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Clash Mini: Cursed Product Design?

Recently, Clash Mini has become a hot topic in the gaming world. Anticipation has been building, with Supercell hinting towards a global release of the game. Javier Barnes, an industry-acclaimed Product Manager, recently penned an insightful article via Deconstructor of Fun, dissecting the game’s features and comparing early data against other hits. His prediction? Clash Mini won’t hit the global stage anytime soon.

Arriving at a similar conclusion, I approached the analysis from a slightly different angle: Product Design. In my understanding, Product Design is the strategic alignment between the game genre and its design, with the target player motivations (see Quantic Foundry insights on Gamer Motivations).

Let’s dissect Clash Mini into its basic components to understand the harmony, or lack thereof, between these elements.

Game Genre: Auto Chess. This genre is characterized as an auto battler, often incorporating chess-like components. Players strategically position characters on a grid-like battlefield during a preparatory phase. These characters subsequently engage with the adversary’s team, all without further player intervention. Despite its initial surge in popularity following the Dota Auto-Chess release in early 2019, the genre has yet to birth a hit mobile title.

Game Design: Clash Mini adopted the Auto Chess genre and integrated it perfectly with the Clash IP, yet failing to introduce any significant twists to the core gameplay. They’ve created an excellent Auto Chess game.

Target Player Motivations: If there’s one thing Supercell is recognized for, it’s their knack for crafting competitive multiplayer games from simple, ingenious game designs, perfectly tailored to mobile limitations. They’ve earned the trust of midcore players seeking more than casual gaming experiences on mobile, primarily focusing on the Social – Multiplayer component.

Clash Mini is aiming to tread the same path as its predecessors. It’s simple, competitive, and well-suited to mobile. Yet, it falls short when it comes to engaging players for the long haul. Let’s delve into the details and uncover the reasons behind this shortcoming.

Deconstructing Competitive Game Design

Victory or defeat in any competitive experience hinges on three fundamental components:

  1. Stats: Defined as the level or power of your character or team.
  2. Skill: User ability involving dexterity, reaction time, or strategic thinking.
  3. Luck: Random elements inherent to the game.

Let’s examine three different non-digital competitive scenarios and how these components are balanced to determine victory:

  • Arm Wrestling: Here, Stats, or in this case, the athlete’s physical strength, is the most crucial determinant of victory. While skill plays a role among competitors with similar levels of raw power, an untrained individual stands no chance against a well-trained one. Luck plays a negligible role.
  • Chess: In chess, both players have equal stats (chess pieces and positioning) and luck plays a minimal role (especially in multiple games determining a match outcome). Skill emerges as the sole deciding factor for victory.
  • Poker: Skill is undeniably important in poker to ensure consistent wins, but it remains a game of chance at its core. Even the most skilled players win only one of several tournaments they participate in. So, we can infer that luck accounts for at least 50% of the victory determining factor.

Similar structures are found in well-known mobile multiplayer titles. Let’s consider Supercell games as examples:

  • Clash of Clans: In this game, power overshadows the other factors. While skill in town design and unit placement is significant, it’s impractical to attack a user one or two levels higher. Skill and luck play minor roles in determining victory or defeat.
  • Brawl Stars: Contrary to Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars is heavily skill-dependent. The user must not only control two joysticks simultaneously but also manage ally and enemy positioning, character strengths or weaknesses, and other stage-related items (like Gems). Stats are important, but the gap isn’t insurmountable for skilled players. Luck also plays a minor role.
  • Clash Mini: This game is the most luck-dependent among all Supercell games so far. Battles play out automatically without player input, the initial unit layout is semi-random since both you and the opponet will be shuffling board in between fights, and the units available for purchase is also an aleatory sub-selection of the team composition. Not to mention that if the opponent hero counters yours significantly then you know that the odds to win are very low. This makes Luck a prime determinant of victory, followed by Stats, and finally, Skill.

To comprehend the acceptable ratios of Skill, Power, and Luck in a competitive game let’s examine the evolution of successful games in this space.

The first generation of competitive games, such as Counter Strike, Starcraft, and DOTA, relied entirely on Skill. These games showcased that Skill alone can drive an exceptional competitive experience.

Power emerged later, particularly in mobile games, as a substitute for Skill. It allowed players to gain an advantage through superior equipment, earned either by extensive playtime or real-world purchases. This Pay to Win model found surprising acceptance among mobile gamers, indicating that Power and Stats can coexist in a competitive framework.

