Supercell, the company behind many great games, heyday, clash of clans, boom beach, clash royale and, brawl stars, however according to the ceo of supercell these are the only five that survived, in 2016 supercell uploaded a video thanking their 100 million players and at the end of that video mentioned that they had already failed in 14 games, that number has increased since 2016. Although we may never know about all of them here are some of their stories.
Gunshine.net
Gunshine.net, supercell's first game later known as zombies online, was a free-to-play mmorpg that ran directly from your browser, supercell's vision was to create a cross-platform gaming service, so the idea was that players would play gunshine on their pc, facebook, tablets, and phones.
Gunshine started development sometime in 2010 and in february 2011 they managed to launch a private beta followed by a open beta a few months later, at this time they had also started working on the mobile version.
Firstly what even is gunshine? well you were a gun wielding gang member, controlling multiple characters simultaneously, as you completed missions that would increase your strength and control over the world of gunshine, you started off by customizing a character, picking a class and hopping into an island called dawn break, this island was ruled by an evil corporation called labycore.
At the start you do some tasks for labycore shooting zombies and talking to xyz, but after some time you were sent to prison to be killed and you joined forces with some prisoners aka the resistance to escape and fight together against labycore, you collected items by defeating enemies and those items could be used to craft gear, weapons, skills, and more character customization items, after a while you also unlocked a pvp section of the game, overall gunshine seemed to be a well-polished and fun mmorpg that revolved around crafting and shooting up enemies, after a few months of being in beta the game transitioned to a more of a zombie theme as we mentioned earlier the game was now referred to as zombie online, unfortunately things didn't last long from here, after about a year and a half of being in beta the game officially closed its doors on November 30th 2012.
The servers were disconnected from the system and the game shut down, according to the developers there were no plans to bring back the game in the future, so that was it for zombies online, the reason for this was explained in three points:
1. players were getting bored so the retention rate was pretty low meaning people were leaving after a month or two of playing and never returned
2. the game was just too hard to get into if you hadn't played other similar games
3. it didn't align with the original cross platform strategy, when working on the mobile version of gunshine the experience just wasn't great, without a mouse and keyboard it was just hard to replicate the same fun experience, at that point the team was also working on more cross-platform titles, but the time had come to make some hard decisions, they decided to ultimately kill all ongoing production of their cross-platform games and put their focus on tablets and phones.
Magic
Because supercell made the hard decision to kill all ongoing projects that evolved around that cross-platform vision, as quartered by the CEO, probably one of the hardest decisions at the time was killing a game with the code name magic.
This game was being worked on by a passionate team of fight developers working day and night for nearly six months straight, they were all excited about magic, it looked amazing and it was a game that had never been seen before on facebook, it was different, unique, and just refreshing, but in the end they killed it, the game never went to any kind of beta and unfortunately gameplay, screenshots, or any kind of information regarding the game was never made public, we do know one thing though and it's that after they killed the project all members of that team ultimately developed clash of clans, yes the five people working on magic created clash of clans, this could be a hint at what magic was supposed to be, maybe it was similar to clash of clans, like a base builder, who knows? I guess it'll forever remain a mystery.
Pets vs. Orcs
One of the other games supercell unfortunately had to kill was called pets versus orcs, their first mobile only game, it's unclear when the game started development or whether it was before magic or not but it was available on january 27 2012.
This game was similar to clash of clans where you build and defend your own town, there was a market so that you can buy items to defend your town from orcs, there were different pets you can own such as dogs, cats, bears, and turtles, in the game there was also two main currencies gold and diamonds, to sum it up the goal of the game was to train your pets to attack ferocious slimy orcs, as we mentioned this was their first mobile only game but learning from their past mistakes from gunshine they came to the decision that they had to kill it, sure it was mobile and that's exactly what supercell was aiming for but pets vs orcs wasn't exactly what the team imagined it would be, as quoted by the ceo if it started to feel like the game isn't going to work or isn't fun enough it's usually a sign that you should have already killed it, so with that in mind the game was pulled from the app store on February of that same year meaning you could have only played this game for about a month once and never again.
Tower
Supercell reported to have simultaneously been developing five games and the first to be released for public testing was pets vs orcs, this game and tower were abandoned, but what was tower? unfortunately after searching for this mysterious game for days, on end I couldn't find a single piece of information other than its kill date spring of 2012.
One interesting thing I thought I'd mention though is that supercell confirmed that clash royale was based off a previous project they had been working on, could this have been the same project? maybe, maybe not, see tower was killed in 2012 and supercell had been reportedly working on clash royale anywhere from 2014 to 2015, meaning there was a two-year cap, this of course is just speculation, the name tower just reminded me of clash royale so maybe there was a connection and maybe there was just none at all, to this day we still don't have any information on tower.
