We thought it would be interesting to try something new. How did 2025 feel for us on the development team? Would that be something you, our community, are interested to hear about? Only one way to find out!

In December 2024 we shipped Update 59.0 and with it our collaboration with Disney’s™ Toy Story, featuring the first temporary Brawler in Brawl Stars: Buzz Lightyear! This update would carry us into 2025 and establish a strong foundation for the year to come. Or so we thought.

Teaming up with Disney™ was a dream come true for us. We loved the opportunity to work with the teams behind some of the most beloved IPs ever created - and our collaboration with Disney™ and Pixar™ went smoothly from the first day with both sides inspiring each other throughout the process.

Buzz Lightyear was one of the most ambitious Brawlers we had created until this point and going all the way in with this idea meant a significant investment from our side. Ultimately the effort required to deliver the quality we were looking for was the equivalent of 3 Brawlers, including some of the custom UI/UX explorations.

On top of Buzz Lightyear we created a series of Skins around the Toy Story IP and a temporary event in January 2025 focused around the Pizza Planet Arcade, with lighthearted variations of 2v2 Game Modes as well as some new game modes like (the controversial) Air Hockey.. Playing in the January season would allow you to unlock new skins, the new Brawler Meeple and ultimately a Buzz Lightyear skin for Surge - for FREE! All of this was accompanied by a series of videos featuring Buzz Lightyear and a series of Brawl Stars characters - the animations alone accumulating 40,000,000+ views. You could say we were (and still are) quite proud of the quality of content we produced, both inside and outside of the game.

On paper this all sounds good. So how did it go?

Well, unfortunately I have to say: not great. While we created some serious buzz (no pun intended) about Buzz Lightyear in Brawl Stars, his temporary release negatively impacted the game in different ways: he was seriously overpowered and for a time omnipresent, disrupting matchmaking and the regular gameflow. It was clear that Buzz caused a lot of grief in the community, at the same time a lot of players were playing him a lot and having fun doing so, which was especially visible when we removed him: we saw an immediate decline in activity.

But that’s not where it ended. Instead of releasing Meeple like previous Brawlers at the end of the month (of December 2024), we thought it would be nice to make him available for FREE for all players as part of the Pizza Planet Arcade event. This turned out to be a mistake and had some unintended consequences. For those of you who had all Brawlers unlocked before the season ended, Credits accumulated on the Brawl Pass would go towards Fame instead, which didn’t feel great.

To make things worse, the unlockable Skins in the event store were not Toy Story themed, which felt inconsistent and somewhat random. To add insult to injury, we introduced a bug related to the event currency which created quite the mess. In general, the January 2025 event was underwhelming pretty much from all angles - and this showed in the results with revenue and monthly active players dropping by around 20% from December 2024 to February 2025.

Seasonality is real and it is quite usual to see player behaviors and engagement shift whenever people go back to school/work after periods of holiday, but in January/February 2025 we lost more Daily Active Players than what can be expected. A clear step-change. We started seeing this trend in January but we were not equipped to pivot fast enough for the following update.

Update 60 released at the end of February 2025. The update was end-game player centric, with a clear focus on a Ranked System refresh. It also delivered two new Brawlers that both were well received by you: Finx and Lumi as well as a smaller collaboration with the card game UNO™.

The Ranked System refresher was centered around higher Power Level requirements for Brawlers, a seasonal rotation of freely available Brawlers (at max Level), unification of queues and a closer tie in with the Brawl Stars Championship esports circuit that came with the new Pro Pass and Progression Skins. Our overall goal was to do something for our most engaged players and (!) increase the amount of people playing Ranked and creating more interest for esports in general.

The first month of Ranked 3.0 showed promise: the playtime for mid-trophy players increased by 27% from the previous peak in March 2024 and more than tripled playtime compared to the previous season. However, high-trophy players (25,000+) participation decreased by 50% from the previous peak, while it increased season-over-season by about 180%. Unfortunately, in the following months the participation rate and playtime quickly normalized back to the previous seasons.

The rework did make things more accessible for newer players: under 5,000 Trophies players saw a 90% increase from the previous peak and almost 300% increase season-over-season. Very much like for the other groups things normalized, but it sustained on a significantly higher level of playtime than before.

Overall we were (and are not) happy with the state of Ranked today. The rework used up significant development resources and did not hit our goals. Worse, by definition Ranked is a feature that is more centered around the core (and hardcore) parts of our community - this means 2 things: the update had no chance to improve things for our “mainstream” players (and consequently didn’t manage to slow down the decline), but it neither improved Ranked for our most engaged players. Meh!

Update 61, released late in April, was focused largely on the Battle for Katana Kingdom event, a storyline that started with the release of Kenji a year prior. The event featured a ton of proven concepts and new ideas, including a “hub” for the event itself: Wasabi Powers, Sushi Rolls, new PvE boss fights, a bunch of amazing Skins, an in-game manga, continued storytelling with a 2-minute animation, and last but not least, the release of our first Ultra Legendary Brawler: Kaze.

