Brawl Stars Has Been Fighting To Prove Itself Since Soft-Launch — and It's Working

From its promising yet shaky multi-year soft-launch to another $1 billion plus gem in Supercell's impressive catalog of successes, Brawl Stars has been fighting to not just stay alive, but improve consistently over time.

The game's roaring success of late isn't some fluke, but rather the result of some very smart and thoughtfully implemented changes to the game's economy, live ops, modes, and more.

All of which paid off handsomely! According to our estimates, player spending in the game for April 2024 (gross revenue) has grown by 856% year-over-year to approximately $74 million globally, from just about $7.7 million one year ago.

Here's what that looked like:

Here's some of how Supercell achieved this near 10x increase in the course of a year.

• Battle Pass makeover that, among other adjustments, made the major change of removing hot new Brawlers from the pass and into the game's store as an IAP, adding more cosmetics to the pass in exchange. The decision to enable players to outright purchase the latest characters, especially after eliminating loot boxes which were their original gacha-ified delivery method, brought the game in line with other hero-focused multiplayer titles.
• Hypercharges were introduced as a new additional super move for certain Brawlers, with more getting the ability to utilize them over time. These powerful moves cost the equivalent of about $20 in the game's gems, and once they were available for more characters, the impact of their addition really started to be felt in late 2023. New hypercharges are being added at a rate of six bi-monthly.
• Brawl Stars has become stickier retention-wise as well, driven in part by its improved live operations and incentives for getting back into the action with friends — or total strangers. A mix of rewards awaits players who embrace playing with strangers, in particular, in a play to grow their connections (and thus continued play) across the user base.
• Numerous other quality-of-life and economy changes, including speeding up the arrival of new goals, have had the net result of turning Brawl Stars into an almost entirely different game in terms of its approach to monetization, and being smarter in how it respects players' desires and needs.

Once you really get behind the curtain on this title, it's easier to see how Supercell has leveraged these myriad decisions into a staggering return on investment in their implementation.

It certainly couldn't have been easy, but Supercell is among a small number of players who have the ability — and guts — to persist and pull it off. Now, whether it keeps this momentum is another question; one we'll be answering in the coming months.