Supercell is the king of mobile game developers. Since the release of Clash of Clans back in 2012, the developer has become known for its satisfyingly simple gameplay and gorgeous promotional material, with a number of stock characters like the Supercell Barbarian becoming mascots for the company. This year saw the release of their latest title Squad Busters: A mobile action game with battle royale elements acting as a crossover for characters throughout the Supercell universe.
Since 2015, Supercell has also been experimenting with mobile esports by taking three of its games onto the world stage. In November of 2024, all three games will come together for one massive event: SuperFest 2024. Hosted in Helsinki, the SuperFest 2024 features the Clash of Clans World Championship Finals, Clash Royale League World Finals, and the Snapdragon Pro Series Brawl Stars Championship World Finals.
In lieu of Squad Buster’s release and the upcoming SuperFest 2024, we’re looking into the performance of Squad Busters so far and its potential place in the Supercell esports scene.
Squad Busters’s Strong Debut Thanks to a Strong Social Media Campaign
Squad Busters had two distinct launch periods: A soft launch in select European countries on the 23rd of April, and a full release on the 29th of May. As such, the debut viewership for the game was split across these two events, with the latter being more heavily marketed (including a star-studded IRL trailer).
Squad Busters commanded an impressive viewership for a mobile game upon both releases. During the soft launch week and the full release week, Squad Busters saw 481K and 839K hours watched, respectively. This viewership is strong, but fails to reflect just how in-demand the game was among players. Squad Busters had 40M pre-registrations just prior to full release – a staggering total boosted by clever marketing and promised pre-registration milestones (similar to a Kickstarter campaign).
As a live service game, however, Squad Busters’ strength comes from long-tail viewership based on the quality of the gameplay and frequent updates. Since its full release, Squad Busters has generated 2.6M hours watched, performing consistently month-on-month. Squad Busters’ recognizable IP and fun competitive dungeon crawler-type gameplay have been a hit with fans of mobile games.
The same holds true for content creators, with a few streamers committing themselves completely to the game. Long-time supporter of Supercell games Trymacs leads Squad Busters’ viewership with 504K hours watched since the game’s soft launch. This is far above second place Vital Shark with 156K hours watched. However, Vital Shark represents a group of more committed streamers to the game: Vital Shark, JuicyJCR, and iPsycooTV have massive airtimes of 299, 144, and 664 hours, respectively.
This contrasts against mega-popular streamers like auronplay who generated 144K hours watched from just 4 hours of airtime. Many of these bigger streamers were helped by Supercell’s Twitch Drops campaign for Squad Busters in July. The Twitch Drops campaign rewarded devoted Squad Busters viewers with in-game loot including coins, gems, and even chest tickets.
Brawl Stars Leads the Way for Supercell’s Mobile Games
As a nascent game, Squad Busters is still being far outstripped by other Supercell titles. The most popular Supercell game on live streaming is Brawl Stars with 69.5M hours watched over the past 12 months – roughly 56% of Supercell’s total 123M hours watched. Brawl Stars is also Supercell’s highest-earning game, thanks to a number of big collaborations with major IPs like Baby Shark, Godzilla, and even an inter-game collab with Subway Surfers. All of this pushed Brawl Stars up into the #1 spot on the iOS App Store in June this year.
Supercell’s other titles aren’t to be underestimated either. Clash of Clans may not be as big of a live-streaming hit (with 15M hours watched over the past 12 months), but the game’s iconic aesthetic has solidified it among the broader gaming industry. Over the course of last year, the Clash of Clans development team doubled in size, giving some insight into how important the game is to Supercell. Supercell’s mobile releases and updates continue to impact mobile game trends on live-streaming platforms.
SuperFest 2024 Looks to Convert Fans of Brawl Stars to Other Supercell Esports
Squad Busters’ performance is admirable considering that it has yet to enter the esports scene with a major event. Looking at some of Supercell’s other titles, it becomes apparent how important esports success is to live-streaming viewership for these games.
As with overall viewership, Brawl Stars is way out in front for esports-specific viewership over the past 12 months with 5.2M hours watched – 75% of the total Supercell esports’ 6.9M hours watched. While most of this success can be attributed to the Brawl Stars World Finals in 2023, the game isn’t a one-trick pony. In fact, the Brawl Stars March Monthly Finals for 2024 alone saw 961K hours watched.
Last year, the three major Supercell esports titles all took place in November. The upcoming SuperFest 2024 is an attempt to make these simultaneous events more cohesive by hosting them in one place. With SuperFest 2024, Supercell may be hoping to convince Brawl Stars fans to try out their other esports titles Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, capitalizing on the former game’s popularity. Additionally, the event will be a great way for Supercell to share news with their dedicated fan base, in much the same way as The Pokémon Company uses The Pokémon World Championships as a platform for announcements.
It will be interesting to see how the developer utilizes this in-person celebration of all things Supercell. Squad Busters may have its own esports league announced, or perhaps a smaller in-person event to test the waters and see if the game has a passionate enough player base for expansion. Stream Hatchet will be monitoring as the SuperFest 2024 rolls around in November.
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