Luck, the final component, has its place in successful competitive experiences too, as games like Hearthstone and Fortnite demonstrate. However, no competitive games where Luck dominates completely exist outside of gambling scenarios. You probably can not imagine a serious tournament of Rock Paper Scissors, right?

The line, in my view, is drawn when the Luck element prevents players from learning from their losses. In competitive games, players should be able to assess their performance and identify areas for improvement.

Ultimately, the progression in competitive games is the ranking ladder. To progress, players must outperform their competitors at similar levels of stats / skills. Eventually, players stuck in the ladder will need to improve their skill, either by practicing, strategising or opening their wallet. A game based purely on Luck does not facilitate this growth, thus potentially leading to frustration among players who are driven by competitive motivations.

Barbarians Improvement

In the case of Clash Mini, it appears this line has been crossed. The auto chess nature of the game confines most decision-making to the spaces between fights. Despite the complexity of board positioning and unit selection, much of the final outcome relies on Luck, and the reasons for failure can often elude even top players.

So what’s next for Clash Mini? Here are two potential paths that I see:

  1. Iterate on the core gameplay significantly to diminish the Luck element. Keep up with its predecessors’ competitive spirit and ensure players aren’t frustrated by the mechanics.
  2. Adjust the audience, with different Player Motivations. Switch the focus from competitive players to a more casual audience. Many games with a high Luck factor have achieved tremendous success outside of the Competitive category. By transforming the gameplay experience and not let it revolt so much on win or defeat, Clash Mini could become an excellent casualized experience.

In conclusion, the analysis of Product Design has spotlighted a possible stumbling block in Clash Mini’s path to success. These issues ideally should be detected early in development, facilitating rapid course corrections or exploration of alternative opportunities. This proactive approach is a vital role for a Product Manager in the early stages of a game’s development. It can potentially steer us clear from launching products that may struggle to resonate with their intended audience.

TL;DR: Clash Mini, Supercell’s new game, might face challenges with its global release due to its inherent product design. The game, an Auto Chess genre, falls short on retaining and monetizing its players. A critical analysis based on three key components of competitive gaming – Stats, Skill, and Luck, reveals that Clash Mini may have an overemphasis on Luck, which often frustrates players seeking a genuinely competitive experience. The game could either revise its core gameplay to minimize the luck factor or shift its target audience to a more casual player base. Early identification of these issues is crucial in the game’s development process, demonstrating the significant role of a Product Manager.

Mobile Game Success: The Hollywood Approach

After years of impressive year-to-year growth, the mobile gaming market experienced a 10% decline in 2022. The introduction of Apple’s new privacy policy has presented significant challenges in user acquisition, and Google is expected to follow suit soon. As a result, several major companies have temporarily closed their new game divisions and shifted their focus to maximizing profits from existing live titles. In this increasingly competitive landscape, how can we still achieve success?

While there is no guaranteed formula for success, I believe there are three distinct verticals that encompass all games that have reached the top spots on the leaderboards:

  1. Innovators: These are the games that introduce groundbreaking game mechanics [Angry Birds, which popularized the slingshot mechanic, Clash Royale, known for its Tower Rush mechanic, and Archero, which took an innovative approach to top-down shooter roguelike gameplay]
  2. Finest: The best expression of a game in a particular genre [Raid: Shadow Legends, renowned as the best team-battle RPG, and Rise of Kingdoms, recognized as the best 4X strategy game]
  3. Appealing: These games may not stand out based solely on gameplay, art, or music, but rather by their theme. They excel at resonating with players and capturing their attention [Playrix’s adaptations of the Match-3 genre with games like Homescapes and Gardenscapes, where the theme revolves around the fantasy of owning a garden or mansion. IP-based games also fall within this category, leveraging existing intellectual property to attract players]

While innovating in a meaningful way for players is challenging, it is even more difficult to achieve success by being the finest within a subcategory. This typically requires extensive knowledge and expertise in the genre, as well as considerable resources to improve meaningfully upon established games.

Therefore, I believe focusing on the appealing vertical offers the lowest barrier to success in today’s market, specially for small to moderate sized studios without extensive expertise in specific genres. By drawing inspiration from existing mechanics and not placing excessive demands on quality, developers can still stand out and achieve success in this highly competitive environment.

So, how can we create an appealing game?

To uncover the recipe for compelling themes, let’s turn to one of Hollywood’s most renowned movie screenwriters, Terry Rossio (known for Aladdin, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean), and his perspective on the difference between an ordinary and a compelling concept: the Strange Attractor.

According to Rossio, when you introduce something strange within your concept, it becomes intriguing because it offers something we haven’t seen before. The strange aspect is often complemented by a familiar element, providing a relatable anchor that grounds the concept in our environment or reality, often drawing from well-known pop-culture topics.

