Brawl Stars and Clash Royale: Popular Teams, Growth in 2020 and What's Next

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Mobile esports encompasses not only the genres of Battle Royale and MOBA – but also the RTS genre is gaining popularity, with respective esports competitions being hosted worldwide. Besides, the mobile audience itself is very diverse, ranging from teenagers to adults.

In our new article, we will take a look at Brawl Stars and Clash Royale. The first discipline belongs to the MOBA genre, and it stands out for having a fairly young audience. The second one is an RTS, with its competition format currently going through dramatic changes. Esports Charts will discuss the features of these titles, the most popular teams in the disciplines, and their development throughout 2020.

Brawl Stars is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in 2020 – as 2019 featured almost no tournaments for this game. This mobile MOBA from Supercell features a variety of maps and modes. The target audience of these titles differs from the other mobile games and consists of teenagers 13 years and older. Which might be one of the reasons for such a rapid development of these disciplines.

In 2020, Brawl Stars amassed 2M Hours Watched, with half of that figure having been reached in Q4. The sharp increase in interest at the end of 2020 was caused by the holding of Brawl Stars World Finals 2020, the discipline’s counterpart for The International.

The world’s top eight teams competed for $1M, with PSG Esports becoming the winners. The event itself collected 815K Hours Watched in 6 hours on the air, which made it the most popular in the discipline’s history.It should be noted that the rest of the tournaments in the top belong to the official monthly series of events from the developers – in other words, when it comes to Brawl Stars, events from community streamers are not very common.

In 2021, ESL began to enter the discipline and hold the first mobile tournaments in different regions. Also, the Queso Cup from the eponymous organization is a recurring event in the Spanish-speaking region.

The audience of Brawl Stars in 2020-2021

What about the platform the viewers prefer to use when watching the Brawl Stars competitions? YouTube was responsible for 85% of Hours Watched. The platform trailblazed the streaming of mobile disciplines and therefore is occupied by the majority of the mobile fans and streamers. At the same time, Twitch accounted for 13% of total Hours Watched.

In terms of audience, the English-speaking viewers were responsible for 44% Hours Watched. To our surprise, the Russian-speaking fans are responsible for another 12% — although the region shows no particular affection for the mobile disciplines in general.

Brawl Stars didn't make it to the top 5 mobile games of 2020, but it still managed to stand out. Firstly, Supercell brought the discipline to a new market — China, which is famous for taking much interest in such games.

Secondly, the discipline was actively developing in the CIS region. The growth of Hours Watched of the game’s Russian-speaking viewers is the direct evidence of this: 2000% up as compared to 2019. Additionally, the organization has signed a new Brawl Stars roster. The roster of ZERØZONE, the champions of the Brawl Stars Championship 2021, became the newest addition to the “Born to Win” family.

We’ve also taken a look at which Brawl Stars teams became the most popular in 2020. PSG Esports are the leaders of our ranking. Over the course of the year, they collected 431K Hours Watched, and also won the discipline’s main championship. INTZ fell only 34K Hours Watched short of occupying the first spot.

Brawl Stars Championship 2021 shall be the discipline’s next major event. The entry is free for anyone, as long as they participate in the in-game Championship Challenge. Winning 15 games allows one to enter the monthly tournaments (that started in March and will run until October), which take place in seven regions: North America, Latin America (divided into North and South), East Asia, EMEA, EECA, and SESA-ANZ. The results of these tournaments will determine the teams qualifying for the World Finals 2021.

Clash Royale is the fifth most played mobile game in 2020

Clash Royale is another RTS project from Supercell. Players gradually bring their troops to the map, with the goal of the match being to destroy the opponent’s main tower.

Let’s take a look at the category’s growth in 2020. The game experienced a huge growth in Q2 – Hours Watched increased from 285K to 2.1M. In part, this was caused by Clash Royale League 2020 Spring (enabled for several regions) that has been running for months.

In Q3 there was a drop to 1.6M Hours Watched, but already in Q4 2020 the game reached the best result of the year: 2.8M Hours Watched. Such a figure was mostly reached thanks to the Clash Royale League World Finals 2020.

2020 was quite successful for Clash Royale because the game entered the top 5 most played disciplines of the last year in terms of Hours Watched (6.9M).

Most popular teams of Clash Royale in 2020-2021

Leading the ranking of the most popular Clash Royale teams in 2020 is the Spanish organization Team Queso. They took the first spot at the Clash Royale League World Finals 2020 and collected 1.2M Hours Watched. Also, their match versus PONOS Sports became the most popular among the teams in our ranking, with 112K Peak Viewers having gathered at the finals of the discipline’s main esports league.

As for platforms, Clash Royale received most of its Hours Watched from YouTube (80%), with Twitch and VK Live being responsible for the rest. Most Hours Watched were brought by Hispanic viewers (31%), followed by English-speaking viewers (30%).

Clash Royale has slightly changed the format of esports competitions. We spoke with Diego Soro, CEO of CREAM REAL BETIS, and found out how this affected Clash Royale in general and why the once popular rosters are leaving the discipline.

“We have been one of the Clash Royale League teams since the beginning, very involved in the scene. Clash Royale has been a wonderful mobile esport, fro my point of view because this was an endemic mobile game, not an adaptation of others like shooters or mobas, that adapts their PC formats to mobile.

From my point of view the Clash Royale League was the unique opportunity to create a global esports, but Supercell has changed any year the format, teams etc, and to create a good esports ecosystem the storytelling and continuity is mandatory. This year Supercell decided to go with players not teams, so we decided to leave the scene; from my point of view if the publisher doesn't believe in the clubs, we don't have to invest in their games. There are other alternatives, for instance we are tier-1 in Free Fire, being part of the Free Fire League, and we are launching our Wild Rift project.”

Despite such a drastic change in format, Team Queso still chose to stick with the discipline. The CEO of Team Queso, Alvaro Buitrago, shared the reasons for this decision and described the current vector of development for the organization:

“At Team Queso we made the decision to keep our four players (Cuchii Cuu, Beniju, Ruben and iAmJP) who won this teams World Cup in 2020, all of them have strong social media accounts and two of them stand amongst the most relevant in the community with strong Youtube and Twitch channels (iAmJP and Beniju). Ruben is considered the best player in the world and he is very relevant every time he competes.

At the moment Ruben and iAmJP are inside the top 20 in the world and aspire to make it to this individual Worlds Final, so they are still strong players in terms of competition.”

At the same time, Team Queso will focus on its development – not through the esports aspect alone, but also through the creation of unique content with the help of streamers:

“Our strategy at the moment is a mix between staying relevant in the community with our players and content creators on the one hand, and in the other hand we are creating our own competitions that will be streamed on our network of channels.”

Despite the dramatic change of the format of the competition by the publishers, many organizations adapted and remained part of the discipline. Pinger.pro (Kazakhstan, the Alaman series of tournaments) and Starladder (Russia, Gamestars series of tournaments) also began to hold competitions in the discipline. The question is whether Clash Royale and Brawl Stars will manage to withstand the competition of other popular mobile disciplines in 2021, or perhaps they will be overshadowed by League of Legends: Wild Rift and similar new titles.

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