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Clash Royale 2025 Player Survey
Analysis of the main concerns for Clash Royale developers in 2025
Getting answers from questions!
Table of Contents
- Clash Royale Surveys
- The Questions
- Main concerns for Clash Royale
- Social Issues
- Clan Chat hasn't kept up
- From IRL to the arena
- Progression Issues
- Gameplay Issues
- Variety Issues
- Feedback
Clash Royale Surveys
Supercell is continuously looking at how players experience their games. Player stats, focus groups, social media, content creators, surveys... they gather a lot of feedback through many different channels.
Clash Royale is played by millions of players, but they don't need to ask everyone to get an accurate read of what their community thinks. With careful sampling, they can target the most relevant and critical segments of their audience. As a result, most players won't ever notice that this research is being conducted, only players who directly receive these surveys will.
Today we are going to look into one of these surveys, which was shared a few days ago by a player in Reddit. These surveys are designed to get information from players, but at the same time, they provide us players a lot of relevant insights.
With some of the survey's questions, we get to see the main concerns that developers and UX teams have noticed. It's worth noting that we can't say how relevant and complete these topics are, as this is a single survey. It's possible that different players at different stages of progression are asked about different concerns.
The Questions
Usually these surveys contain several questions, to assess how players feel about the game and why it is they feel that way.
The most relevant one, which is what this blog covers, asks:
What aspects of Clash Royale are you most dissatisfied with?
The player is then presented with a list of options to pick from. Presumably, these options are the most relevant concerns that Supercell and/or other players have identified.
Main concerns for Clash Royale
Among the 17 options listed in the question, we have identified 4 main categories:
Social: your experience related to other players and people you know. Playing with others is usually more fun and engaging, and establishing social connections around a game is a good indicator for games that aim to be played for years.
Progression: relates to how your experience as a player evolves over time. A well tuned progression system allows players to experience new content regularly while keeping them motivated to keep playing.
Gameplay: the most direct and simple experience of the game, related to the strategy and how Clash Royale is played.
Variety: the side of content that isn't tied to progression. This changes dynamically as Supercell releases updates and creates special events that regularly rotate.
Social Issues
Since the beginnings of Clash Royale, social engagement has been core to the experience of many players.
Clans used to be one of the core features of the game, creating small communities and giving players a sense of common purpose. This can be a very strong driver of player engagement, by creating the sense that your community depends on you; but it can also be annoying if that becomes an unfun burden.
For several years, clan activities and engagement have been neglected. As a consequence, clans are more of a legacy feature than the hub of engagement and connections they used to be.
The survey options that fall in this category are:
- Lack of social interactions
- Game feels outdated / unpopular
- Difficult to find a suitable Clan
- Other players / the community are toxic
- Inactive clan
- Friends / family stopped playing
A few topics and issues related to this category:
Clan Chat hasn't kept up
Clan Chat is no longer the best way to meet other players. Clan chat filter is very aggressive with content moderation, and platforms like Discord and other social media allow players to connect in more effective ways.
Sharing videos, images, links, translations... other platforms provide a lot of versatility that Clan Chat simply doesn't have. It's utility has been reduced to sharing replays and requesting card donations/trades.
From IRL to the arena
Connecting your in-game experience with "in real life" connections adds powerful layers to the player experience. Playing in a community, sharing your achievements, learning new strategies... many sides of the game are enhanced when players aren't just by themselves.
A lot of this is driven by trends, which enabled Clash Royale to be a common topic of conversation in the past. Some of the interest naturally goes away over time, but there's also a clear lack of incentives to maintain these connections.
Progression Issues
This category is much more complex, and also less universal. There are many factors that completely change the main issues that each player faces. Some of them are:
- How much do you play each week?
- What is your account level?
- Are you willing to spend money in the game?
- Do you like playing a single deck? Or trying different strategies?
- Are you a competitive or casual player?
Everyone has different answers to these questions, and that creates opposed concerns that can be hard to reconcile. Some of the main ones are:
Progression goals: some players enjoy levelling up their cards and increasing their collection; others simply see it as a chore to complete before reaching the endgame. Some enjoy competing with maxed decks in a balanced playing fields, while others get bored by the lack of new goals. Additionally, the difference between players who focus on one deck vs the whole collection is immense; caring about your whole collection extends the progression road by more than 10x. Overall, the goal is to keep players engaged for months or even years, causing the single-deck upgrades to be the limiting factor for the whole progression system.
Gold abundance: given that card upgrade costs don't scale linearly, newer players face different constraints than veterans. Usually the first stages of progression are limited by gold, but that changes to Elite Wild Cards and evolution shards afterwards.
F2P vs P2W: it's undeniable that the Games as a Service (GaaS) model requires recurring revenue. Giving incentives for players to spend while avoiding excessive disparities between players can be tricky. There's also a fairly extended "pride" among F2P players, and this becomes an obstacle for modes of low-value and high-conversion rates.
The survey options in this category were:
- Game feels pay-to-win
- Difficult to collect enough gold for upgrades
- Difficult to collect the cards I want
- Feeling stuck at my current league / trophy count
Gameplay Issues
This is a fairly subjective category that seems rooted in player biases.
Players make choices in fairly random ways, and become frustrated when they don't lead to the optimal outcomes. Usually this involves selecting specific decks and strategies that aren't strong enough to deliver the expected player progression.
Players then blame external factors such as "rigged matchmaking", level disparities and unbalanced meta as the cause for their misfortune. Negative sentiment of online communities also fuels these ideas, which can sometimes take them out of proportion.
Veteran players usually face these issues from a different perspective. As the game evolves and developers make changes, Clash Royale moves in directions that they may find unpleasant. Many of these can be attributed to change aversion, but it's also true that changes always have pros and cons, so not everyone likes them.
The survey options in this category were:
- Game feels pay-to-win
- Cards feel unbalanced
- Technical issues (lags, crashes, etc.)
- Difficult to practice or master strategies
- Matchmaking feels unfair
Variety Issues
The development team has grown a lot in recent years, but game updates are still not as meaningful as players would hope.
We can identify some significant changes, as the amount of evolutions/cards released per season. But there are hardly any changes that influence how players engage with the game.
There's not a simple way to say what this variety would involve, but it would probably have to involve player adaptation and being forced to learn new strategies. This can be achieved with new game modes, cooperative gameplay, clan activities... Recent updates have mostly targeted superficial changes and player behaviour at very basic levels, but haven't touched these strategic layers of the game.
But a simple glance at the survey options shows that this is just one side of the story. For players who are looking for a more casual game, the existing variety can already be overwhelming, and they'd prefer a simpler experience with less changes.
The survey options in this category were:
- Lack of new content (Cards, events, game modes, etc.)
- Too much new content to keep up (Cards, events, etc.)
Feedback
What did you think of the survey? Were there any significant options missing? Let us know in the comments.
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