What is Clash Royale?
Clash Royale is a strategy based game that was released on March 2nd, 2016.
The game was released as an addition to Supercell’s popular game Clash of Clans, which is a real time strategy game, released in 2012. Clash Royale, however, is a 1v1 tower defense card game using some of the same iconic characters created for Clash of Clans.
In Clash Royale, you make a deck with 8 cards of your choice, each with their own specialized attacks, that, once placed down, creates a character that tries to defeat as many enemies and do as much damage to the enemy towers as possible. The objective to win is to get the most crowns before the game is over, which is done by either destroying the two princess towers, getting one crown for each princess tower destroyed, or by destroying the king tower and winning the game immediately.
Once you’re in the arena playing against a random person you CLASH!
Why is everyone hooked?
While many originally downloaded Clash Royale thinking it’d be another mobile game they’d delete in a week, Clash was different. Clash Royale turned out to be a masterfully made game, keeping players hooked. The best special effects and character designs intrigue you visually, the noises and sound effects that have become so iconic, that even just the jingle that plays when you open the game has become iconic.
Whether you win or lose, whether you’re excited or angry, it doesn’t matter, you still keep playing just to get that next win, or advance to that next arena. This game either feeds your ego or fuels your rage.
Over the years mobile games have a tendency to go up and down in players. Although Clash Royale has managed to hold an impressively steady player base over the years, Clash also has its ups and downs as players take breaks or stop playing altogether.
The way they dominate the mobile game space is by updating the game consistently with absurd new features or cards to use. These features have a tendency to be overpowered when first released, resulting in players being drawn back in to try them out. The game is updated every month; when the game updates there’s typically a new season, which includes new features like passes, challenges and within the recent months, “evo cards,” resulting in players returning each new season.
Every new season, one of the most important things that happens is the rank reset, where if your trophy count is high enough, it will be pretty drastically lowered. This resetting of your rank makes you want to climb to a new high each season, yet another way they’re able to keep such a high player base.
Why has there been a resurgence?
In recent months, there has been a massive resurgence of players old and new, most unaware of what the core reason for this resurgence even was.
The answer to why such a massive pool of players returned to, or came to play, this near decade old game, lies with one streamer: Jynxzi. Jynxzi has been a popular steamer on Twitch for a couple of years now, and he has quite a strong influence.
According to streamcharts.com, Jynzxi held his first Clash Royale live stream on May 7, 2025. This stream was the start of something Super Cell probably only ever dreamed of. As Jynxzi continued to stream Clash, the game’s popularity skyrocketed from 17 million concurrent players in April to 47.4 million concurrent players in October, according to data that activeplayer.io sourced from Google Play.
A lot of this success came from clips on social media of Jynxzi raging at the game and people finding it funny, then remembering how much they once enjoyed playing, or new people discovering the game through these clips and trying it for the first time themselves. Jynxzi undeniably had a massive impact on the resurgence of Clash Royale.
The Pay to Win Debate
One thing that Super Cell does with Clash Royale that results in players leaving rather than returning is the encouragement to spend money on their game. Players jokingly consider a credit card the best card in the game because of the game’s “pay to win” nature, referring to the game’s paid transactions.
Clash Royale is a free game with no ads, but has a shop where you can pay real money for in-game currency or resources. Although you don’t have to pay for anything in the game, it makes things much easier for players upgrading their cards faster, and ranking up faster as a result.
In opposition to “Pay to win,” “Play to win” is all about skill, no transactions, and straight grinding. Play to win players typically don’t respect pay to win players as much as they see them as having taken the easy way. Paying to win is like taking a shortcut. This is one of the great divides among the players of Clash Royale: Is pay to win lowkey kinda lame?
Clash Royale has had a long and successful history and it deserves the attention and credit it deserves, being such a well made and creative game that’s free to play on your phone any time. Only time will tell if the surge that Jynxzi brought to the game will die out, or if more streamers will start to play it and this high will last longer.
Clash Royale is an amazing game that anyone can enjoy; this is why we clash.