Pay to Win? The Relationship Between Resource Inequality and Competitive Advantage in Clash Royale

Mobile video games constitute a large and fast-growing industry, engaging more than 2.85 billion players and generating roughly $92.6 billion in annual transactions. This paper asks whether such games are genuinely competitive, or whether in-game progression systems allow players who hold greater resources to gain systematic advantages—so-called pay-to-win. We assemble the largest hand-crafted dataset of 100,000 micro-level match records for Clash Royale, one of the longest-enduring and most popular mobile games, and use it to proxy pay-to-win behavior. We test whether investing more resources in the game predicts greater competitive success, and whether any such relationship is driven by resource advantages rather than by experience or player ability. The evidence indicates that progression-based competitive advantage can function as a monetization strategy by strengthening players' incentives to spend in order to stay competitive. These findings suggest that contemporary progression systems blur the line between skill-based competition and financially driven advantage, and—given the addictive character of these games—that they may impose real financial costs on players.