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Frank Yan
Senior Game Designer at Supercell
Frank Yan is a Senior Game Designer at Supercell, a prominent gaming company based in Helsinki. He has a significant presence on LinkedIn, where he shares insights and updates related to his work, particularly focusing on projects like "Brawl Stars."
In his role at Supercell, Frank has contributed to various initiatives, including the removal of loot boxes from "Brawl Stars," which was a notable update in the game's development. He has also participated in discussions and presentations at events like GDC (Game Developers Conference), sharing learnings from his experiences in game design and market intelligence.1234
Frank Yan's professional network includes over 500 connections on LinkedIn, reflecting his engagement within the gaming community.1
Highlights
Today the GDC Talk for "Brawl Stars : Learnings from the Removal of Loot Boxes" presented by Frank Keienburg and myself on behalf of the exceptional Brawl Stars Team is online in the GDC Vault for those that are interested!
Reflecting on what it felt being on the Brawl team over the last 2 years as we went from historical lows in 2023 to historical highs, a few things stick out.
During our lowest point metrics wise in 2023, some may assume that we were pressured to monetize the remaining players we had, but it was quite the opposite. We knew we needed to improve engagement and more importantly the game's "time to fun" as we simply didn't entertain players like we use to.
So we trashed our plans, and made a hard pivot to focus on adding random rewards back into the game as engagement rewards which we shipped 2 months later, this lead to the start of our recovery to our eventual historical highs.
Are you struck by something? I was.
Firstly, the Brawl Dev Team culturally makes the ultimate decision on what to do. This has been very empowering. Once we knew we needed to add random rewards back into the game as engagement rewards, we acted on this and shipped an update 2 month later which started our recovery.
Secondly, while "time to fun" is hard to measure, it's very easy to feel. Games after all are about entertainment, and for a mobile game like Brawl Stars, continuing to make it easy for players to experience that fun quickly is very important. We lost sight of this over time and needed to refocus on it. Gameplay is a key focus for us each and every update.
As a live service game, Brawl can get more complicated over time, and in our case, dragging out the time to fun. We spent a lot of time over the last year looking at the key areas of the game with low engagement and improving this time to fun, and in many ways, simplified the game in the process. Sometimes this meant removing entire features and rebuilding them from scratch.
Lastly, how the team is setup to adapt quickly as we see issues has been inspiring to experience. This is a fundamental truth, certainly of live service games. You will always want to adapt quickly.
A special shout out to our community team who have been engaged with the player base throughout all the ups and downs. Their feedback and ability to run exciting community events as live ops have been huge for our momentum. The value of a healthy community is invaluable. This were integral to our move to the now IAP Brawl Pass.
I hope you enjoy the talk as much as we enjoyed making it. We certainly weren't shy to call ourselves out on mistakes we've made in addition to the successes we've experienced and some of the lessons we've learned. To say we planned for this and saw the recovery of Brawl is naive at best. We certainly did some good along the way, but could not have expected such results. I continue to inspired by how humble and talented the team is throughout all of this.
#gdc #supercell #brawlstars
Thank you for the fantastic coverage of our GDC talk Neil Long!
