The stakes were high for the launch of Squad Busters, Supercell’s first global release in over five years.
So the Finnish firm asked its creator community for feedback on the game throughout its development, giving its most trusted content partners direct access to the development team through Slack and Discord channels as well as organising face-to-face meetups before the game’s first beta in February 2023.
Some members of the creator community urged the Squad Busters team to make the game’s battles easier to parse, and feel less random. Others noted a lack of variety in each round, which was later helped with the addition of modifiers before each match. There were also concerns over how to create compelling videos about the game.
“While some in the industry may take a transactional approach, we focus on fostering a true community,” Supercell creator program lead Rick Crane tells us.
“We gather extensive feedback from creators through our Discord and Slack channels, and Squad Busters is no exception. High-tier creators get early access to builds, allowing them to provide valuable insights on features before they are released. This feedback is crucial for our teams to make necessary adjustments and enhance the game for everyone.”
YouTube creators Alvaro845 and JudoSloth were part of that process. Both have been working with Supercell since they each started out making Clash of Clans videos ten years ago. Alvaro845 tells us that creators must attain “a certain level of trust” to get invited into the creators club.
“Our main feedback as content creators was in the matches,” he continues. “Every game seemed similar to the previous one, but that was before modifiers were introduced. The other feedback that we had was in the first closed beta it seemed to be more like a battle royale where you need to kill the opponent, and didn’t have much control over the attacks.”
“Right now, the game is balanced in a way that maps are changing, modifiers make every game different, and it’s more clear for the player that you don’t need to kill everyone – you just survive and make it to the top five.”
Alvaro845 and his fellow creators also told Supercell that Squad Busters could be a difficult game to make YouTube content about. “That was our first impression, particularly with the first closed beta,” he tells us. “Particularly because the game sometimes felt like it was very random.”
The game in its current state is much more YouTuber friendly, though, says Alvaro845. JudoSloth, however, doesn’t feel the game is for him, and has only made one video about it to date.
“My feedback on Squad Busters was very broad at the time, and it kind of echoed what other people were saying as well,” JudoSloth tells us.
“I can’t really tell if you’re going to win a battle or not, so a lot of the time I find myself just walking around the outside of the base scared of confrontation with people. And it feels like whenever you’re trying to run away from someone, or chase someone down, you ultimately can’t – and that’s in the scenario where your squad is huge and theirs is small, you could sometimes just get stuck chasing each other around.”
“They’ve made a lot of improvements from what it was in the initial beta,” he adds. “There are certainly a lot more ‘comeback’ mechanics, which is the feedback we discussed back then.”
This kind of honest feedback is something Supercell actively seeks out through these early access programs, says Supercell’s creator boss Crane.
“We deeply admire content creators for the immense effort they put into their work,” he tells us. “For us, increased discussions about our products yield better results across all games.”
And while some unfairly assume YouTube creators are simply a paid army of shills, JudoSloth in particular is keen to stress that is simply not true. Yes, Supercell creators do benefit from early access to its games to make content that’ll improve their numbers, and can earn directly from their communities through the creator code program. But JudoSloth says he doesn’t feel any pressure to make positive videos about Squad Busters, or even create any content at all around it.
“We work alongside Supercell, we have an NDA with them to get into the program, but ultimately I can do and say what I want in my content. I’m not duty bound to do what they say or anything like that.”
Squad Busters is fun, “but it’s not the game for me,” he adds. “You can see that it has a massive reach when you compare it to, say, Clash Mini that was recently killed by Supercell. But I think it’s an interesting case – it shows people that we are independent creators.”
