The CEO of Supercell recognized the concept of small teams as untenable: "This is one of my main mistakes"

Supercell has always been known for the ability to “kill” unsuccessful games and develop them by small teams. However, the CEO of the company Ilkka Paananen (Ilkka Paananen) called such a concept erroneous. He explained in detail the reasons for its insolvency and outlined a new course of development for Supercell.

At the beginning of his program address, Paananen pointed out two key problems faced by the Finnish studio.

Firstly, none of the successful Supercell games have shown strong growth over the past few years, despite the total revenue of Clash of Clans and Clash Royale of more than $10 billion. Secondly, the company has not conducted a global launch of a single new title since Brawl Stars (released in December 2018).

Why did this happen?

“We noticed that we were so entrenched in our old beliefs that in some cases we simply could not fully meet the needs of our players,” Paananen said.

Based on this, the head of Supercell openly admitted the inconsistency of certain points in the company’s development strategy.

The problem of small teams

• Historically, Supercell has adhered to the concept of small teams. This helped the studio to create innovative products, experiment and generally accelerate the development process.
• Paananen is convinced that large companies fail precisely because they are afraid to take risks and try to adhere to ready-made formulas for success.
• This approach allowed the company to launch several games in softlonch and then easily “kill” them in case of failure. This was already the case, for example, with Hay Day Pop, which closed after earning $ 1 million.
• However, here lies the main mistake of Supercell. Small teams not only made new games, but also continued to operate them, starting from the beta testing stage.
• Small creative teams are excellent at developing concepts and creating potentially successful projects. However, they are completely unsuitable for long-term support and meeting all the needs of a growing user base.
• For this reason, Paananen stated that Supercell needs to change the course initially chosen. Otherwise, the company simply will not be able to reach new heights and grow further.

Definitely, this is one of the main mistakes among many that I have made throughout my career. I'll remember her forever. Considering that thanks to our culture we are used to celebrating failures, I deserve a big bottle of champagne.

Ilkka Paananen

CEO of Supercell

How will Supercell’s strategy change?

• The company will abandon the “small teams”. Now their size will be determined based on the type of a particular game and the development phase in which it is located.
• Supercell has already decided to slightly expand the size of the teams that operate its games services. The studio is also gradually introducing new tools, technologies and pipelines.
• On average, titles are now supported by 20-35 people. According to Paananen, it’s still a small team by the standards of the gaming industry. However, this is a big step forward for Supercell.
• It is important that the concept of independent teams (or “cells”, as Supercell calls them) will remain the same. The studio still believes that it is necessary to fully trust the selected people and give them full creative freedom to implement ideas.
• Supercell intends to fight burnout. The need to support projects remotely by a small group of people often led to health problems for individual team members.
• Paananen believes that this is the wrong approach. Now the company will adhere to the following principle: you can not sacrifice the health of the team for the sake of producing more content for the players.

Future plans

• Supercell continues to work on improving Everdale — an urban planning game, the beta version of which was released last year. According to Paananen, the company is so far satisfied with the feedback from the players.
• In April 2021, the studio announced three games in the Clash universe. The CEO of Supercell noted that two of them are already in beta testing. In addition, the early announcement allowed the company to be more transparent to the players.
• In addition, seven more unannounced games are in development. However, the studio is not ready to share details yet.
• Paananen does not deny that some of these projects will not live to release. The company will continue to “kill” unsuccessful projects. However, now she will give more resources to her development and support teams. This applies to both future and already launched titles in the global release.
• Supercell hopes this will help it release more successful games in the future. Now the team will go into a global release only if it is fully confident in the readiness of the project.
• The company will continue to invest in studios that practice a similar approach to development. Supercell has already supported Beatstar (the highest-grossing music game in the world), Merge Mansion (over 20 million downloads) and Love & Pies (received the TIGA Awards for the best casual game of 2021).
• The studio has launched the Level Up program. Within its framework, six university graduates can unite in one team and create a playable prototype of the game in six months. Thus, the company wants to learn from young talents and attract not only experienced developers to its ranks.
• Supercell is looking for founders to open a new studio in North America. Its tasks will include the development of games for different platforms — not only for mobile.

Finally, Paananen commented on Supercell’s financial results for 2021 (the company demonstrated revenue and profit growth): “We are inspired by Nintendo, which has been building its company for more than 100 years. Such financial results allow us to continue investing in the creation of even better games, take risks and improve the support of titles for more than 250 million people who play our projects monthly.”