Battle Buddies
In may of 2012, one of the five games being worked on mentioned earlier was published and eventually became supercell's first internationally released games and a huge success, hay day, it was followed by the fourth game on that list was clash of clans, in july, another huge success for supercell, the fifth game on that list was called battle buddies a player versus player tactical shooting game, it was actually soft launched before clash of clans and hay day on the 31st of march for ios and only in Canada.
The game was fairly simple, it was turn based, so when in a match you would take turns moving your character and doing different actions such as shooting or collecting loot, and you had sort of a vision area where enemies in that area were visible, the other team could do the exact same thing, except you had to wait for each other's turn in order to do anything, in single player you controlled up to 5 buddies over a variety of maps, defeating enemies but premeditating your actions because every time you moved or shot or really did anything ,you would use energy, there was also a shop to buy a handful of items and a skill system that helped you unlock more weapons and such.
Overall the game looked fun, the graphics were great for 2012, I would have had a blast playing this, but that's as far as the good goes, supercell killed the game because they did not see a vision that the game was going to be popular, there were also reports of poor monetization and low player interest, the game never moved out of beta and was killed just after a few months.
Spooky Pop
If you've ever played the game best friends and liked it you're probably very excited about spooky pop, another reason for the excitement was because every game with the name supercell behind it gets a load of hype and this was no different with this game.
Spooky pop was released in december of 2014. In its core it was a puzzle game there were different levels you had to complete and like other games in this genre there were a lot of color boxes you need to match so that once they matched and popped it would create an action which in this case was to kill an enemy, there isn't much to discuss about spooky pop, supercell wanted to work on a game and the likes of other popular puzzle games at the time, but ended up killing it in fear that it would be a failure. On february 9th 2015 the app was removed from the app store and people who still had the game downloaded received a message of its discontinuance, on march 10 the game was fully shut down and that was the last time it was ever heard of again.
Smash Land
After spooky pop was killed on march 10 of 2015, another game emerged called smash land on april 1st, available to be downloaded in canada and Australia, this game had been worked on by a team of four to five people for 10 whole months, obviously it had high hopes that this would be the next big thing.
Smash land was a game in which she bounced off of walls and obstacles to hit your opponents, when you killed an enemy you got xp, after completing the match you got a few more other rewards and the goal of the game was to find and collect lost heroes and search the world for treasures, join teams, battle against others and make some enemies, the game was rather fun in fact it got so much attention from supercell YouTubers, all things seemed to be going well and as far as everyone could tell it was pretty popular, but in case you haven't pieced it together we've heard this story numerous of times, a game looks fun there's hype surrounding it but ends up getting killed due to supercell having a vision it wasn't gonna go well, I don't blame them though after all supercell wants to make sure every game that goes global does it successfully and ends up being played for years on end and smash land just wasn't that, on the 1st of july of 2015 supercell announced that it would end development for smash land and later that year on september 1st the game officially closed its doors.
Rush Wars
The most recent supersoul game to be killed at the time of the post hey day pop is still in beta and it's unknown if it'll be killed or not, so we're left with one last one in the list, rush wars.
This game was soft launched on august 26 2019 in canada, australia, and new zealand, I personally had a chance to fly over to helsinki finland to experience the development and plans of the project, after a few days of touring the city of helsinki and recording footage of the game, I truly believe rush wars was the next big thing, but I had a feeling that the rest of the world would have mixed feelings on the project and well, to everyone's suspicion, well they were right.
Rush wars was a game described by a few developers as a mix of all supercell games combined, kind of, you would build up a squad to raid enemy gold mines for loot, join teams, fight in wars, open boxes to unlock more troops and defenses, collect commanders, protect your own gold mines, discover new maps, but that wasn't enough.
November 5th 2019 only a couple months after soft lunch, it was announced that the game would not be continued and was shut down on november 30th, the reason was rather different from other titles, this time it was based on the community's feedback, they had taken into consideration that players thought the game felt repetitive and after a few changes to the game they still believed it would be the same, they felt as though the changes weren't enough long term nor change up the game as a whole, even if they continue to improve rush wars they felt that they would never hit that goal of making games that would be played for years and remembered forever.
Many things have changed since 2010 for supercell, but the core beliefs upon which they were founded are stronger than ever today, supercell continues to work on new games behind the scenes and supercells, a term described by supercell on how they work in small teams of 5 for each game and only 5. Supercell over the years has gotten very conservative on the games is soft launched and made global, because at the end of the day multiple failures is nothing compared to one big success.
Post a Comment