Brawl Stars, the well-known action game developed by Supercell, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a grand celebration. Over the last five years, the game has experienced exponential growth, with over half a billion players and 170 billion matches played. To know more about the game’s 5th-anniversary milestone, GamingonPhone sat down with Frank Keienburg, General Manager, Brawl Stars for an Interview to discuss the behind-the-scenes of the Brawl Stars team, be it celebrating their anniversary, the evolution of the game over the years, future plans and possibilities, and more. So, let us head over and see what insights are in this Brawl Stars interview.
Congrats on this 5-year milestone! How is the team celebrating it?
FK: Thanks! The team celebrated by… releasing a new update! Probably our biggest (and best?) update of 2023 with tons of new content for the community to look forward to!
What was the most challenging time the Brawl Stars team faced during these 5 years?
FK: I think the period from February 2022 to December 2022 was the most challenging. We had a great plan for the year starting in January 2022, then Russia invaded Ukraine. Consequently, we removed Brawl Stars (and other Supercell titles) from stores in Russia. The Russian community was a big group of players in Brawl Stars, and it dealt a serious blow to our plans and had a major impact on our business.
What is the proudest moment for the Brawl Stars team from these 5 years?
FK: Getting Brawl Stars back into growth mode! In the last 1.5 years, the team worked hard to turn Brawl around, and I am happy to say that it paid off and we’ve seen considerable growth over the last 6 months or so.
What’s the main motive behind revamping the Brawl Pass system this year?
FK: We’ve wanted to address 3 things: decouple the release of Brawlers from the monthly pass to make the pass more future-proof (i.e., we will likely reach a point where we want to release fewer Brawlers in the future), increase the value proposition for our paying players (which was only possible by moving it to IAP) and last but not least the 2-month cadence led to a situation where things became stale towards the end of the season.
The community is seeing a shortage of coins for Brawler upgrades, how does Supercell see this game economy issue?
It’s somewhat of a tricky topic. We’ve changed some systems to re-distribute rewards from being very top-heavy to accessible by a wider group of people. The Club changes are a great example of this where we transitioned from a pretty hardcore bi-weekly seasonality of Club Quests and Club League to one monthly event running over a weekend (the MEGA PIG).
While we reduced rewards for the Club efforts, instead of playing 4 weeks and getting the top rewards only for the top Clubs out there, now more players have access to a huge chunk of the previous rewards by being active just 1 to 3 days per month. The remaining progress has been moved into the Free track of our new Brawl Pass and other systems, like the upcoming Power League changes or events.
Good examples of these events are the most recent Starr Drop and Chromatic community events, where players could unlock a huge amount of progression for active participation without being available only for the 1% of Brawl players.
Why has Bling been removed from the free-to-play Brawl pass? And when is it expected to arrive in Power League?
FK: As we are learning about our players, it’s becoming clear that progression is the most important thing for our F2P players. Nudging our free rewards further in this direction while sustaining Bling and other cosmetic rewards as part of our Starr Drops felt like the right move. I don’t have a date for Power League changes yet – but we hope to ship those early in 2024!
Is there any possibility to make Fame a more rewarding experience for the players?
FK: Yes, and we’ve communicated about this already. In the first update of 2024, we will add additional cosmetic rewards for players for all Fame ranks!
What’s next for Brawl Stars in 2024?
FK: We’ve communicated in one of our recent Brawl Talks what we are currently focusing on; now that the new Brawl Pass has been shipped, the next step is to improve Power League. Other future changes in 2024 will be centered around eventfulness and a better structure around events in general, as well as a strong focus on social play!
We have noticed that Supercell has been growing its teams massively, how is it going to affect Brawl Stars moving forward?
FK: The Brawl Stars team has already been growing since the summer of 2020. Today the team consists of 45 people with 21 nationalities. The majority of people in the team are still developers today, while a smaller group of people is focused on marketing, community, esports, and support functions to run our business. With more people on the team, we can deliver more fun content for the community to play!
That’s all for our Brawl Stars 5th-anniversary interview! Did you feel we missed out on any query in this Brawl Stars Interview? Let us know in the comment section below!
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