If You Like Brawl Stars and ARC Raiders, You'll Love MISFITZ

Two of our favorite games of the last few years live in completely different worlds. Brawl Stars: 70 million monthly players, three-minute matches, the phone in your pocket. ARC Raiders: a slower thing, on PC, where the best moments are forming a temporary alliance with a stranger and watching them turn on you 50 meters from extract. They don't look anything alike. They feel almost the same. Both are about people, not gunplay.

What Brawl Stars Got Right

Brawl Stars is one of the most-played mobile games of all time. Top-down perspective, three-minute matches, characters with abilities, no inventory grid you have to fight with. 70 million monthly players. Eight years live. One of the rare mobile games where if you say the name in a non-gamer room, half the room knows what you're talking about.

The reason it worked is that it didn't try to be a PC game on a phone. The team started from where players actually were: holding the device with two thumbs, in transit, with maybe four minutes before the bus came. Top-down so your thumbs don't cover what you're trying to see. Auto-aim so the skill is positioning. Three minutes so it fits between things. Frank Yan worked on the version of the game where those decisions got locked in.

What ARC Raiders Got Right

ARC Raiders is the opposite kind of hit. PvPvE extraction on PC and console, 14 million copies sold, and the moments players actually share are never the shootouts. They're the negotiations. The voice-chat moment where a stranger asks for help and you have to decide whether to help them, ignore them, or shoot them in the back.

ARC Raiders made it about other people, and the gear is just what makes the betrayal expensive. That switch sounds small in a paragraph and is enormous in practice. It's the difference between a game where losing is annoying and a game where losing is a story you tell at dinner.

The Game in the Middle

MISFITZ is being built by ex-Supercell and ex-King developers. The CPO and lead game designer, Frank Yan, was a senior game designer on Brawl Stars. The CEO, Brice Laville Saint-Martin, was Art Director on Clash Royale at Supercell for seven years. The CTO, Andre Parodi, was Technical Director on Candy Crush at King.

Worth saying out loud: this is our game. We're not pretending to be neutral about it. But we're also not making the connection up. Frank wanted to leave Supercell because he wanted stakes that Brawl Stars wasn't built for. The night the MISFITZ idea actually clicked, he'd just been betrayed by a teammate in a Tarkov raid 50 meters from extract. He took off his headset and said: "This. But on a phone. In five minutes." That sentence is what we've been building for two years.

MISFITZ is what came out. Top-down like Brawl Stars. Five-minute matches like Brawl Stars. Auto-aim like Brawl Stars. Six characters with abilities like Brawl Stars. Then the second half: extraction stakes, alliances and betrayals, proximity chat so you can actually hear the stranger lying to you. The format from Brawl Stars, the weight from ARC Raiders. That's the entire pitch.

Brawl Stars vs ARC Raiders vs MISFITZ

Why the Bridge Matters

The interesting part of combining these two isn't the design exercise. It's the audiences. There are tens of millions of Brawl Stars players who'd enjoy more weight on a phone, and millions of ARC Raiders players who don't play on PC and would love a mobile-native equivalent. Both audiences exist. There isn't much built specifically for them yet.

We're probably not the only studio that's noticed. We're bringing two halves together: people who actually shipped one of those games, plus an explicit design choice around the social mechanics that made the other one memorable. If we ship this well, MISFITZ becomes the place those two audiences meet.

The gap is real either way. If you came up on Brawl Stars and want more weight, or you came in through ARC Raiders and want this on the device you actually carry, this post exists so you know we're trying.

Frequently Asked Questions

What games are like Brawl Stars and ARC Raiders combined?

MISFITZ is the only game that explicitly combines them. Top-down mobile-native format from Brawl Stars. Extraction stakes and social trust mechanics from ARC Raiders. Built by ex-Brawl Stars and ex-Clash Royale developers.

Is ARC Raiders coming to mobile?

Embark Studios has not officially announced a mobile version. Industry chatter points to a possible 2027 port. Until then, MISFITZ is the closest mobile equivalent — same social PvPvE design philosophy, built for phones from day one.