The event was a big success. New players and returning players peaked in May 2025, in some countries like Japan our daily active users even reached new lifetime records. The meta was more diverse than in previous events, the theme itself was a hit. From our own perspective, this was one of the best events we released in 2025. This is even cooler considering that originally we had planned a collaboration with another IP and Battle for Katana Kingdom was a result of a pivot.

This month we also had our first Brawl Stars Championship event on US soil: our mid-season event, the Brawl Cup, was held at Dreamhack Dallas featuring the Top 8 teams from around the world. The 2024 World Champions from HMBL(EMEA) took it all, securing an additional World Finals spot for their region and Symantec secured the MVP award for the event. Toxic Lotus also won hearts during the event with the best placement for a team from Mainland China in official Brawl Stars competitions.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Following Jae-yong’s rather uneventful release in late April, any positivity around Kaze’s release and game mechanics was quickly overshadowed by the price tag of… $50 USD. Technically it all made sense: the price difference was in line with our regular pricing strategy - but at the end of the day it also showed us the clear limitations of what price tag all of you out there would find acceptable, and this clearly wasn’t acceptable for a Brawler, or at least not for the majority of our community. The price tag itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was that this was the only way you were able to get access to Kaze.

The last part of this update was Brawl Arena: an experiment to test a longer form game mode with in-game power scaling and MOBA mechanics. The mode temporarily boosted playtime in general, but quickly normalized and didn’t manage to keep players engaged. Popularity dropped to similar levels like Heist and Hot Zone across all Trophy ranges.

Then came Update 62. We shipped the long planned rework of the Trophy Road and transitioned from Brawler Masteries to Records. The Trophy Road changes included significant buffs for the progression of new players, which had a very positive impact especially on early retention numbers. Records are a whole different story, and the short version is that it didn’t have the desired effect of engaging more people with the system. If you want to know more about this one, I highly recommend you to watch our latest Time to Explain episode, where Quinn, Dani, Adrian and Gonzalo discussed this feature specifically.

One thing that we didn’t talk about much is how difficult the development process of Records was: we don’t use the term “development hell” for live service games much, but this feature development cycle was as close to it as it gets. Changing stakeholders with different design visions, time constraints, reduced scope and too many compromises, people who just joined the team thrown into the mess. We didn’t only fail you out there with Records, we failed the whole Brawl Stars team. The learnings coming from this were maybe the most important ones in 2025.

On a more positive note, the new Brawlers (Trunk and Alli) both found their own community. Alli got a lot of love from fan artists, while Trunk’s origin story broke hearts and made grown men cry.

Update 63 released in early September and with it our collaboration with Subway Surfers that also featured a bunch of experiments on our side:

• A new event currency with its own reward track

• Controllable power-ups with its own joystick

• Changes to the play button rewarding you for 3-wins (instead of 8)

At the same time our friends from SYBO Games celebrated Brawl Stars in Subway Surfers, showcasing a 3-player version of their signature gameplay for the first time to their global audience.

We learned a lot from this collaboration and it informed the next round of updates in quite meaningful ways. In general events turned out to be great opportunities for us to learn more about our players.

The update had much more content, though. The highlights for me? New Boss Fights for the Brawl-o-Ween event in October as well as new Brawler release events! While we are still learning about the new release events even today, it was an important step for us to allow more players to access the latest content shortly after release. The first Brawlers released this way were Mina (somewhat OP?!) and Ziggy (maybe somewhat on the weak side). There was an unrelated learning here as well: with Mina we leaned way too much into her being inspired by Brazilian culture, rather than us focusing on her place in the world of Starr Park. The Mina release was part of a strategic plan to increase our presence in Brazil, together with the Brawl Esports LCQ event in São Paulo and our collaboration with Rayssa Leal. We should (and could) have balanced this better as we did similar releases quite frequently before (ex. Kenji, Kaze, Melodie, etc.) and once again, we learned a lot for future releases.

The BSC Last Chance Qualifier in São Paulo was our first Brawl Stars esports event in South America. The audience did not disappoint and welcomed 16 teams from around the world. The competition was fierce as the audience witnessed the elimination of the local favorites from Casa Brawl E-Sports. At the end of the day four teams came out on top, securing their spot to the Brawl Stars Championship World Finals event a few months later: Revenant XSpark, Totem Esports, Crazy Raccoon and Papara SuperMassive. This was also an opportunity for myself and a small group of Brawl Stars team members to meet with some of the local content creators to discuss the ecosystem and their challenges in the region. Big shoutout to all the content creators that contributed to the event and spent time with us, especially during the breakout sessions. Muito obrigado! O carinho e a paixão de vocês é contagiante!

There was one more painful learning here: a rework nobody asked for. Meant as a Quality of Life change, we decided to refresh Trophy Icons. This change clearly didn’t land with most of you and as you likely already noticed, we made another change this update to improve the situation for you.

