Creator Spotlight - RoyaleAPI
Authors:
This article was originally published as a Creator Spotlight within the Supercell Creators web platform (2025-03-17), and is still available here for content creators with access. The content was written and edited by SML, Milo the great (as Supercell Creator Manager) and Alpe.
Supercell has given permission for this article to be distributed publicly.
In this month's edition, we sat down with See-ming Lee & Álvaro Peña (better known as SML and Alpe), the operators of RoyaleAPI, a cornerstone utility for Clash Royale players of all levels.
What is RoyaleAPI?
RoyaleAPI is a project dedicated to Clash Royale content, and our main goal is to enhance your experience as a player. We mainly have a website with advanced stats and tools, but we also have a forum and a blog where we share deep dives into update contents, balance changes, and other topics related to the game.
RoyaleAPI started off initially as an application programming interface (API) for developers to develop tools for Clash Royale. APIs are usually hidden from the public but provide the essential data that other services and apps are based on. Player profiles, clan information, battle logs… but all in a raw format that’s not suitable for users to use directly.
In order to showcase what this API could provide, a website was eventually developed, which unexpectedly took off and became a user-facing tool used by both professional esports players and casual players alike. In turn, we have shut down the developer tools and turned our brand into a definite source for Clash Royale analytics and content.
Overall, our total headcount of collaborators is at around a dozen, which includes roles such as translation, moderation, and community management. Our core team is currently based around SML (left on thumbnail) and Alpe (right on thumbnail).
Who is involved in RoyaleAPI’s development?
Hi, I am See-ming Lee (李思明, SML), a designer and technologist with nearly 30 years of experience in creating user experiences and interactive media for both Fortune 500 companies and startups. In 2017, I launched RoyaleAPI, which provides real-time analytics for Clash Royale players. This venture exemplifies my passion for creating solutions that utilize my unique blend of design, technology, and marketing strategy expertise. I graduated from Yale University, and my projects have been recognized in numerous international awards and publications.
Hi, I am Álvaro Peña, aka Alpe. I work part-time at RoyaleAPI while I finish my Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering in Spain. This journey playing Clash Royale began 9 years ago, when the game was released, and my link to RoyaleAPI started as a member of the Reddit Alpha Clan Family. In 2018, I gradually got more involved with the website, mainly by creating the esports database that is still used nowadays in player profiles. Over the years, my role has expanded to cover content of all kinds, as well as collaborating in the development of new features.
As a website creator, your content differs widely from the average Supercell Creator. Are there any struggles this has caused, and what benefits have you seen from being able to be more creative with the types of media you make?
There are many ways to think of content creators, and one that seems useful to explain the role of RoyaleAPI is the entertainment-utility spectrum. Basically, there is a range of content that goes from plain simple fun to advanced content and stats.
Together with in-depth guides, RoyaleAPI sits at the extreme of this spectrum. We mainly provide tools that aim to enhance the experience of players. The key to succeed in this field is to understand what players want to know, and deliver content they can’t find anywhere else. We try to compliment the game itself, becoming essential for players who want to improve and optimize their own progression.
The real challenge is in creating tools that players use over time; we need to always be useful and reliable. The critical moments are when we need to adapt to changes that happen inside the game. Adjusting quickly to major changes is challenging due to the narrow time frames we work with, but that is what our users expect from us.
You can think of RoyaleAPI as the middleman between Clash Royale’s API and normal users. We read and digest the data from the API, and output the content that users find on the website. When updates happen, the data structures that we receive from the API can change, and we need to adapt to them swiftly. Unlike with update content that can be explored in the developer build, API changes are only visible when pushed to the public servers; we can’t prepare in advance.
And that’s why the 24-48 hours after an update are critical. In order to take advantage of the increased player interest generated by the update’s new content, our tools need to support new features as soon as possible.
Aside from these especially stressful moments, there are more general challenges that we face in the long term. The three that stand out are:
Financials. Unlike content creators who publish content on social media platforms, we have very significant server costs to be mindful of.
Alignment. Many players assume that we are part of Supercell or at least financed by them. This sometimes leads to players directing their criticisms and concerns about the game towards us directly.
Support. The creator program aims to engage with video content creators, and most creator events also lead towards that effort. For this reason, we have felt the need to extend our effort to cover as many media as possible and do more player outreach.
If you could snap your fingers and have any feature added to Clash Royale and/or RoyaleAPI, what would it be?
For some time we’ve been pushing for more attention towards Duels. Duels is a game mode that players have mainly seen in Clan Wars; it is based on having 4 decks and playing in a Best of 3 format. This means that battles are longer, but they push players to try new decks and discover new strategies. It also opens a lot of opportunities for deck building, so RoyaleAPI could be very helpful in finding powerful Deck Sets.
If we look at our website, there are still a lot of things we wish we could add, but doing them properly seems challenging at this time. The main one is probably a premium service for our most advanced users; as we are often asked for an ad-free experience.
The other timeless request we have read thousands of times is for a RoyaleAPI app. But for that to work, we’d also need the power to update it with finger snaps.
RoyaleAPI has been focused on Clash Royale for 8 years. Have you ever considered covering other games?
It is something we consider often, but there are a few big challenges: our time, our knowledge, and data availability.
