Supercell wants to make new mistakes, not repeat old ones, as it reports record 2024 results with $3 billion in revenue

Supercell has reported its 2024 results with traditional remarks from CEO Ilkka Paananen. Here’re the key takeaways from the statement, including the company’s financial performance last year.

Financial highlights

According to its 2024 report, Supercell reached a record $3 billion in revenue last year, up 77% from 2023.
EBITDA grew 78% year-over-year to $947 million.
Note that the company has now decided to report figures “before deferral” (bookings that are calculated as deferred payments such, as in-game purchases, and that are typically recognized as revenue in the future) to “give a more transparent view on what our year actually looked like.”
In 2024, Supercell paid corporate taxes of €41 million in Finland, compared to €110 million in 2023.
The company’s headcount grew 31% year-over-year to 686 employees.

Game results and taking risks

According to Paananen, 2024 was the best year for Supercell ever, with all of the studio’s games growing in revenue for the first time since 2014. It was also a record year in terms of gross revenue.
Supercell’s game portfolio surpassed 300 million monthly active users (MAU) globally.
Brawl Stars continues to scale and drive the company’s growth even six years after its global launch. The game “doubled, tripled, quadrupled (and more) its metrics, especially players, engagement, and revenue.”
Squad Busters surpassed $100 million in revenue during the first seven months of launch. However, it failed to meet the team’s expectations, with Paananen saying that these results reflect the “challenge of launching new games today at Supercell and, I believe, across the industry.”
As for its game pipeline, Supercell continues to develop monster hunting game mo.co, as well as action RPG roguelite Project R.I.S.E.

Despite its lower-than-expected performance, Supercell has no plans to abandon Squad Busters. Paananen acknowledges it is becoming increasingly difficult to launch new games in a market environment where most playtime is spent on evergreen hits that are six years old or older.

He also recalled how Supercell almost killed Brawl Stars before launch, but the team decided to take a risk and present to a global audience after running a 500-day Beta. The same is true for Squad Busters, with the game’s lead Eino Joas saying that “we do not want to become a company that is so tied up with success that we don’t dare risk failure.”

With Squad Busters, Supercell wanted to create a game that appeals to everyone. However, it ended up not being perfect for anyone. “Casual audiences have a hard time finding it since it looks like a battle game, something they are not naturally drawn to,” Joas explained. “For mid-core audiences the game appears too simple, easy, lacking depth and feeling that it is a skill-based game.”

The team now better understands Squad Busters’ true audience, planning to make bold changes to the game in 2025 based on the feedback they collected.

According to Paananen, Supercell wants to create an environment where developers feel safe to take big risks, while learning from their mistakes. Here’s the studio’s motto: “We do not want to repeat our mistakes, we want to make new mistakes!”

Supercell is about teams, not games

“We believe in greenlighting teams, not games,” Paananen said, adding that a successful game can’t be built without a strong team. Last year, Supercell launched the Spark incubator to nurture new talented teams, both in-house and outside the company.
Under this program, various developers go through game jams and prototyping to see which of them are capable of creating full-fledged games at Supercell. 30 developers have already participated in this Spark, forming five new game teams.
One of the lessons learned during this process was that external ideas bring “different creativity, hunger, and ambition to create something at our scale, and do not have the burden of our previous successes.”
Building strong teams is essential for Supercell to take more creative risks and keep making new games. As Paananen pointed out, he loves feeling like the “least powerful CEO,” trusting developers who learn from their mistakes and set new ambitious goals to achieve.
The company also plans to scale the teams already involved in the development of live games. This strategy has proven its worth with Brawl Stars, which is now supported by 60-80 devs. The team can now implement more changes and test various ideas while better balancing risks.
According to Brawl Stars lead Frank Keienburg, establishing an involved team that doesn’t feel much pressure leads to “higher levels of creativity, high appetite for risk-taking, better decisions” and ultimately better game updates.