Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen – How an Early Pivot Led to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’

Introduction

Ilkka Paananen: Many of the best things we’ve learned have actually come through those failures, which has led to me think that: are these failures even failures in the first place? I mean, should we even call them failures?

Maybe we should just call them, like, experiments. And sometimes experiments are, you know, or have a hypothesis. And sometimes the hypothesis proves to be true; sometimes it proves to be false. 

But in either case, you learn something new—and maybe that’s how we should think about new games as well.

Roelof Botha: Welcome to Crucible Moments, a podcast about the decisions and inflection points that defined some of the most consequential companies of our time. I’m your host and the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha.

 I used to think of games as belonging to one of two categories: on the one hand, you have games that require weeks of your life to gain basic proficiency—and then pull you into a vortex for a year or more, where you can spend hours playing each week. On the other hand, you have games that are casual, lightweight, with simple game mechanics: brain teasers, puzzles—the kind of game you return to casually while waiting in line.

Supercell—the Finnish game studio behind massive titles such as Clash of Clans, Hay Day, and Brawl Stars—managed to create a third category of games. These are mobile experiences built with easy on-ramps but incredible depth, and innovative strategic and social features that keep players engaged for years. 

 In its 15-year history, Supercell has only released a handful of titles, yet nearly all of them have become chart-topping hits with remarkable staying power. Time and again, the company has defied the churn of the mobile games industry by obsessing over detail, killing more projects than it ships, and empowering small teams to think like independent studios. 

Today we’ll explore Supercell’s early pivot to focus exclusively on mobile gaming, how the company rapidly broke into markets where other gaming giants failed, and how it took a hard look inward to reignite growth when momentum began to stall. The result: billions in revenue, millions of daily players, and a reputation as the rare mobile developer whose name inspires the same reverence as a console giant. 

This is the story of how Supercell quietly rewrote the rules of mobile gaming.

Ilkka Paananen: My name is Ilkka Paananen, and I’m the, uh, one of the Co-Founders and the CEO of Supercell.

I studied, uh, industrial engineering here at the, uh, in Helsinki, in the University of Technology. It was sort of a, kinda business track of a technical university. Then most of my classmates, they basically, like, either went to, like, investment banking or management consulting.

And I was one of the odd ones out who was actually got interested about entrepreneurship. And I just wanted to, basically, found my own company or be part of a startup—which was relatively, like, uh, not that common thing to do in Finland at that time.

I got super lucky. I bumped into these guys who wanted to found their company, and it happened to be a games company. I joined—and, and all of these guys were game developers. So all they wanted to do was develop games, and then they needed somebody to do everything else, like, including, you know, all the boring stuff like sales and admin and finance and that type of stuff.

And, and they couldn’t really to pay anybody any salaries, and I was probably the only applicant. So they, they got me—and, and you know, there I was. I, I think was 22 years of, of age and, and, uh, obviously had never really had a, a real job. Had no idea what I was doing. I’d only read about business in from books in, in university.

These guys, like, they’re, um, trying to figure out what should they call me. And, and then they thought that, “Well, if you are gonna be selling our games, you need a title with credibility.” They couldn’t come up with anything else, so they started to call me the CEO. 

Roelof Botha: While Ilkka’s establishment as CEO of Sumea was somewhat haphazard, he excelled in the role—growing the company to nearly 60 employees before it sold to Digital Chocolate, founded by EA’s Trip Hawkins.

Roelof Botha: The first time I met Ilkka in person was actually at a Sequoia event. I’d been wanting to meet Ilkka for a very long time, and we went for a lovely walk around the gardens of this hotel where we were staying in Scotland.

Digital Chocolate was doing well as a business, and Ilkka had obviously made a big impression on this company, uh, with what he did for them in Europe. 

Roelof Botha: But as the company evolved, Illka began to feel that some of the business’s processes—even the ones that he put in place—were flawed.

Ilkka Paananen: I essentially, like, created this organization that was a relatively, like, process-driven and somewhat hierarchical as well—as were, like, all the other games companies at that time as well. 

Over time, I start to realize that actually, like, these processes and, and all these well-thought-out systems don’t really matter unless you have the best people—the best creative people. And oftentimes, what tends to happen at, especially at the successful games companies, that sometimes these game developers who actually build the games, they sort of lose control.

