Clash Royale has veered into an interesting monetization direction.

The game has always had built-in P2W-lite elements, and still does. Specifically, you can buy gold and special treasure chests, both of which can accelerate your progression well above the curve. Will it be a permanent advantage? No. Eventually your overleveled troops will carry you to enough victories to place you where your power-level and skill levels indicate. That the system is (eventually) self-correcting does not diminish the fact that you bought wins, but nevermind.

These days, Supercell has fully committed to… emotes. Lots and lots of emotes.

It’s been about two years since Supercell initially double-down on the emote trolling, only to back down three months later. The “backing down” required you to specifically mute your opponents every single game, but at some point they allowed the setting to stay on. However, one of the downsides was that muting emotes then muted them from your own teammate. There really wasn’t much communication possible via emotes, but it was sometimes useful to be able to “complain” about your partner’s inanity.

Towards the end of June of this year, Supercell released the new Goblin emotes. At first, I thought this seemed a bit silly. I mean, they were sold in $25 bundles that included a bunch of gold and cards which effectively made the emotes “free,” but it’s hard to imagine a company selling a sort of cosmetic item that anyone can just disable entirely. Later on, Supercell went on to just sell packages of emotes for $5, and mix and matching the types of bundles.

The funny thing is… I turned emotes back on. And I am somewhat serious about wanting to buy a certain combination of emotes.

The specific scenario I want to be able to communicate via emote is when my own 2v2 partner does something unbelievably fucking stupid. Like, every person I get matched with is supposed to be around my own skill level, right? So how can they be so dumb? It’s one thing to be interrupted while playing the game. It’s something else entirely to place troops poorly, or not at all, or basically get flustered and do random shit.

Goblins have a “roll eyes” and “this is fine (burning building)” emote and I want, nay, need to be able to communicate this to my opponents. Not my own teammate, because they either already know they fucked up, or are too stupid to comprehend it anyway. Just something a bit more… precise than simply the default “angry” emote plus sending a Fireball to the King Tower – the nigh-universal “I give up” action.

I didn’t think emotes could possibly work as a monetization strategy, especially when you can turn them off at will, but here we are. Supercell surprises me again.