development cycles need to be faster.

Live Services are vital: Most Live Services today are optimized to entertain players more deeply than in the past and end up taking up more of players’ time, making it harder for new games to “steal” players. Having strong Live Services today is key to reach the LTV needed to afford ever -growing CPIs. However, live services are expensive and require different skills vs. system design.

UA can turn into a knife fight: Incumbents can literally “suck the air out of the room” by engaging in UA wars, where only the highest LTV games can afford to pay for the growing CPIs and afford the years-long payback times. This means that entering a space with lots of established competitors is even harder than in the past.

As a result of these trends, most successful mobile games publishers have four common elements:

A successful game publisher aims to constantly overachieve in all four of the elements. Supercell has for sure been excellent in all of the elements. Though in recent years the publishers hasn’t always been able to keep up with modern Live Service requirements. The reason being that live games have become increasingly content driven requiring ever larger team sizes. And as we know, Supercell’s foundation contradicts the notion of big teams.

Implications for Supercell

Most of the trends above imply that hoping to break into the top 100 chart with incremental innovation is increasingly hard. Instead, Supercell’s approach to making genre-defining games is better suited at reaching commercial success than launching, say, another Clash Royale clone. Obviously, Supercell’s strategy is not for everybody, as it requires extremely high design talent, creativity, and a risk-taking, long-term focused mindset (by the way, this is why we’re not bullish when Supercell works on incremental innovations like Rush Wars and Hay Day Pop).

On the flipside, Supercell seems to be struggling with Live Services, as discussed with Brawl Stars. Their small size is in stark contrast with the need to sustain existing games, while staffing up new teams to plan for the future. Simply put, one big update per year is not sufficient to retain your most engaged players.

More broadly, Supercell’s desire to remain small and nimble is already being challenged by operating in several locations (e.g., Shanghai and San Francisco, in addition to Helsinki). And as discussed in Eric Seufert’s article, we can argue that Supercell’s approach to separate marketing from product is a practice of the past.

If growing way beyond 300 employees is not in the cards, then outsourcing and externalizing could be the answer. Supercell has already taken steps in this direction, but doing more of this will require more processes, which will lead to more management, which could lead to loss of ownership and speed — which fit Supercell’s culture like garlic fits into vampires’ diets.

Another approach would be to off-load legacy titles like Boom Beach to Space Ape for live services. It would be a win-win, though it’s highly unlikely that Supercell considers this.

Supercell is know more for its top-of-the-funnel marketing than performance marketing. With games that have such broad appeal like Clash of Clans, this approach makes sense.

Finally, it’s the UA resources. When it comes to money, Supercell has thousand time more than it needs. When it comes to people, Supercell can hire them. When it comes to influencers, Supercell has been investing into this since 2012. And when it comes to organics, everyone loves Supercell and will install their game. Nevertheless, Supercell’s capabilities on the performance marketing side might be limited. It’s been a while since Supercell has been recognized for performance marketing excellence, as the company has switched its focus to top-of-the-funnel channels (TV, events, billboards) and influencers. In a way, Supercell’s marketing strategy feels more like “carpet bombing” than a tactical operation. Their approach suits big launches for wide audiences, but seems less geared towards finding pockets of new players with targeted performance marketing campaigns.

SECTION 5: M&A STRATEGY

While Supercell has been smashing it with creating games, its M&A efforts have been lackluster. After 4 years and ~$100M invested, Supercell has little to show for it. This is because Supercell doesn’t seem to have a compelling M&A strategy.

In general, M&A strategies are built around acquisition of synergies and purchasing of scale. The two are often supported with smaller investments into future bets.

In 2016, Supercell started investing into other companies. In a typical Supercell fashion, they did it with no fanfare, which resulted in even more interest because of the limited context around their plans. In 2017, Mikko Kodisoja, co-Founder of Supercell, said to Venture Beat:

When we look for external teams and studios, first and foremost we’re looking at the team. The team should have a similar kind of culture to what we have at Supercell, so there can be full ownership for the teams that develop the games….

We want to diversify our portfolio and invest in teams that do something different from us…

Their vision has to align with ours. We want to make games that last for decades. People play them and remember them. All the studios we’ve invested in have that same kind of mentality

Mikko Kodisoja, Supercell

To summarize, this strategy can be interpreted like this: Supercell invests into companies that look, sound, and feel a lot like them. Companies that dream of becoming like Supercell.

The good part about this strategy is that it’s simple and it focuses on finding a cultural fit, which makes any cooperation much more easier down the line. It’s easy to know if you’re jiving with a target company, as you’re looking for the same characteristics that you already possess. Also, there are a lot of companies that do their best to mimic Supercell. And why not? After all, the aspiration of building a great (top grossing) game with a small team in an organization where teams come first is every developer’s dream.