And if the control, like, moves, like, somewhere outside the the developers and, and the game teams—and, and to the upper management and, and so forth—that actually doesn’t really make sense, because ultimately, actually it is the game developers who know what’s best for their game and what’s best for the players.

And then this idea kinda started to grow on me and my fellow co-founders that: what if you would found a completely new type of games company, and we, we would almost, like, flip the organizational chart upside down? 

Meaning that instead of, like, the upper management and the leadership, like, owning the vision what type of games the company, uh, produces, what if that vision would be owned by the individual game teams?

Maya Hoffree: It’s exactly the opposite of the traditional hierarchy structure. The idea here is that we actually give the power to the people who are closest to the product—who are closest to the game—uh, to drive those decisions.

My name is Maya Hoffree. I am the General Manager of Hay Day at Supercell.

I think kinda like what we like to look at it is just, um, like a record label. Like, in a record label, the managers are not gonna tell the artist what to play and what to do—so why should it be different in the gaming industry? So how do we make sure that the people who are actually working on the game are the one who have this full creative decision-making?

Ilkka Paananen: We start to think these individual game teams as very kind of their own, or almost as their own companies—their own little startups within the greater company. And we start to call these startups or these teams “cells.” And then we asked ourselves like, “Okay, what should then they call the entire company?”

And then that led us to the name, Supercell. But the whole idea was that: let’s give the power to the game developers, and, and let’s make them the superstars of the company.

Ilkka Paananen: When we founded Supercell, the vision was that we wanted to create games that would be played by as many people as possible. So we wanted to, like, design games for the widest possible audience, but then also, uh, create games that have this longevity—games that people would actually play for months and months, and if not for years and years.

It was a very radical idea because the whole market was, you know, filled with these games that would shoot up the charts one day, and then, a few weeks later, like, nobody would be playing that game anymore. And we wanted to change that. 

Following that sort of thinking, like, we, we were asking ourselves that: what is the games platform that has the widest possible reach? And, you know, and remember, now it’s 2010—and at that time, it actually was Facebook.

Roelof Botha: Supercell’s initial ambition was to create browser-based games that could be played across PCs and, eventually, on mobile devices—then a burgeoning market. 

In 2011, the company released its first title, a Facebook-connected game for browsers called Gunshine. Off the strength of Gunshine’s initial metrics and the promise of its ability to scale across platforms, Supercell raised its Series A.

But soon after this initial investment, the team began to see that Gunshine wasn’t catching on the way they had hoped.

Joost van Dreunen: While social network-based gaming had been on the up and up for a while, by 2010, 2011, um, you know, that market had been saturated.

And in many ways, also, um, you know, Facebook at the time had institutionalized these new rules and, like, you know, policies around monetization that just made it much more difficult for companies to do well. 

My name is Joost van Dreunen. I am the CEO of ALDORA, and I teach on the business of video games at New York University Stern School of Business.

Supercell’s title, that they launched on Facebook—a game called Gunshine—it didn’t really go very well.

As Facebook kind of came up and realized that a lot of game developers were just spamming people on their timelines and so on, they started to close that down a little bit, and it just made it a harder platform to, to do well. So in other words, like, the, the, the growth spurt that a platform like that would have started to ebb away.

Ilkka Paananen: Once we start to scale the game, we realize that, that actually the metrics do not scale—and this game actually isn’t working out. And this game won’t be one that lots of people will play for, for, for years. 

And then just a few months after we had literally raised the Series A—uh, at this, partly on this promise of this successful game—we decided to kill the game, kill Gunshine.

I grew up with, like, playing Nintendo games, and Nintendo as a company—and their games—have always been big inspiration for me. And, and if you can set the bar that high, you know, it was very clear that they were nowhere near reaching that type of quality and, and uh, that, that type of company.

I shouldn’t call it an easy decision—it’s any, anything but easy—but I, I guess it was the ambition, and we believed, uh, in our vision so much that we just didn’t see any other way. 

Roelof Botha: Just months after their first game’s big public release, Supercell scrapped the project and returned to the drawing board, where they faced a crucible decision: was a cross-platform strategy the best path forward, or should they pivot the company and narrow their focus on an emerging new technology?

Ilkka Paananen: We noticed the rise of tablets and, and mobile. And as we were sort of exploring that platform, we sort of figured out that actually from our point of view, there actually aren’t that many great games built for this platform that would actually, like, truly take advantage of what the platform is all about, which is that, first of all, the user interface is very, very different. You know, it’s touch UI, and most games where, at that point, there almost felt like ports, like from our platforms to this, like, touch UI platform.

