Is Clash Royale dying? That’s a difficult question to answer with a single word. Numbers don’t show that, but it doesn’t mean Clash Royale is in a good state either. This is why the YouTube content creator, B-Rad, recently shared a new video criticizing the game’s approach in the last 12 months, claiming that Supercell has done nothing but scale up the paywall.
B-Rad goes over all the big changes that have been released in Clash Royale in the recent year throughout his video, including new Champions, Card Evolutions, Tower Troops, Lucky Drops, and the Season Shop.
He rightfully criticizes Supercell’s policy to lock the initial Evolutions behind a $100 paywall in a limited-time offer. Without purchasing that offer, it would take you months to unlock all four initial Evolutions, as each season offers only 1 Wild Evolution Shards along with 3 random Evolutions. So, you will technically need 24 Shards, which could be obtained in 6 months at the very best.
Then, he moves over to the Lucky Drop, a new reward system in Clash Royale that offers a random reward with a random rarity every day upon finishing daily challenges. The highest rarity version of Lucky Drop offers instantly unlocking a random Evolution, but it only has a 1.5% chance of dropping, which is quite low. This means you could likely get it twice in 100 days, logically.
But that’s not all the frustration about Lucky Drop. Supercell removed Wild Cards from Season Shop after launching Lucky Drop and moved them all to this new random rewarding system. So, while the Season Shop still offers one Wild Evolution Shard per season, it doesn’t offer Wild Cards anymore, which further traps players behind the Level 15 upgrade, which requires heavy grind and top-notch luck for free-to-play players.
“That’s where we are at,” B-Rad comments on the Level 15 upgrade grind. “You can’t even play the game anymore without spending money. Like, if your deck is bad, spend more money… it will give you free wins! This is not a competitive game anymore.”
B-Rad also sheds some light on the similar problems that happened to Tower Troops, especially Dagger Duchess, which launched in a pretty overpowered state and stayed the same way until very recently.
“It was the most broken card,” comments B-Rad on Dagger Duchess. “This literally changed the game in such a negative way that if you didn’t play [Dagger Duchess], it was just a straight loss. So, by definition, it is pay to win.”
Supercell offered a hefty $50 upgrade pack for Dagger Duchess when it was launched, forcing high-ranked players to buy it, or they couldn’t compete anymore. This has been an infamous strategy from Supercell, according to B-Rad, to release new Champions, Evolutions, and Tower Troops overpowered to sell them, and once the offer period is over, nerf the cards.
B-Rad does give some offers to help the game get out of its current state, though he believes developers do not care about the community at the moment.
“They could have tied Card Masteries to Level 15,” B-Rad offers a method to end the grind hell between Level 14 and Level 15. “You would have to play a single card for 5 hours, 10 hours, 20 hours… so in order to upgrade the card to Level 15 you have to master the card.”
The card mastery currently rewards players with Gold, Gems, and more Cards in multiple levels, but it does nothing towards upgrading from Level 14 to Level 15.
“For whatever reason, something happened two years ago… someone took over the game lead and they just decided ‘Screw the players, let’s just make money’,” B-Rad claims on what has led Clash Royale to the current state.
Despite criticizing all the updates in the recent 12 months, B-Rad believes that the Goblin Queen’s Journey was actually a step in the right direction, as it finally added a game mode with a bunch of new cards that cannot be purchased through the in-game shop, and all players will have to equally grind the new mode to obtain them, though he thinks the way the new game mode plays is not fun at all.
B-Rad concludes his criticism by claiming that Supercell might eventually return from this horrible approach, and the Goblin Queen’s Journey was probably a sign of that, but he also confronts this idea. “They actually just might not,” B-Rad confronts his own idea that Supercell may realize its wrong approach. “They might just be in their Board Room Meeting watching this video, calling me a dumb***, raking in the money.”
The majority of comments both on YouTube and Reddit support B-Rad’s opinion on the game, which could indicate a massive red flag for Supercell. “Supercell has become greedier as time goes on, that’s why I just quit,” reads one comment on YouTube. “Clash Royale only needs one thing: Competition,” reads a highly upvoted comment on Reddit.
