Supercell's Smash Bros: How "the stars aligned" for Squad Busters

gamesindustry.biz:

Supercell is one of the most successful developers in mobile gaming, a feat even more impressive when you consider it's off the back of just five games. On May 29, the Finnish developer launched its sixth title, Squad Busters, and it's already a smash hit.

The game generated $1.1 million on launch day and quickly passed 30 million downloads, which game lead Eino Joas tells GamesIndustry.biz makes it "by far the biggest launch that we've had." Anecdotally, we also heard that by day two it had already earned enough to recoup the casting costs of its star-studded live action trailer, which featured Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Ken Jeong and more. While Supercell's marketing exec Rob Lowe does not confirm this, he does add the game is "quickly getting toward profitability."

The fact that Squad Busters is only the sixth game to launch globally in Supercell's 14-year history is significant; famously, the studio has only admitted it frequently kills many of the other games it has worked on, even if they make it to public beta or soft launch in selected markets. A representative for the developer tells us that six titles in public beta or soft launch were scrapped between the 2018 launch of Brawl Stars and last month's debut for Squad Busters – so why did the latter escape the axe?

"Our bar is very, very high for these global releases," Joas explains. "All of the other games that we've had in soft launch or in various betas, I think they've all had something that didn't click and didn't work. It's very tough, that's the truth of it, and only Squad Busters is one where all the stars aligned. We had a package that we were able to go the full mile with."

"Our bar is very, very high for these global releases. Only Squad Busters is one where all the stars aligned. We had a package that we were able to go the full mile with"

Lowe adds: "It was something that we didn't already have, with a huge potential to go very broad. It's pretty easy to pick up and play. It has characters