So we wanted to create something that is true and native to the platform.

And the other big thing that we totally believed in was that we wanted to create games that were, like, truly social. So that the social feature isn’t just, you know, inviting your friends and spamming them and, and trying to get that viral spread going on, but the social play would be actually, you truly play with other people.

Joost van Dreunen: The big risk for Supercell by going all in on mobile was sort of an obvious one, in that, uh, you just raised the Series A, you know, total like $12 million, and you have this cross-platform thesis. And oh, by the way, we’re going to, we’re gonna scrap all of that. We’re gonna kill our MMO, we’re gonna take Gunshine off the market, and we’re gonna go this entirely other direction.

Like, it takes a lot of stones to do something like that, right?

Roelof Botha: Keep in mind, the App Store was barely three years old, and early smartphones weren’t capable of the sophisticated graphics they are today. By exiting cross-platform gaming, Supercell risked alienating players who still preferred browser-based games or didn’t have a smartphone.

But the team saw where the world was heading. Touchscreens weren’t just a novelty—they were becoming the primary way people interact with games. Supercell decided to make the risky bet, going all in on mobile.

Ilkka Paananen: Obviously, like, it wasn’t the most pleasant call to make. I, I remember back in the day, like, you know, telling somebody who has just invested, you know, €8 million—obviously believing in, in the first game—and, and telling that, okay, like, you know, two pieces of news, like.

First of all, this game isn’t working out. And by way, the, the platform strategy that they all believed in isn’t working out either. And they’re gonna throw everything that we’ve built so far, you know, down the toilet and we’re gonna focus on tablets and mobile.

You know, we’ve always thought that the biggest risk is not to take risks. And yes, like, we probably could have built a, like, an, an average, you know, reasonably sized business, even with the existing strategy—focusing on, on Facebook games and slowly iterating and making them better and doing incremental improvements.

But, you know, it, it wasn’t anywhere near close to our ambition.

Fail Early, Fail Smart

Roelof Botha: Once the decision was made to focus entirely on games for mobile devices, Ilkka and the company’s “cells” of developers dove into designing gaming experiences that stood out from everything else on the market—games that were easy to learn, had bold visual design and imaginative social aspects that rewarded collective play.

In the process, Supercell also forged an ethos that would become a cornerstone of company culture.

Ilkka Paananen: We are, like, a, at least somewhat famous for celebrating failures.

Like, many of the best things—and many of the best things we’ve learned—have actually come through those failures, which has led to me think that: are these failures even failures in the first place? I mean, should we even call them failures?

Maybe we should just call them, like, experiments. And sometimes experiments are, you know, or have a hypothesis. And sometimes the hypothesis proves to be true; sometimes it proves to be false. 

But in either case, you learn something new—and maybe that’s how we should think about new games as well.

Roelof Botha: Ilkka adopted the philosophy of “failing early and failing smart.” 

Maya Hoffree: The philosophy of fail early, fail smart is actually true in practice in the day-to-day. 

If we break that down into two parts, there is the first part, which means that’s fail early. Uh, so let’s do it quick. Let’s try to understand before we spend too much time and too much effort, uh, and budget on something that doesn’t resonate with players. 

So that’s makes that we get to players as fast as possible. And then fail smart is—it, it’s not smart if we didn’t learn from it. 

Um, so we don’t hide our failures—quite the opposite. We celebrate it.

Joost van Dreunen:  Supercell is pretty strict when it comes to metrics. They look for specific numbers, certain thresholds to be met. And they are rigorous in that. So they look at a variety of different numbers. 

Um, every morning they send around a company-wide email with all of the metrics for all their titles to show everybody. It’s sort of—they, they love that transparency. 

If something doesn’t meet a threshold, it gets shut down. And so criteria are like: growth of the audience—is it working regionally in a way that we expect it to? They go and do soft launches.

And so they have this very rigorous, analytics-based approach of: once we build it, then we test it against the market. And we look for certain numbers in that effort. 

And only when they reach those thresholds, do they get the next round—the next, you know, budget, the next phase or milestone in the process.

Roelof Botha: “Fail early and fail smart” came into practice with the soft launch of Pets vs. Orcs, Supercell’s first mobile title—which you probably don’t remember. When retention fell short, Ilkka and his team didn’t wait a year and a half to accept defeat. The project was swiftly shut down, and the company got back to work—but not before establishing what would become a Supercell tradition.

