Clash Royale in GDC 2026
Authors:
AlpeThe Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an event that happens every year in San Francisco (United States). It mainly targets developers and the business side of the gaming industry.
This year, some Clash Royale devs presented a lecture that was titled "Recent Bets & Outcomes from Supercell's Clash Royale".
Session information from the official event website.
Session details
Presented by:
James Back: Design Lead of Clash Royale at Supercell
Aleksandar Markovic General Manager of Clash Royale at Supercell
After a decade live, Clash Royale has experienced record-breaking highs and dramatic lows. In this session, Aleksandar Marković (Head of Clash Royale) and James Back (Game Design Lead) look back at the past five years with an honest focus on what the team tried – what worked, and what didn't. They'll walk through key updates, experiments, mistakes, and course corrections from 2021–2025, sharing how bets around novelty, accessibility, and streamlining shaped the game's direction, from steep declines to its strongest year yet. Aleksandar and James outline the team's three big ideas that now guide their approach, while acknowledging the challenges of evolving a long-running live game and the continual learning that comes with it.
Takeaway
Attendees leave with actionable lessons on three themes: finding the overlap between what players want and what works for the game; simplifying to make space to grow the audience; and sticking to a multi-year strategy over long iterations. They see failures and fixes across content, core systems, economy, modes, and more.
Intended Audience
Designed for teams working on core, competitive free-to-play games. It suits attendees familiar with live game systems, economies, and modes. Prior knowledge of Clash Royale is not required; the focus stays on principles drawn from content, simplification, and long-horizon platform strategy.
Usually the contents of these sessions are not available publicly, but this year we got a quick summary thanks to the work of Neil Long of mobilegamer.biz.
In the article Supercell explains Clash Royale’s big comeback, Neil shares highlights and even some slides. It's an interesting read, covering details such as:
Evolution release pace
Progression accessibility
Simplification costs and benefits
Most of the charts shared in the slides are vague:
no y-axis to redact internal details; the focus is in the relative changes and trends
old data, from at least a year ago, usually more
Despite these limitations, there was a very informative slide: Pass Royale Revenue of 2023. This is what it showed:
Photo of a slide from the real presentation.
Even if it doesn't contain any numbers, this kind of data is extremely rare, and very useful to test our own observations of the past. With it we can check if stats we have collected in the past actually match this distribution.
If we use November (highest month) to normalise the chart as 100%, these are the approximate values we get:
| Month | Revenue |
|---|---|
| January | 43.5% |
| February | 36.5% |
| March | 39.0% |
| April | 63.0% |
| May | 55.0% |
| June | 67.0% |
| July | 82.5% |
| August | 89.0% |
| September | 78.0% |
| October | 86.0% |
| November | 100.0% |
| December | 84.0% |
Chart match comparison
And these are the results we had previously found through our own analysis:
The main takeaways are probably:
Decent match of results, with ~10% variation
2023 was a year with a lot of changes
In April, Pass Royale price was bumped from $5 to $12 USD (in red). Evolutions were added 3 months later (in blue). Was that context covered in the lecture?
Overall the takeaway is that this data seems reliable to observe trends in player spend, but are hard to translate into absolute numbers. Our estimates are usually provided as absolute values, but arguably the right way to interpret them is as relative changes.
We could spend a lot of time digging into the limitations of our tools, but just to name a few: we can't easily track inactive players, we can't translate player spend to actual revenue for Supercell, we can't keep track of localised prices, we can't see spend of all types of IAPs... Even in this Pass Royale example, our data doesn't include the Gold Tier of Pass Royale that was available when the price change released.
Hopefully sharing these limitations conveys how much we care about transparency and accuracy.
Bonus Content
In 2017, Stefan Engblom also gave a lecture about Clash Royale in GDC:
Quest for the Healthy Metagame: Balancing Cards in Clash Royale
This lecture was recorded and is publicly available for everyone in the GDCVault.
Overview
Gameplay balancing is a fundamental design challenge in any multiplayer game. Persistent and continuously changing multiplayer games that evolve over the course of several years are particularly challenging to keep in a balanced state. However, that is an essential part of providing a good experience for the players.
Stefan Engblom, game designer on the 'Clash Royale' team, will talk about the philosophies and principles used for balancing cards and gameplay in Supercell's 'Clash Royale'. In his talk he'll share lessons learned from successes and failures that the team encountered both pre-launch and through the first year of the game being live.
Do you have any questions or requests for future content? Join our Discord Server and let us know!