How Boom Beach Could Be Set Back to Growth?

This article focuses on analyzing Boom Beach’s current state and suggests couple theoretical ideas for how it could be set back to growth.

Note: This article is constructive, giving a straight-forward analysis on a game’s current state — with also suggestions and ideas for future improvement. The sole intention is to provide here an insightful article and as a goodwill-basis give open ideas and principles for improvement. This article has data from AppMagic.

Current State of Boom Beach

When looked over the long haul, Boom Beach by Supercell has seen long-term engagement decline (despite bringing great amount of revenue and success — which is still something everyone needs to acknowledge) over its lifecycle; a common “trend” for many mobile games as their player bases gradually lose interest after peak growth.

Side Note: These things are common “trends” in games such as Stumble Guys as well as overall on genres like 4X Strategy.

Quickly looking, AppMagic shows that while e.g., their Warships update successfully reinvigorated engagement couple years back — giving players a competitive mode and new objectives — this effect alone was not overall solution for them as overall the long-term engagement is back on slowing down.

Boom Beach Downloads, and Warships update peak

Since then, DAU and MAU numbers have waned over long period of time, underscoring a need for further refreshing gameplay to keep the core player base engaged and finding meaningful ways how to introduce the game for new audiences.

Where Boom Beach Should Go From Here?

Obviously, it is not an easy job to refresh something like this for growth back again — but Supercell has done this couple times already; so maybe once more?

Specifically, Supercell has couple time managed on revitalizing games through updates focused on creativity and e.g., competitive dynamics. When they’ve done thing right, they’ve set games like Brawl Stars to great lengths.

Brawl Stars Revenue

Incrementing the Experience by Focus on Core

Boom Beach could benefit (yet again!) from expanding its core gameplay to tap into new dynamic experience(s), which could be also attractive for new players to engage in the game.

Actually, I believe more strongly, that it could be even a good strategy overall to push these in beats, if overall core issue vs. symptoms is challenging to treat — meaning, specifically, that maybe LiveOps of the game, to some (or full) scale, should be about always building the core further vs. planning content and events.

Thus, my suggestion overall here, would be figuring out how your whole LiveOps strategy would be able to be refreshed over time to push out core-improving and -extending increments to your game — and investing and building systems around it (if not from scratch, then after you’ve validated it’s a successful case).

For instance, as a quick idea for Boom Beach, a dynamic treasure-hunting world mode could add a fresh layer of excitement (Note: this is just a very basic example):

• In this event-based mode, players could raid islands for treasures, with mid- to long-term goals over bigger “ultimate” treasures being there to go for, facing both in-game enemies and other players in PvP combat when doing that.
• It could have a new fresh type of core gameplay mechanic in it, or a core ruleset, as well as involve Warships in the design — on top of which different leaderboards (or ladders) could be tied to the whole experience in terms of how “ultimate” treasures would be given and shared.

What Else There Could Be?

Furthermore, adding more dynamic social interactions and cooperative PvE missions could amplify player engagement, creating content that feels less predictable, more community-oriented, and more self-propagating as well. This would allow, potentially, exploration for certain group monetization methods.

Other potential areas could include looking into user-generated content to build longevity. But, How? The answer could be within systemic and emergent mechanics, where core-extending systemic systems would be built — over which players would “generate” content by using these systems; a content that would be “faced” by other players in PvP and/or PvPvE setting, in “UGC”-like manner.

Systemic and emergent mechanics and features are, in my opinion, very blue ocean — and they are something audiences from Gen Z to younger audiences are very open to (whilst definitely older audiences and audiences of the game’s genre would be as well) because they have grown to systemic and emergent mechanics thanks to Minecraft, Among Us, Fall Guys and even Fortnite having some bits and pieces of those. Boom Beach could attract by this also these audiences — on top of existing target groups.

Side Note: It kind of looks Boom Beach has many of these elements, over which they could look into something like this, but more systemic and systems-based call for such would be what I’m after here. These games in these genres kind of already are little systematic in terms of how you build your bases, etc. — whilst, on this path a deep dive to systemic exploration is what I’m indeed after.

What else is good with these mechanics is that they would be streamable — and watchers would definitely aim to recreate certain things. On top of this, theorycrafting would spark and lit up on communities. Both aforementioned points together? A big boom.

Final Thoughts

Being bold and expanding the game’s universe by core-focused increments and fostering social, cooperative, systemic and emergent systems / mechanics — in alignment with players’ engagement and e.g., psychological motivations — Supercell could overall drive a revitalized interest in Boom Beach.

Again, and obviously, this is not an easy task and many games face downhill over their lifecycle, which is fully normal — but it doesn’t say innovation and creativity shouldn’t stop always. Like, in practice / theory, it would be possible to actually plan your LiveOps over core-focused increments in the strategy vs. just focus on content and events systems. Trying also fresh strategies is important.