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Are Hero Summons truly random?
Drop rates of each Hero in Clash Royale
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Are Hero Summons truly random?
Although Heroes were technically released on December 1st, only a few lucky players were able to obtain enough Hero Fragments to summon their first Hero.
Everyone else had to wait until the following Friday, December 5th. By this day, players were able to obtain Heroes in one of 2 ways:
- Completing the “Unlock Your First Hero” event
- Buying specific Heroes in the store, for around $15 USD each
As soon as players started getting their random Heroes, community comments were filled with disappointed players who didn’t get the Hero they were hoping for. It didn’t take long for conspiracies to start spreading around. Some users posted reports to our forum, such as Craig Laird, who said:
I got the Hero giant on all 5 of my accounts, very disappointed with how the game has gone as far as rewards.
We regularly read comments from the community, and also noticed a disproportionate amount of players claiming they got Hero Giant.
Sabotaj asked us if we had a way to check Hero distributions. Were players getting all 3 Heroes evenly?
We decided to look into it, and this is the blog we have written to share our findings.
Our Research
It seems not everyone knows this, but RoyaleAPI is not Supercell. We collect a lot of stats by ourselves, but we don’t have special access to the whole playerbase.
This means that we can’t directly find the absolute amount of players who unlocked each Hero, but we can get approximate answers through random sampling of the playerbase. Player counts presented in our results are expanded to the whole playerbase size based on our sample rates.
We tried our best to find a decent sample size with high randomness, but please keep this important caveat in mind.
Players were sampled during Sunday, December 7th; about 50 hours after Hero offers and free summons were first available.
Our Results
We found about 38 million players who met our criteria:
- More than 5K trophies, which gives access to Hero Slots
- Have been active since December 5th, which is similar to daily active users
Of these 38M players:
- 45% have no Heroes unlocked, meaning that they haven’t completed the unlock event yet
- 55% had at least one of the 3 starter Heroes
The share of each starter Hero was quite balanced:
- Hero Knight: 18.81%
- Hero Giant: 18.72%
- Hero Musketeer: 18.50%
This leads us to think that there aren’t actually more players getting Hero Giant. The impression that more players were getting Hero Giant was due to participation bias.
Most players think of Giant as the worst of the 3 starter Heroes, mainly because:
- As a win condition, it’s less versatile than support cards
- The normal Giant form card has lower usage than Musketeer and Knight
If more players are upset by this drop, it makes sense to see more comments talking about it. For example, it’s less likely for someone to be so upset about getting Knight in 2 accounts that he rants on Reddit.
Hero Revenue
Although it’s still very early to know how well this new card form will monetise, we can take a look at some preliminary results. The shop offers have been available for a bit more than 2 days, and thousands of players have already bought them:
- Hero Knight: 114K buyers
- Hero Musketeer: 82K buyers
- Hero Giant: 19K buyers
This adds up to about $3.2M USD from the Hero bundles, before taxes and fees.
The buyer ranking of Heroes shows us that Knight is clearly the favorite option, and Giant the least of the 3. This supports the idea that Hero Giant isn’t a desirable drop.
To this we could also add part of the revenue from this month’s Pass Royale. During the first week of the season, about 2.2M players have bought the pass and unlocked Hero Mini Pekka. This is around 5.2% of the players who have been active this season (and above 5K trophies).
These amounts always increase as the season moves on: more players log in, and more active players convert into pass buyers. On average, this results in 3-4M buyers per month, which is around 6% of the active players.
Note: last month, Supercell rolled out regional pricing for Clash Royale across more than 100 countries. This makes it harder to convert buyer counts to revenue, but the price of $12 USD per pass seems a decent standard.
Feedback
Did you find this analysis interesting? Share your feedback with us in the comment section below and ask any questions you have!
If you enjoyed this article and plan to buy Pass Royale to unlock the Hero Mini Pekka, don’t forget to use our code: RoyaleAPI to support us!
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