With a small team, creating new projects from scratch can be difficult if we don’t have the time to properly maintain them in the long term. The last thing we’d like to do is create tools that we later abandon.
We need to actively play these games, and play them a lot; without that, it is very hard to understand the players' needs. The best and simplest way to know what users want is to be one.
Not all games have open API access that we can use. We’d love for all new games to have this data access, but developers usually avoid this until features are solid and stable for the long term.
We have recently dipped our toes in some Squad Busters blog content (here), but due to the constraints mentioned above, it has not gone much further.
In the past, we also started developing something for Brawl Stars, but realized that we were severely limited by time. Keeping one site updated with all the media asset production is challenging enough — to do that across multiple games would stretch ourselves really thin.
This showed us how important it was to immerse yourself into the full lifecycle of a game — to be a gamer yourself at a decent level, and to also understand the game and challenges enough to create features that are useful.
The time demand also extends to actively participating in the game’s community. Part of what makes us successful has always been having meaningful conversations with players. A content creator who remains in touch with the community arguably needs to spend several hours every week just on this.
And lastly, there’s a difficult timing balance when venturing into other games. If you join too early, game systems and structures are unstable; you’ll be forced to redo a lot of features as the game evolves quickly. If you join too late, there are probably other tools that have already been developed, so acquiring users and finding appealing new features becomes much harder.
Do you have any tips for up-and-coming Website Creators for SC games?
Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that the Creator Program is mainly designed for video content creators. If you aren’t one, it isn’t impossible to level up as we did, but it isn’t easy either, and there isn’t a clearly defined path you can follow. But aside from these words of caution, what would we suggest?
Simply work on tools that you find useful, interesting, and unique. If players like them, they’ll spread the project organically. Collaborating with video creators is also a very interesting option that can create strong synergies and help you reach Community Managers, but your project has to be appealing first. Over the years, we have had this happen with many of our new features, and this is one of the main reasons we currently hold this position within the Clash Royale community.
Lastly, an important thing to know is that monetizing non-video content is very challenging nowadays, so adjust your expectations accordingly. This is not something we have solved, and we are always working to improve. The main issues worth highlighting are:
Ad networks don’t value written content as well as other platforms. Compared to your peers on YouTube with a similar audience size, the ad revenue will be much lower.
“Faceless” content creates a less direct and personal connection with your audience. This strongly affects the effectiveness of calls for action, such as using your creator code.
Working with Supercell IP puts constraints on how you are able to monetise content beyond ads, as you need to follow the Fan Content Policy. Only since 2023, creators in the program may monetize through subscriptions and direct payments.
So, in summary, make something because it would be helpful, not because it would make money. We have seen some interesting projects being set up in the wild, but most of them failed quickly because they focused too much on generating profits too early on.
What feature/media used in RoyaleAPI are you proudest of creating? What do you think is the most underutilized feature you provide?
Some of the work we have done for Clash Royale League (CRL) holds a special place in our memories. In it, we worked with a limited amount of data and tried to extract the most out of it, looking for the most original and interesting insights we could find. It was directed at the most advanced players and casters in the world, so substance was prioritized over accessibility and simplicity.
Another interesting project we worked on was RoyaleAPI Ladder Series (RLS). This platform is now inactive, but it allowed us to do a lot of research and testing around tournament systems. We learned a lot from it, which has shaped many features that we developed afterward.
And probably one of our least known features: Battle Replay. It took an insane amount of development to create it! Battle Replay is an interactive UI that allows users to visualize the card deployments that happened during a battle. Instead of reproducing interactions with a game engine, this presents a timeline with the actions taken by each player. These actions are also mapped into a battle arena, creating a tiled heatmap.
How has RoyaleAPI changed Clash Royale?
It’s hard to say how Clash Royale would have developed without us, would someone else have provided similar features? Maybe. What we know is that nowadays many players consider our tools essential to play CR.
The most basic is probably stats. Simple queries such as:
What is the win rate of a card for a certain game mode?
What are the best decks played by the best players?
What are the best decks for a new game mode?
What are the best decks for a new card?
Expert players can’t reliably answer all of these questions, but by digesting a huge amount of data, we can share results in real time.
In order to power this real-time search engine with card filters, we have to spend thousands of dollars every month in server costs. The extreme cost is part of what makes it so unique, as it requires a certain scale to be viable and openly available for everyone. This open access is what accelerates deck discovery drastically, increasing the adoption of new decks and speeding up card meta evolution.
Before this kind of aggregation existed, decks were only spread through clanmates and content creator spotlights; there wasn’t a centralized source. RoyaleAPI slowly changed that over the years.
We have also heavily impacted the competitive scene, player discovery, CRL, clan management, and much more, but none of these are as broad and ingrained in the game as deck stats. (See below)
RoyaleAPI is known for its pioneering of new ideas, data visualization, and being a cornerstone of the CR community. Do you have an ending quote or passage you would like to leave us with?
Alpe: We are grateful for this opportunity to mix games, stats, and design; it is always great to see how many players enjoy it with us. See you in the arena!
SML: “Destiny arrives when obsession meets opportunity.”
To learn more about RoyaleAPI, be sure to follow them on social media: