This week, I wanted to reflect on the ethics and mechanics of randomness by diving into Squad Busters, a game I’ve recently been seeing everywhere. It’s the newest release from Supercell, the creators of Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars, and it’s available on mobile. I played on IOS. It’s chaotic, colorful, and at first glance, pretty fun. But after playing for a few days, it became clear that this is more than just a casual brawler. This is a game built around chance, carefully designed to keep players hooked, confused, and ideally, spending.
Like other live service games, Squad Busters uses a gacha model. You earn or buy chests that contain randomized characters and upgrades. These chests are central to your progression. But what stood out to me was how deeply this randomness is layered throughout the game. You don’t just rely on chance to get new busters. You also rely on it to win. Matches themselves are shaped by what characters you get, who spawns nearby, and what power-ups show up. There’s an illusion of control, but that illusion quickly fades when you realize how often victory comes down to luck.
To break it down more clearly, we can use the MDA framework. The mechanics are simple. You smash crates, collect gold, build your squad, and try to outlast other players. But the pool of characters you can choose from is based on the first random buster you get. This sets off a chain reaction. The characters available for the rest of the match are limited to that starting group. And during the match, the upgrades and items that appear are also randomized. All of this creates dynamics where the player doesn’t have full control over their strategy. One game, I started with a great character and coasted through. Another time, I lost immediately because my opponents had better draws. It wasn’t because I played worse. I just had worse luck.
This reminded me of the article Designing Chance. In that reading, we learned that randomness can be used to add tension and excitement. In something like Dungeons & Dragons, a dice roll can heighten the stakes of a moment. But in Squad Busters, randomness doesn’t feel like it’s there to add excitement. It feels like it’s there to slow you down and nudge you toward spending. Chests take time to open unless you pay. Character upgrades are tied to duplicates that are randomly found. And the most powerful characters seem to be locked behind either time investment or payment.
In the photo below, there is an image of the item shop in which players can buy characters to try to improve their squads. This rotating item shop popularized by Fortnite is one in which players become excited once the character they’ve been looking for finally appears. Thus, they are likely to buy it.
The other reading for this week talked about live service games as the “living dead.” These are games that don’t grow because they have something new or meaningful to offer. They grow because they keep people coming back. Squad Busters is a perfect example. It doesn’t have deep lore (if any lore at all…), a compelling story, or even long-term strategy. It survives by keeping players in a loop of chance. This loop is powerful. It creates near-misses, social comparison, and the feeling that you’re always just one chest away from leveling up your character and gaining a new ability. But when the design becomes more about keeping people playing than helping people enjoy is when the game crosses a line for me.
I think randomness in games is not inherently bad. In fact, I really enjoy it when it adds to the experience or creates funny or surprising moments. But when randomness is used to gate progress, mask imbalance, or pressure players into spending, it becomes something else. It becomes predatory. Especially when the target audience includes younger players who might not understand what is happening.
If I were to suggest changes to Squad Busters, I would start by increasing transparency. Players should see the odds for character unlocks. I would make it possible to make significant progress without relying on duplicates. And most importantly, I would remove pay-to-win elements from gameplay. Additionally, I would go the Fortnite route of making paid items purely cosmetic.. That way, people who love the game can still support it without feeling like they are being forced to pay to compete.
In the end, Squad Busters taught me a lot about how chance can be used in design. But it also raised questions about fairness, clarity, and ethics. When randomness becomes the foundation of a game rather than a small part of it, we have to ask who the game is really designed for, players or money?
