The challenges and advantages of casual approachability in Brawl Stars esports

Mobile games are often considered broadly "casual," but scratch the surface of any of them and you'll find people who aren't playing casually at all. Your aunt's got 50,000 hours in Candy Crush. Other Eurogamer writers are in long-standing beefs with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp octopi. I've probably spent more time in one fan-made calculator to maximise gatcha pulls in K-pop management game BTS World than anything else this year.

Even so, it's a leap from there to esports; professional competition that takes place on both a small mobile screen and a global stage. So, in November I attended the Brawl Stars World Finals in Busan, South Korea, to talk to some of the developers at studio Supercell and the championship's winning team about taking the eight-month old game very seriously indeed.

Brawl Stars is a recent entry in Supercell's stable of fiercely playable smartphone games. As the name suggests it's about facing off against a bunch of goofy characters in little arenas. It plays a bit like a twin-stick, and while it can feel chaotic at first, there's a lot of stuff to learn if you want to excel.

Read more