What Brawl Stars Can Teach You About Retention (Even If You’re Not Building a Game)

I spent a week reverse-engineering a mobile game’s gamification system. Here’s what actually transfers to product design.

Every product person eventually hits the same wall: users show up once, maybe twice, and then just… stop coming back. You can blame onboarding, blame the market, blame the feature set. But sometimes the real issue is simpler: nothing in the product is pulling people back to it.

So I did something a little unusual. I opened Brawl Stars, a free-to-play mobile PvP game with tens of millions of daily players, and studied it like a UX case, not a game. Not to copy mechanics, since copying rarely works outside its original context, but to understand the psychology behind why people open it every single day.

What I found is a retention system where almost every mechanic pushes the player back: log in for five minutes, grab a small reward, feel progress, see the next goal waiting. Here’s the anatomy of it, and what’s actually reusable outside of gaming.

The core loop

The entire loop takes three to ten minutes, start to finish:

Log in → view rewards and quests → play a match or two → complete a daily objective → gain progression → unlock something new → exit.

That’s it. No friction, no long onboarding, no thinking required. You open the app already knowing what to do next.

Anatomy of the loop

It starts with a daily login bonus, claimed with zero obligation. That free reward triggers a temporary boost, which nudges you to jump into a match right away before it expires.

A single win then triggers three parallel reward tracks at once: it advances your long-term rank, your seasonal pass, and a daily objective, all simultaneously. One action, three feelings of progress.

Everything funnels back into upgrades: trophies, XP, and drops all convert into character power. That power unlocks tougher leagues, which sets up the next milestone, and the loop restarts with slightly higher stakes than before.

The pattern: one action should never move just one meter. If a single “win” only feeds one progress bar, you’re leaving retention on the table.

Eight currencies, one job each

Brawl Stars runs on eight different currencies, each aimed at a different psychological need: soft currency for immediate spending, a shared pool for gradual character growth, an automatic track for free character unlocks, a premium currency for instant gratification, and so on.

At first glance that looks like overkill. In practice, the reason it works is that every currency has exactly one job, and none of them compete with each other.

Most products fail here not because they lack a reward system, but because they bolt on one currency (points, coins, whatever) and expect it to motivate five different behaviors at once. A single currency asked to do too much just dilutes into meaninglessness.

Progress systems, stacked

Brawl Stars doesn’t rely on one progression bar. It layers several, each with a different time horizon:

• A main linear track with guaranteed prizes and escalating rewards every few steps (the account-level “you’re getting somewhere” signal)
• Achievement milestones tied to specific actions, like winning 20 matches with one character, for players who want a long-term personal goal
• Per-character mastery tracks, so even players who main one character feel constant progress
• A win streak that’s achievable for most players, not just top performers, because wins in team modes count too
• A competitive ladder for the subset of players who actually want status and ranking pressure

Different players are motivated by different time horizons, and a single progress track can only satisfy one of them.

Someone playing ten minutes a day and someone playing three hours want to feel progress on completely different scales. Design for both, or you’ll only retain one type of user.

ʼTen principles behind the loop

Strip away the game skin, and what’s actually happening is a short list of behavioral principles, and none of them require a leaderboard or a sword:

1. Frictionless re-entry. Give value before asking for action. A returning user should get something the moment they show up, before you ask anything of them.
2. Immediate session activation. Every session needs one obvious first action. If a user opens your product and has to think about what to do, you’ve already lost momentum.
3. Multi-layered progression. One action should advance multiple tracks at once, not just one metric quietly ticking up in the background.
4. Predictable and unpredictable rewards. Guaranteed outcomes combined with occasional random ones build both trust and excitement at the same time.
5. Near-miss design. Always show users how close they are to the next thing. “2 more to go” is a stronger hook than a static progress bar.
6. Habit formation through cadence. Daily systems create daily reasons to come back. The more often a cadence repeats, the stickier the habit becomes.
7. Social accountability. Friends, teams, and shared goals pull people back in ways solo progress rarely can.
8. Short session satisfaction. Lower the cost of a single session and people come back more often.
9. Permanent progress guarantee. Even a “failed” session should move something forward. Punishing loss with zero progress is how you lose users after one bad day.
10. Scarcity and FOMO. Time-limited content creates urgency. It’s also the easiest mechanic to overuse, so treat it as a light touch rather than a core system.

What good integration actually looks like

Here’s the distinction that matters most, and it’s easy to miss.

A lot of products stop at: you complete an action, you earn a currency, and that currency just sits in a wallet, disconnected from everything else. It doesn’t unlock anything, doesn’t move any other track, doesn’t create a new goal. It looks like gamification, but nothing behind it is actually connected.

The version that works ties a single action to three answers at once: what did I just get, how did this help me this week, and how does this move me toward something bigger. One action unlocks something visible right now, while quietly advancing a mid-term and a long-term track in the background.

Gamification only works when it’s built into the core loop. Anything bolted on afterward just sits on the surface.

A retention loop you can build in a week

You don’t need eight currencies and a battle pass to apply this. A minimal version looks like this:

Step 1: Daily bonus. No requirements. Show up, get something small. This is purely a login-habit mechanic.

Step 2: Manual collection. Don’t auto-credit rewards. Make the user actively claim them: a tap, a small animation, half a second of ceremony. Automatic rewards barely register. Claimed ones feel earned.

Step 3: Multi-goal feedback. The moment a reward is claimed, show what it moved: progress on a short-term goal and a mid-term milestone. One action, two visible wins.

Step 4: A completion bonus. Finish everything for the day, unlock one extra reward: a badge, a small bonus, anything that marks “today counted.”

Chain those four steps together and you get: daily bonus → action → reward collection → multi-goal progress → completion bonus → next action. A user who opened your product to do one small thing gets pulled through a sequence of rewards and new goals without you asking them to do anything extra.

The takeaway

A well-built game is, underneath the skins and sound effects, a disciplined retention system. Nothing is ever a dead end, and every action quietly answers “what’s next” before the player has to ask. That discipline is worth borrowing, whatever you’re building.

What Brawl Stars Can Teach You About Retention (Even If You’re Not Building a Game) was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.