Boom Beach: Frontlines has picked up 1.3m players 10 days after expanding its soft launch to 19 countries.
And Space Ape boss Simon Hade told us that while it’s still too early to lock in a global launch, things are looking good.
“It’s really hard to maintain the discipline to not read into the early stats,” he said. “Because the problem is things are always inflated by the early adopters, especially when you’ve got a big IP and a big user base, so you’ve just got to be careful.”
“Once we get into a steady state, then we’ll know where the game is going to land,” Hade continued. “And so I think it’ll be a month or two before we really have a clearer picture. We’re trying not to get too excited by the early momentum.”
“We follow the same rules as Supercell and all their games. But certainly the goal is to take it global. That’s why we’re making the game, we’ve spent years on it and we’re backing it, but it’s not helpful to call it at this point.”
Hade says that even though the IP is Supercell’s, Space Ape has “full operational independence” on how it runs the game and whether it takes it global.
“It’s entirely down to us,” he says. “It is their IP though, so we engage and we respect the IP in the same way we respect Hasbro’s interest in Transformers and Eminem’s songs in Beatstar. If we thought it wouldn’t be additive to the brand, we would not want to launch it. But Supercell have so much more experience and access to data and insights and everything, so we’ll definitely be consulting with them on those decisions.”
Hade says the player base thus far is mostly Supercell players, existing Boom Beach and Brawl Stars fans and also “a lot of people from outside the Supercell universe”.
“I think it’s going to be much broader than the strategy gamer audience,” he told us. “I think there’ll be a fair chunk of people who like twin stick shooters and battle royale games, and that sort of younger demographic – my hope is that will bring in a lot of fresh blood as well.”
Supercell’s backing has helped plenty too, of course. Hade says the Finnish firm has spread the word about the Frontlines soft launch through multiple social channels and existing communities.
“A lot of [the momentum] comes from the Supercell stamp of approval, basically, leading YouTubers and influencers and influential people in the community to get behind it and drive it. That’s been super helpful. And you’ll start to see references to Frontlines inside various Supercell games in the soft launch territories.”