However, Update 63 did also do something else for us, unseen by many: it stabilized retention numbers and stopped the decline of DAU.

In mid-November we shipped Update 64 and with it our collaboration with Stranger Things, just in time for the final season on Netflix as well as some quite impactful quality of life features like the rework of the daily wins and MEGA quests.

While the skins were somewhat controversial (with fans praising and other players lacking excitement about them), the gameplay elements of the update received a lot of praise from the community and people kept playing UpsideShowdown and Brawler Decks! This was also one of the rare moments for us that a new game mode increased the overall playtime of Brawl Stars in meaningful ways.

We’re still thinking about how we could bring back this game mode in the future!

Outside of the Stranger Things collaboration, we also released Gigi (yes, another Assassin). Even more controversial than the Stranger Things skins? Our decision to focus the Brawlidays season around Mecha. The Mecha theme has always been super strong and the Brawl Pass itself was the best performing one since the summer, but once again the Christmas season humbled us: were Mecha really the best choice for the season?

On November 28th, the Brawl Stars community and many of our creators came together to celebrate the Brawl Stars Championship World Finals at Dreamhack Winter in Stockholm, with teams competing for a share of the $1,000,000 USD prize pool and limitless bragging rights. ;)

Following a live performance of the Brawl Stars original “My Only Trophy”, the former World Champions from HMBLE (EMEA) faced Crazy Raccoon (EAST ASIA). In this rematch of the 2024 Grand Finals, Crazy Raccoon reversed the roles and swept HMBLE 3-0, securing $400,000 USD and the crown with Milkreo, one of the most veteran competitors in our esports program, securing the title MVP. Head over to YouTube to check-out our documentary “Chasing Glory” (4 parts) to relive some of the best moments from last year!

Behind the scenes and unknown to most people, pretty much 100% of the Brawl Stars team traveled to Stockholm to attend the World Finals in person. We also invited 20 of our biggest content creators from around the world to the event and used the opportunity to have everyone in one place to discuss the state of the game with them and give them a glimpse into what we have planned for 2026.

Update 65, the final update of the year, introduced some serious changes to Brawl Stars:

• Buffies!

• Brawl Pass 3.0

• Chaos Drops

Much has been said about this update and we’ve seen the heated discussions on Reddit and X. The team covered most of the questions around these topics and talked about some improvements specifically for Buffies in the last Time to Explain.

On the performance side, Update 65 was the most successful update of the year. Following the stabilization two updates prior, our engagement numbers started growing significantly from day #1 of the new update, which set us up very nicely for the beginning of 2026. Spoiler: January (and February until today) sustained the positive momentum and we’re off to a great start for the year.

The last bit I have to talk about is the Pierce release event. The first Legendary marksman was very well received by all of you, the in-game integration of the event and the short videos on YouTube just worked. Let’s get this out of the way: the event was a success.

But at what cost? Some of you were clearly put off by the crude humor and the theme itself was better suited for the summer season. We should have timed this differently and once again, this was a good learning for us. Technically speaking we’ve built some new capabilities for storytelling and some new tools in the box for future events. We already re-used some of these tools during the Brawlentine event and I am looking forward to seeing what other things the team can do with this new tech.

What else happened in 2025?

Since January 2025, the team has grown more than 20 people year-over-year and we are about to be 100 people strong. Thinking back when we launched the game in December 2019, we were 19 people, everything considered.

The biggest change came in the form of a new Tech team within Brawl Stars. Traditionally at Supercell, all game teams receive support from a central tech team. However, as the company grew over the years and with many game projects (including new ones) going on in parallel, prioritization became harder and harder. The solution for this was to build some capabilities internally and I am happy to say that we have established the team and already saw some positive impact both on the client side (loading speeds) and tooling for our artists. For the foreseeable future, the Tech team has these priorities:

• Client performance (ex. memory usage)

• Improved tools for our developers

• Live operability (ex. balance changes on the fly)

• Unlock novel gameplay

There is also some work to be done on the server infrastructure, which is also something we are tackling. This is probably also a good moment to point out that we are constantly looking for additional talent. You can find an overview of our job openings on supercell.com.

Our CEO Ilkka already talked about the general performance of Supercell in his annual blog. For Brawl Stars, 2025 was a year of learning and the first half of the year looked quite grim, especially compared to the breakout year we had in 2024. This being said, things did stabilize in September 2025 and since then the game has been growing every month. Ultimately 2025 was the second best year ever for Brawl Stars in terms of both monthly active users and revenue (our third best year being 2020).

I would like to end with a big thank you to our community of players and pro players, our content creators, casters and partners that stuck with us through the good and the bad times, even when we are not always hitting the mark. Without you we wouldn’t be where we are today!

We are looking forward to a great 2026 and we’ll talk more about this in the upcoming NOT A ROADMAP VIDEO, which will be released at some point in March 2026.

Thanks for reading!

Frank
General Manager, Brawl Stars