Brawl Stars almost didn’t exist. Supercell, a studio famous for killing its own games, spent 522 days in soft launch, wondering if the whole project was a waste of time. Fast forward to 2024, and the game pulled in $678 million in a single year. So what happened between “maybe we should kill this” and “this is the biggest game we’ve ever made”?
A Rocky Start Nobody Talks About
When Supercell first showed off Brawl Stars in a June 2017 livestream, it looked nothing like the game you play today. Portrait mode. Tap-to-move controls. 2D graphics. The initial soft launch in Canada drew curiosity, but the team knew something was off.
Over the next 522 days, the developers ripped the game apart and rebuilt it. Portrait became landscape. Tap controls gave way to dual-stick joysticks. The entire visual style shifted from 2D to 3D. According to GM Frank Keienburg, the team was working in a genre where they “weren’t sure how to interpret its success.” They were flying blind, and the community openly speculated that Supercell would kill the project entirely.
On November 14, 2018, Supercell announced the global launch, and over 5 million players pre-registered. When Brawl Stars officially went worldwide on December 12, 2018, it grossed $63 million in its first month.
The Numbers That Tell the Story
| Metric | Early 2023 (Low Point) | Late 2024 (Peak) | Change |
| Monthly Active Users | ~35M | 84M (Dec 2024) | ~2.4x |
| Daily Active Users | ~5M | 19M (Dec 2024) | ~3.9x |
| Monthly Revenue | ~$7M | $45M (Dec 2024) | ~8.8x |
| Annual Revenue | ~$150M (2023) | $678.5M (2024) | ~4.5x |
| Total Downloads | 400M+ | 500M+ | Continued growth |
Those aren’t incremental gains. They’re the kind of numbers that make other studios question their entire live-service strategy. Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen called the surge “historic”, and the company hit a record $3 billion in non-GAAP revenue for 2024, with Brawl Stars as the biggest driver.
The Secret Sauce: Hitting Rock Bottom First
Here’s the part most success stories leave out. From 2022 to 2023, Brawl Stars declined. Player counts were dropping. Revenue was sliding. The game that once felt electric was starting to feel stale.
What saved it wasn’t a single genius move. It was a philosophy shift. Supercell scaled the Brawl Stars team to 60-80 people and, critically, took the pressure off. With the company’s attention focused on Clash of Clans, the Brawl Stars crew had room to breathe. Keienburg summed it up perfectly: “Involved team + less pressure = higher levels of creativity, high appetite for risk-taking, better decisions, better updates.”
The old approach meant swinging for the fences every update, with two or three big features that each had a coin-flip chance of landing. The new approach mixed those big bets with smaller, high-confidence features that had a 90% chance of success. More frequent wins built player trust, and the bigger swings felt earned rather than desperate.
The Updates That Changed Everything
In June 2023, the team reintroduced random engagement rewards through Starr Drops, giving players three drops for every eight wins. Sounds simple. It was transformational. Between June 2023 and February 2024, the team shipped more than 25 new events and offers, borrowing proven engagement mechanics from social casino and puzzle games.
Then came the February 2024 Ranked mode overhaul, which replaced the aging Power League system. Ranked gave competitive players a real ladder to climb, with meaningful progression from Bronze through Legendary and up to the Pro tier. The 2025 rework added Masters II, III, and a requirement for Power 11 Brawlers at Mythic and above. This gave veterans a reason to keep grinding while casual modes kept the broader audience hooked.
The roster kept expanding, too. Brawl Stars now has over 100 brawlers across multiple classes, each with unique abilities and playstyles. That’s a staggering amount of variety for a mobile title, and a big reason why many players are buying Brawl Stars accounts, which is another thing entirely.
Esports Put It on the Map
Supercell didn’t just grow Brawl Stars as a casual mobile game. They built it into a legitimate competitive scene. The 2024 World Finals in Helsinki featured a $1 million crowdfunded prize pool and drew a peak of 1.1 million viewers during the HMBLE vs. SK Gaming semifinal. That’s the most-watched event in Brawl Stars history, with 7.57 million hours watched across just 12 hours of broadcast.
HMBLE took the 2024 championship with a clean 3-0 sweep over Crazy Raccoon, pocketing $400,000. Crazy Raccoon got their revenge at DreamHack Stockholm in 2025, winning the seventh World Championship in front of a packed arena.
The esports angle does something critical for the game’s longevity. It creates aspirational content. When you watch pros pull off insane plays with Brawlers you own, you want to queue up and try it yourself. That feedback loop between watching and playing keeps the game relevant in a way that pure content updates can’t match.
Why It Worked When So Many Others Didn’t
The mobile gaming graveyard is packed with titles that launched strongly and faded within a year. Supercell’s own Squad Busters launched in May 2024, cleared $100 million in seven months, and was still considered a disappointment because it “ended up not being perfect for anyone”.
Brawl Stars avoided that trap by finding its identity, even if it took 522 days of beta agony to get there. The game nails the sweet spot between accessible and deep. You can pick it up in 30 seconds, but the skill ceiling in Ranked keeps you coming back for months. Three-minute matches fit perfectly into mobile play sessions, and the constant drip of new brawlers, skins, and events means the meta never sits still long enough to get boring.
With over 500 million downloads and $2 billion in lifetime revenue, Brawl Stars isn’t just a mobile hit. It’s one of the most successful games of the last decade, full stop.
Where Does Brawl Stars Go From Here?
The 2025 numbers show some cooling from the 2024 peak, with MAU settling around 73 million by mid-2025. That’s natural after an explosive year of growth. The real question is whether Supercell can sustain the creative energy that fueled the comeback. If the team keeps the same mix of smart risks and steady improvements that Keienburg described, there’s no reason Brawl Stars can’t keep growing its audience for years to come.
The next time someone tells you mobile games can’t be serious, show them Brawl Stars.
