Clash Royale or 70€/month to fight for the king

Studio: Supercell

Type: Strategy, Card Battle

Competition: Hearthstone (Blizzard), Magic 2015 (Wizards of the Coast)

Downloads: 100 000 on the Play Store

Price: free

Clash Royale is a game that mixes card battle with strategy in the world of Clash of Clans. The game was released with a lot of expectation at the beginning of January 2016 and lets you collect card, update them to increase the power of your troops and then fight against other players to find out who has the best deck and tactics.

Game Economy

Once again, the game presents two different currencies:

The gold that you obtain in chests after winning a combat or via the in-app store in exchange for gems and that you can spend on new cards for your deck and to upgrade them.

The gems that you can in limited quantity by fulfilling some achievements, in free rewards chest every 4 hours or by buying them through the in-app store. They can be used for getting more gold, exclusive treasure chest or rushing the opening of your chests and we will get to that feature very soon as it is the main monetization feature of the game.

But fist let's see what the in-app store has to offer:

Three different categories of cards can be obtained against gold, the categories available remain the same but once a day, the type of cards available is changed. Buying common and rare cards is easy enough, but giving that you will earn around 40 gold per victory at the beginning, the epic cards are more targeted towards paying players.

Clash Royale in-app Store, treasure chests

The treasure chests will make you as horny as a short-armed teenager but once again you should be able to get one giant and maybe even magical chest if you manage to save enough gems over a few months, but the super magical one is definitely for the players that are spending some money on the game, which is fair and actually a good way to convert a player that loves the game into a spender.

Like always, to get gold you need to spend gems, which are a rare resource in the game so this part of the store is definitely for paying players that want to exchange their gems for gold in order to buy some of those epic cards mentioned earlier.

Finally the gems themselves, depending on the option you choose, 1€ will get from 80 to 140 gems. Just know that 80 gems will only be enough to open 4 chests, the equivalent of 12 additional minutes of game time as I will explain right now.

Basically when winning a battle against another player, you will receive a chest, some kind of Christmas present you can’t wait to unwrap, except you have to wait… Just imagine Santa Claus looking over your shoulder as you reach for one of your presents under the tree before slapping your hand and telling you to wait 3 hours before opening it, or for 20 cookies you can open it now. You don’t have that many cookies and anyway you’re hungry and want to keep all of them for yourself, so you’re thinking: “fine, I’ll just wait 3 hours and I can open all of my presents at once and keep all the cookies for myself”. So you go count all of your precious cookies and come back 3 hours later to find out that only one of the present is opened, the others are still waiting untouched.

Well that’s exactly what happens in Clash Royale, depending on the chest you obtain you will have to wait from 3 to 12 hours before opening it or pay 18 to 72 gems. Only one chest can be open at a time and to make it even more complicated, you can only keep a limited number of chests with you (4 to be more precise).

So let’s say you just started playing, in 5 minutes you have already defeated your first opponent so you launch the opening of the chest and go on your merry way, killing more enemies. 15 minutes later you’re back, having defeated 3 other players, you now have 4 chests to open and the first one still needs 2 hours and 45 minutes before you can open it. At that point you have three solutions: keep on playing knowing that winning will not give you any additional rewards, wait the time left to open the first chest then come back to play another 3 minute match, or simply pay. In short, a non-playing player will be able to play effectively 3 minutes every 3 hours at best.

Just for the fun of it, I wanted to see how much it would cost for an average paying player to play efficiently (meaning that he would only battle against another player when he has a free slot to receive the reward chest) a normal amount of time: 20 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening during the week and double that on the weekend. On a week day, the player would spend around 270 gems if he doesn't connect in between his two sessions (while at work) or 216 gems if he does. On the weekend, the player would spend 504/450 gems per day. If we sum up all those values for a month we get 9972/8352 gems per month, the equivalent of 71€/60€ per month, and that is for someone that plays a couple of times a day, no more.

Why do players pay?

Clash Royale is a really well made game that immerges the player further in the attractive fantastic world of Clash of Clans. The troops are fun and you want to upgrade them and discover new ones, the combats are thrilling and most of players will want to keep on playing the game after the first few victories, except they won’t be able to play efficiently without paying a lot of money. Upgrading the most interesting cards gets gold consuming really quick and you cannot collect the rewards from your success in battles. It is also important to notice that even if you were to accept the waiting 3 hours to play 3 minutes situation, it seems evident that the more you play the more chances you have to be meeting a paying player that will have the upper hand on you as soon as the game starts. All of that classes Clash Royale in the pay-to-win type of game, but I have no doubt that Supercell will find a way to modify the monetization design in order to increase retention and therefore long term profitability.

What to improve?

The chest limitation is one of the biggest issues with this game, I think a way of limiting the non-paying players while not falling in the pay-to-win category would be to simply allow players to open more than one chest at a time while increasing the time needed to open a chest. That way the playing would go 3 to 12 minutes every 4 or 5 hours, allowing non-payers and low-spenders to still enjoy the game.

Conclusions

Pros: exclusive content for the paying players (epic cards and super magical chest in the store)

Cons: pay-to-win, very expensive even for casual players.

Retention: