No Nerf to Early Access Brawlers?! - Time to Explain

Time to Explain, the Brawl Stars podcast! In this episode, we talk about how we learned from our previous mistakes and managed to revert a downtrend for our players. We also discussed the game economy, showing lots of data! And went through lots of Player questions! You can skip straight to the topic you wanna hear about here: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:18 - Daily Active users graph and the state of the game (December 2022 to February 2024) 00:09:44 - Player Retention Graph 00:10:45 - Google Trends vs Daily Active Users graph 00:12:38 - Drama! The case with Adrian and the leaking of confidential information (breaching NDA) 00:15:13 - Don’t make things personal when criticizing the game 00:17:40 - How did the dominance of Larry & Lawrie affect the game in terms of player metrics? 00:18:49 - Why didn’t we nerf Larry and Lawrie earlier? 00:25:09 - Will you add something like Brawl Stars China, like a social lobby? 00:29:05 - What are the pros and cons of nerfing a brawler during early access? Your thoughts about Early Access? 00:34:59 - How does your playtesting process work for new brawlers/hypercharges/etc? 00:39:10 - Will we receive more lore campaigns in the future? 00:40:40 - Can we get an update with just Quality of life changes? 00:43:10 - How are old exclusive skin recolors performing in the game now? 00:45:46 - How does revenue from progression stack up against revenue from cosmetics? How do freebies affect the “f2p economy”? 00:58:12 - How do you guys see the increase amount of Power Points inside of the game? 01:04:37 - Any plans on adding more Pin Slots to the game? 01:05:49 - How do you guys plan on addressing trophy inflation? 01:08:51 - How did you like the release of the new Brawlpass system? Performance and community feedback 01:17:32 - Do you have plans to improve the bonus rewards at the end of the Brawl pass? 01:23:07 - How to improve XP Doubler which is useless now? 01:27:09 - Why does it take so long to balance Star Powers and Gadgets? 01:31:06 - What are your upcoming plans, if any, to improve the mega pig experience? 01:38:52 Why do we get credits out of Starrdrops when we have all brawlers? How about Fame improvements? 01:40:00 - ✨Sneak Peeks✨ 01:47:47 - Was the lore changed from before to now? Is the Investor video still part of the lore? 01:50:18 - Why are a lot of changes happening to the game? 02:00:20 - General balancing and Hypercharge prioritization 02:02:41 - Do you plan to continue discarding determinism and go back to random progression only? 02:05:04 - Frank quotes on social media 02:09:58 - What is considered “extra“ reward and what is part of the game economy? 02:11:03 - Is there any plan to speed up the release of Hypercharge and Mythic gears? 02:12:37 - It would be nice to have a little bit of time to select the build after every person chooses their Brawlers in Mega Pig 02:13:14 - Are there any plans on doing a story mode feature? 02:14:58 - Will you make any Collab with another company or game/movie? 02:15:26 - Does the current high player count change how you develop the game? 02:18:20 - How much do you want the game to change in about 5 years? 02:19:22 - What exactly forms your priorities? And what’s the best way for the community to change it? 02:22:30 - Why does the amount of challenges decrease significantly? 02:24:23 - Did 5v5 meet your expectations? 02:25:03 - Are you planning to ever do a Brawler concept competition?