I Analyzed Clash Royale’s Marketing. Here’s What I Found.
Everyone talks about the undeniable product improvements of Clash Royale. But no one talks about Supercell’s marketing, that every year invests hundreds of millions of Dollars into user acquisition, creators, events, PR and brand marketing.
To get into the bottom of this, I used Sensor Tower’s unbeatable tools, such as Pathmatics, to analyze the role marketing played in Clash Roayle’s second life.
What Happened?
Every live game dreams of a second wind. Most never get one. Instead, they’re stuck on the never-ending content treadmill, focused on retaining and monetizing the existing user base. Then there are games like Clash Royale, that didn’t just get a second wind, but a second life. And what’s most astonishing is that this occurred nearly a decade after the game's original release.
In six months, Clash Royale downloads grew 600% from 500k a month to 3 million. At the same time, peak net revenue increased $9M to $33M
This is truly unique to anyone except Supercell, who just last year posted the comeback of the decade with Brawl Stars. Because when a game enters the late stage, download surges rarely happen. For Clash Royale, that rediscovery came from a combination of meaningful product changes, a renewed creator ecosystem, and a marketing strategy that abandoned brute force in favor of timing and organic leverage.
Despite downloads and revenue both peaking in October, the vastly bigger player base is still there
The most surprising part? Despite passing the peak of its resurgence, Clash Royale hasn’t actually lost the players it gained. Weekly active users continued climbing throughout 2025 and approached nearly 120 million toward year’s end. That’s an astonishing number for a nine-year-old title.
How It Happened: Product Changes Meet Organic Gravity
The foundation of a modern resurgence is partly product and partly marketing. Royale had been layering meaningful systemic changes for over a year: broader progression updates, improved reward structures, new strategic depth, and a better on-ramp for returning players.
These changes weren’t headline-grabbing. Sure, they added the Clash Mini auto-battler (RIP) as a game mode, but the impact of it alone hasn’t been tangible. Yet collectively all the product improvements have rebuilt the scaffolding of long-term engagement. Players who had drifted away now had reasons to return, and returning players became the nucleus of organic growth.
Most of the growth looks to have appeared from organic (not user acquisition channels) sources.
The data reflects this shift with unusual clarity. When you look at the download sources, an unmistakable pattern emerges: the growth was overwhelmingly organic. Organic Browse surged to nearly seven million monthly downloads by September, with Organic Search following above four million. Paid Display remained a small fraction of the mix.
Based on the data, this wasn’t a paid-user-acquisition miracle. How to explain the steady growth of organics, then? When a large game like Clash Royale finally improves after years of relative slump, the ecosystem, in the form of creators, lapsed players, social feeds, and search algorithms, begins working in its favor.
But let's be clear, this wasn’t a fully organic surge. Supercell’s marketing team played a crucial supporting role. Instead of relying mostly on social platforms for spending, Royale redistributed impressions toward mobile ad networks. Mobile networks reward creative iteration and gameplay-centric advertising, formats that align with Royale’s strengths.
The impression-share timeline shows a decisive pivot in June 2025 away from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube toward AppLovin, Unity, and Mintegral.
This becomes even clearer when looking at the top-performing creatives on, which are a mix of cinematic ads and gameplay playables across AppLovin, Unity, and Mintegral. Cinematics created emotional intent; playables converted intent into installs. And because product changes had raised long-term value, these installs could be monetized more effectively.
Top performing creatives for Clash Royale look quite conservative compared to the likes of Century Games. Perhaps there’s still hope for ads showing actual gameplay?
Even Royale’s impression share across the app ecosystem tells a story of controlled acceleration rather than reckless blitzing. Impression share peaks in October 2025 but with enough volatility to signal deliberate bursts rather than an aggressive year-long push.
In short, Royale improved the game, trusted its brand gravity, and deployed paid marketing tactically as leverage, moving impressions from social media channels toward mobile ad networks.
What Happens Next: A Decline, But to a Higher Baseline
Every resurgence has a half-life. Clash Royale’s breakout year of 2025 won’t sustain its peak forever, nor should it. If you zoom out, games with strong IP, structural depth, and community ecosystems tend to follow a predictable pattern: a spike, a retreat, and then stabilization at a meaningfully higher baseline. Brawl Stars followed this exact trajectory in 2024. Royale is now in that same phase transition.
The WAU growth curve shows that the audience is still expanding, but at a pace that suggests a ceiling is approaching. Downloads, too, are likely to taper back from the extraordinary heights of mid-to-late 2025. But where the curve settles is what matters most. With tens of millions of additional active players now integrated back into the ecosystem, the floor is dramatically higher than it was in 2023 or 2024.
Brawl Stars experienced elevated downloads for a full year. Clash Royale will hopefully have a similar controlled decline.
Brawl Stars' base revenues are still twice the size compared to the time before the resurgence. We can expect the same for Clash Royale.
More importantly, Royale has rebuilt a habit loop that extends beyond individual updates. Players are not returning for a one-off event; they’re returning because the game feels alive again. The combination of systemic product changes, renewed creator energy, and intelligent marketing redistribution has translated into a second life for the game that shook our phones in 2016.
This is what the great games do. They contract, but never all the way. They age, but never fully. They stabilize at levels that smaller titles only dream about. The 2025 resurgence wasn’t a fluke. It was a repeat of a live ops masterclass from Supercell.
Clash Royale saved 2025 for the company. But as the game inevitably declines, the company will have to pull a third Hail Mary in 2026. Unfortunately, Mo.Co and the Boat Bame can be counted on…
