You’ve seen this game once or twice at the peak of its popularity. Maybe you played it a bit even. Or maybe you were one of those hardcore Clash of Clans players who had alarms go off every time a building finished upgrading or you had troops finish their training.
But what exactly was Clash of Clans, and why was it so popular?
Clash of Clans was a freemium (Free To Play game with pay-to-win features) developed by a Finnish mobile game developer, Supercell. Founder and CEO of Supercell, Illka Paananen, was inspired by games such as World of Warcraft who had longer shelf lives. And so, Clash of Clans was developed with this goal in mind.
Lassi Leppninen and Lasse Louhento were the concept creators for Clash of Clans and they wanted to develop a strategy game that’s easy to play on any mobile device. During those times, mobile game developers saw the strategy game genre as too complicated to port over due to the mobile devices’ limited functionality.
The game was created over a period of six months after its conceptualization before it was released on the iOS. Three months later, it became one of the highest grossing games in the USA. Clash of Clans is one of the the most popular mobile games on iOS and Android to hit more than 500 million downloads while earning more than $1 billion in revenue annually.
Now, Clash of Clans isn’t as popular as it was during the first few years since it was released, but its accolades, revenues, and stats are too impressive to ignore.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the numbers that explain why this game is one of the most successful and most profitable games in the mobile game industry.
Key Clash of Clans Statistics
- Tencent acquired a controlling stake (81.4%) of Supercell for $8.6 billion [1].
- Revenue for microtransactions in 2019 was $727 million [1].
- The company earned $66.6 million in revenue on the month that they released The Gold Pass on April 2019 [1].
- Worldwide revenue as of July 2022 is $4.09 billion [2].
- Average daily revenue on April 2019 during the release of the Gold Pass was $3.9 million [2].
- 18.2% of the players playing Clash of Clans are from the United States [6].
- As of April 2021, daily peak players logged in was recorded at 2.2 million [7].
- There are roughly 7.7 million clans live in game right now [7].
- Indonesia is the country with the highest number of clans at 978,573 [80]
Clash of Clans Revenue Statistics
The last three years of Clash of Clans were impressive in terms of their revenue [1]:
- The game earned $727 million in revenue from microtransactions on 2019, which was a $200 million increase from $527 million earned in 2018.
- The Gold Pass, introduced in April of 2019, earned $66.6 million in revenue for that month. The Gold Pass was Clash of Clans’ own version of a season pass where players get something as they achieved certain tasks or goals.
- Clash of Clans accounts for 42% of Supercell’s annual revenue.
- Tencent paid Supercell $8.6 billion to acquire the company with a controlling share of 81.4%.
It didn’t take long for Clash of Clans to become one of the biggest mobile games to dominate both Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Seven months after its release in 2012, the game was at the top of the charts for both Android and Apple platforms.
And there was no game-breaking mechanic introduced by Clash of Clans. In fact, Clash of Clans was your typical cookie-cutter RTS or real-time strategy game. You build, you wait, you train, you attack, and then you re-do everything again.
But what the game capitalized on was the players’ inability to wait for these buildings to finish. To speed up the build, players had to spend Gems, the game’s in-game currency. But Gems were finite and you could only get them in small quantities when you’re not going to spend money on the game.
Gems are available in the game’s virtual marketplace. You purchased X amount of Gems for a certain denomination, and there was no limit to how many you could buy. If the average spending for these Gems were $10, and you had 100,000 players logging in daily with 10,000 of them spending money, how much do you think Clash of Clans earned? Well, do the math.
Clash of Clans wasn’t the only mobile game that Supercell developed. There were other Clan games that came from the company, but not as big as Clash of Clans. However, these games were just as profitable.
Here was their earnings worldwide for these titles, including Clash of Clans, as of July 2022 [2]:
- Clash of Clans earned $4.9 billion in revenue.
- Clash Royale earned $2.7 billion.
- Brawl Stars earned $1.3 billion.
- Hay Day earned $1.03 billion.
- Boom Beach earned $600.6 million.
In 2021, Clash of Clans earned $490 million in revenue through in-app purchases while Clash Royale earned $294.11 million [3], [4]. The highest in-app purchase revenue was back in 2015 with a record-breaking $1.3 billion [4].
In terms of daily revenue, Clash of Clans still pulls in close to a million in revenue [5].
- In 2014, daily revenue worldwide was $654,000.
- In 2015, daily revenue was $1.56 million. That average soon closed out at $5.5 million by the end of the year.
- During the first week after the release of the Gold Pass in 2019, the average daily revenue was $3.9 million.
How Popular Is Clash of Clans?
The revenue numbers just don’t justify the immense popularity of this mobile game. We know that there are people who spent money on this game, but how many players are we actually talking about here.
Clash of Clans User Stats
- USA is the country with most number of Clash of Clans players, comprising 18.92% of the player-base [6].