From this perspective, we can identify two essential components of the strange attractor:

  1. The Familiar: This is the relatable part that connects us to something well-known, and serves as the anchor, or hook.
  2. The Strange: This is the unexpected and intriguing part that stands out from the familiar, sparking our curiosity and driving us to explore further.

Let’s explore a couple of examples to understand how to effectively combine the familiar and the strange:

  • The Twilight Saga combines the familiar theme of high school and teenage romance with the strange and fantastic creatures of vampires and werewolves.
  • Jurassic Park merges the familiar concept of a zoo with the twist of being filled with dinosaurs.
  • Spider-Man combines the known setting of a big metropolitan city with the addition of a superhero theme.

Notice how numerous attempts have been made to create vampire and werewolf movies, but none have achieved the level of success that the Twilight Saga did. Similarly, imagine pitching a movie about dinosaurs without the familiar anchor of a zoo—it would likely have a narrower appeal. Spider-Man’s success also highlights the power of introducing a friendly neighborhood hero instead of focusing solely on universe-saving superheroes during the golden era of comic books.

These examples demonstrate the potency of combining the familiar with the strange. In this complex era where user acquisition is increasingly challenging, we can apply the, as I call it, Hollywood Approach, to create games that have mass appeal, maximizing the results of any UA campaigns by attracting a broader audience than your game genre typically would.

However, in the context of games, the methodology for applying the Hollywood approach differs from that of movies. Here, the strange component largely lies in the game mechanics. Therefore, the key to implementing the Hollywood approach successfully is to pair a familiar theme with a game mechanic that incorporates the strange element seamlessly.

One excellent example of this approach is Parking Jam 3D by Popcore. It combines the familiar theme of an overcrowded parking lot with the strange mechanics inspired by Unblock Me, one of the early smartphone games. By applying a different familiar theme to existing mechanics, they achieved impressive results and scaled the game with fantastic returns.

Another compelling case is Overcrowded by Zeptolab. It flawlessly combines the familiar theme of a thematic park with emojis that represent the visitors’ emotions, creating a relatable hook. This, along with the promise of engaging physics gameplay, attracted a significant number of users to the game, amounting to a moderate success overall.

Lastly, let’s compare two puzzle games on a different platform—Steam. Despite both receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews, only one of them achieved financial success. Consider these two games, Linelight and Mini Metro:

It’s easy to imagine which game experienced greater success. Indeed, Mini Metro is estimated to have generated 20 times more revenue than Linelight, despite both having a similar selling price of around $8 and similar positive reviews.

Is this the solution to succeeding in today’s market?

The Hollywood approach can provide an effective way to generate game concepts that possess a strategic advantage in terms of marketing. It goes beyond what can be achieved with misleading advertisements. However, it remains crucial to pair the theme with the right gameplay that will fit well.

Keep in mind that by making your theme more Hollywood-esque, you’re broadening the potential audience for your game. This often means lowering the barrier of entry for less experienced gamers, especially if you’re developing a midcore game. You are always in time to add more hardcore-ish mechanics for the most engaged players.

Remember, It’ll help if the setting allows players to fantasize about the experience and escape from reality. After all, that’s what entertainment is all about.

TL:DR

  • Game success is found in three key verticals: Innovators, Finest, and Appealing.
  • The “Appealing” vertical offers the lowest difficulty in achieving success by combining familiar themes with fitting game mechanics.
  • The Hollywood Approach involves blending the strange and the familiar to create mass-appealing games.
  • By using relatable anchors and intriguing elements, developers can capture players’ attention and help overcome challenges in user acquisition.

Welcome to my Gaming Industry Blog

Greetings and welcome! I am a seasoned product manager with over a decade of experience in the gaming industry. I have a technical background that includes work as a developer and data scientist. This has given me a deep understanding of the industry and its complexities.

As a passionate gamer, I have always been committed to delivering the best possible gaming experiences to consumers. My focus as a product manager has been on developing innovative new features, analyzing player data to improve engagement, and staying on the cutting edge of industry trends and best practices.

Through this blog, I aim to share my insights and analysis of various topics related to the gaming industry. From industry news and trends to my own personal experiences and observations, as well as doing some game deconstructions and share some of my predictions.

I believe that my love of gaming, coupled with my years of experience in the industry, give me a unique perspective on the gaming world. I am excited to share my thoughts and engage with readers who share my passion for gaming.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope you find my blog informative and thought-provoking. Let’s explore the world of gaming together.