However, on paper, Supercell has so far invested into companies that have much to gain from Supercell, but that Supercell has little to gain from — both in terms of M&A strategy and results produced. In reality, the situation is even worse, as the acquired companies didn’t seem to have received the “cheat codes” they were hoping to obtain from Supercell. And with only 300 people, there is limited time to spread the magic around.

To understand this better, let’s look at the investments made by Supercell so far:

·2016: ~$10M in Frogmind (51% stake); ~$4M in location-based start-up Shipyard
·2017: ~$60M in Space Ape (62% stake)
·2018: ~$5M in Trailmix (ex-King team); ~$6M in Redemption Games; ~$6M in Everywear Games (used to be known as Apple Watch games company)
·2019: ~$4M in Luau Games; ~$1M in Wild Games; Ritz De·li (amount unknown)

These companies have produced limited results to date, e.g.:

·Frogmind released two great looking games (Badland Brawl and Rumble Stars) and used Super Scale to scale their games. On paper, this seems to show Supercell’s ability to help their portfolio companies. However, the real challenge for developers lies in scaling a game when you don’t have the war chest nor the experts to drive and sustain growth.

·Space Ape was known for their lean live services. Since the Supercell acquisition, Space Ape has publicly discussed about on how they’ve switched to a much more creative way of working after. Yet the developer has released only Fastlane having been forced to cancel Rumble League (a very Brawl Stars type of a game) after an extensive soft-launch period.

·Redemption Games received strategic investment from AppLovin. A publisher that has a track record of growing they portfolio companies. What can be derived from this is that investment from Supercell helps to bring in talent and hone in company culture as well as the ways of working. But when it comes to growth, Supercell just doesn’t seem like the right partner for a small to mid-size developers.

The other issue is exiting. After all, starting a company is taking a major financial risk from founders’ perspective. VC will push you to grow and eventually sell or IPO when the price is right. Supercell doesn’t need to. For example, who’s going to buy the rest of Space Ape? Those are likely the stocks owned by the founders and the key staff. With Supercell owning the majority, the upside for Space Ape folk seems to be somewhat obscure. And with no clear upside looming in the horizon, maybe the effort might not be at the same level as with a typical startup? On the other hand, Supercell does bring unrivaled level of stability, which makes it much easier for smaller developers to hire top talent.

Looking forward, Supercell has three options to fix its M&A strategy:

1.Invest more into portfolio management / developer relations. This means setting up a structure for active knowledge sharing on all fronts of development as well as marketing with their current and future portfolio companies.

2.Focus on investing only into truly independent and accomplished companies. Peak Games, Tactile Games, and Lilith — just to name a few. These companies don’t need babysitting and they can help Supercell to grow in turn.

3.Stop M&A efforts. The current approach feels a bit like a distraction. Supercell should do everything like it builds its games – full focus, best talent, aim only at the top!

SUPERCELL in 2020 and Beyond

Attempting to drive disruptive innovation comes with significant uncertainty in terms of timelines and outcomes. As discussed, Supercell is one of the few companies that is best positioned to generate genre-defining hits in the mature mobile gaming market. However, despite Supercell’s approach to kill games with less than staggering potential as fast as possible, their creative process can’t exactly be put on a conveyor belt to deliver year-on-year revenue growth. But the good news is that the outcomes of their games have been nothing less than outstanding so far.

So, it is not very useful to look at Supercell’s short-term financials to determine their ability to create “unicorns” in the long term. The real metrics to determine this should be tied to the decisions they make and to the new games they launch. So far, instead of turning conservative and guarding their market share by making incrementally ‘better’ games, Supercell has stayed on the offensive and continued to launch only genre-defining hits. Killing Rush Wars is a perfect example of this determination (let’s see what happens with Hay Day Pop).

Nevertheless, Supercell does have a few opportunities to boost their performance beyond their current approach on game development:

1.Increasing their focus on Live Services to sustain existing games
2.Stepping up their efforts performance marketing
3.Pursuing M&A as a lever to grow both audience and revenues

As Supercell considers these (and other) opportunities, it will have to wrestle with how to scale the company for success without losing the culture that led them to where they are today.

We’d like to conclude our analysis with a bit of a thought exercise. Imagine for a moment an alternate universe where Supercell was never acquired and where the company had chosen to aggressively pursue acquisitions in addition to organic growth. In this alternate universe, Supercell would have likely acquired Small Giant and/or Gram (maybe even Peak and Playrix). Supercell would have been a totally different company not only in terms of size, but also culture. While it wouldn’t likely become the company developers around the World look up to today, one thing is for sure – we wouldn’t be discussing whether Supercell’s best days (in terms of revenue) are behind and what the publisher should do to get back on the growth track.

(source: deconstructoroffun )