- Turkey comes in second place with 6.17%, followed by China with 4.09%. Honorable mentions are Germany and Russia with 3.65% and 3.57% respectively [6].
- At any given time, there are more than 750,000 players worldwide logged in to the game [6].
Note that just because the United States has the biggest market share doesn’t mean they’re the country with the biggest spenders as well. Participation does not always mean that players are spending money. But given the players in the USA for their spending habits for a video game, there’s a good chance that US players are spending just as much money as the other players for other games.
What else do the numbers tell us?
- As of 2016, Clash of Clans has about 55 million users [7].
- In April 2021, more than 2 million players were logged in daily [7].
- 42% of Clash of Clans players are core gamers and 44% of players are midcore [7].
- 16% of Clash of Clans players are also playing Candy Crush, while only 6% of Candy Crush players play Clash of Clans [7].
- Clash of Clans player base is comprised of 77% male gamers and 23% female gamers [7].
- 43% of the player base are aged between 21 and 35 years old [7].
- 15% of their player base are aged between 36 and 50 years old [7]..
- Players aged 10 and 20 years old represent 16% of the player base [7]..
- There are roughly 7.8 million clans in Clash of Clans [8].
- Indonesia has 978,573 clans while India comes in second place at 870,451.
- China has 722,274 clans.
- United States bags the fourth spot with 678,548 clans.
- The Philippines rounds off the Top 5 countries with the most number of clans with 512,454 clans.
It’s pretty obvious that there are a lot of Clash of Clans players globally. I mean just look at the number of clans for the top 5 countries out there. They’re at least averaging more than half a million clans at any given time.
Clash of Clans Download Stats
Let’s take a look at the number of downloads for both Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
- In the USA, Clash of Clans is ranked #7 on iPhone and #17 on iPad for the Free Strategy Games category [9].
- In Great Britain, Clash of Clans is ranked 5th for iPhone and 19th for iPad in the Free Strategy Games category [9].
- In China, Clash of Clans is ranked 16th and 18th for the iPhone and iPad respectively [9].
- In Indonesia, Clash of Clans is the 3rd most popular game in terms of downloads in the Google Play Store as well as the top grossing game for the Strategy category
- In the USA, Clash of Clans is the 7th most downloaded game in the Google Play Store and the highest grossing game.
Is Clash of Clans Pay To Win?
Being a popular mobile game for both iOS and Android platforms, and being a free one at that, one can’t help but wonder if Clash of Clans is a pay to win game.
Do you really need to spend money to win at this game? The answer is both YES and NO.
Now, Clash of Clans follows a freemium business model. This business model allows people to access the content of a particular app, some features are hidden behind a paywall. The caveat here is that the experience of using this app is not hindered at all when you don’t want to spend money.
Is Clash of Clans a pay to win game? To some extent, YES. Clash of Clan users can purchase in-game items like the Gold Pass, Gems, and more that give them a certain advantage over users who just play the game for free. But the advantage these Clash of Clans users get for purchasing items is minimal at best.
Some core gamers will probably spend a few bucks on Gems. Gems allow you to speed up building, training, and allow you to acquire the necessary Gold or Elixir that you lack to do something in the game.
But between a paying player and a free player playing Clash of Clans, it’s really hard to distinguish which one of them spent money. The Gems that these paid users are getting for real money can be acquired in game as you progress, just not in the same amount as you’d pay for them.
If you look at the best Clan players in the game in terms of their rankings, you’ll probably conclude right off the bat that these are paying players given the state of their base. I mean, just look at this example right here:
You could argue that that might belong to a player who never spent a single dime, but the time it would take them to complete something like this would be far longer than the player who spends money on Gems. The latter would probably just use the Gems to speed up the building process, and nothing more.
Within the mobile games industry, the freemium business model is considered normal. Clash of Clans, or any other game for that matter, will always have a high player counter but this doesn’t mean that all of them are spending money on the game.
Wrap Up
The numbers don’t lie, from the annual revenue to the number of active players playing Clash of Clans to almost a million on live player count on a daily basis. Now on their 10th year anniversary, Clash of Clans’ huge presence in the mobile games industry is nothing to scoff at.
Reference
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/clash-of-clans-sees-first-year-over-year-revenue-increase-since-2015
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1135746/supercell-games-spending/
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/557510/clash-of-clans-and-clash-royale-sales-revenue/
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1089399/clash-of-clans-player-spending/
[5] https://sensortower.com/blog/clash-of-clans-daily-revenue
[6] https://playercounter.com/clash-of-clans/
[7] https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/supercell-vs-king-how-do-their-gamers-compare
[8] https://clashspot.net/en/statistics/clans
[9] https://app.sensortower.com/ios/US/supercell/app/clash-of-clans/529479190/overview?tab=about
[10] https://app.sensortower.com/android/US/supercell/app/clash-of-clans/com.supercell.clashofclans/overview