Ilkka Paananen: When we killed our first, uh, game—this game called Pets versus Orcs—it was a mobile game. And I still remember fondly, I was sitting at the lunch, you know, together with the, the lead of that, that game team who was telling me that, “Hey, in the afternoon I’m gonna just get the whole company together, and I’m just gonna, like, share, like, what we learned through, through this failure.”

I was thinking to myself that, “Wow, it’s probably gonna be a bit sad. So what could I do to kind of cheer it up a little bit?”

And then I just had this idea that I’ll just get a few bottles of champagne and I’ll just give them to the team, and we can all, you know, have them together—and maybe that’ll make it a bit more, more fun. And then I did exactly that, and people thought it was sort of funny. 

And the next time when we killed a game, did the same thing. And then this thing started to live its sort of own life—and that tradition is still very much alive. 

Roelof Botha: Many companies have talked about wanting to have innovative cultures, and I’ve heard many companies talk about the need to celebrate failure. 

I think the reality is that very few do, because it’s hard—it’s very hard for people to accept that. 

And I think part of what Supercell has done well is they’ve, they’ve sort of leaned into that, uh, very aggressively and deliberately, where they make a show of this celebration so that it’s not just paying lip service to this idea.

And I think that’s part of why the culture has been so incredibly innovative.

Roelof Botha: In the summer of 2012, Supercell’s commitment to learning from failure paid off. The company soft-launched its new game, Hay Day—a farming simulator where players grow crops, raise animals and trade goods.

Ilkka Paananen: I, I still remember when we launched Hay Day, and then the first metrics start to come in, and, and they were just incredibly good.

Like, we had never ever seen anything like that before. And they’re actually so good that at for, for first, maybe few days before that, there’s something wrong with our analytic systems.

’Cause all we had seen until that point were, like, metrics that were, were far worse. Um, then we sort of, like, verified the analytic system, and, and, you know, okay, there’s nothing wrong with it—these figures seem to be real.

The metrics, they, they held up. And that was an, like, incredible feeling. 

And then we, slowly, we start to realize that, hey, with Hay Day, we’ve actually, like, now we’ve found something. 

And then the exact same thing happened, uh, on Clash of Clans just a few months later. 

Roelof Botha: Clash of Clans—Supercell’s second global release for mobile in August 2012, and my favorite game—exploded in popularity out of the gate. 

Ilkka Paananen: It was a pretty, uh, incredible few months. 

I remember we were celebrating—we got to the 10,000, uh, daily active users. And we bought some kind of cake, and, and everybody at the office had it. 

And, and then maybe just a few days, even later, a week later, we got to, like, 50,000 daily active users.

And, and then we again get a cake. And then we go to 100,000, and then, you know, they just couldn’t believe it anymore. 

Okay, we get a cake—then we go to half a million daily active users, another cake—a million daily active users. 

And then this: okay, 10 million, 30 million, 50 million, 70 million, 100 million.

That’s a lot of cake.

Sometimes I still need to have to pinch myself to, like, say that it wasn’t a dream—or it, it actually did happen.

So the decision to, to kill Gunshine and, and, you know, pivot from Facebook to mobile, you know, why that was a pivotal moment for, for Supercell, you know, well, quite simply without that decision, like, Supercell wouldn’t be, uh, you know, the Supercell that they know, know today. And of course we got extremely lucky with the timing. It was a perfect time to do exactly that.

Expanding Without Relinquishing Control

Roelof Botha: By 2013, Hay Day and Clash of Clans were raking in an astonishing $2.4 million dollars in daily revenue. Riding the success of these titles, Supercell set its sights on global expansion—particularly in East Asia, a potentially massive market for mobile gaming. But with heavy regulation, language barriers and fierce local competition, the region had earned a reputation as “the great graveyard for Western gaming companies.”

Ilkka Paananen: One of our biggest dreams was, and still is, to build the world’s first truly global games company. 

You know, a company that actually not only does well in the West, but also does well in the East—and, you know, which has these true global hits, which is something that, you know, uh, hasn’t really been done before.

Roelof Botha: The Asian gaming market actually pioneered much of what we’ve seen evolve in the United States and Europe over the last 15 or so years.

And so, in some sense, the Asian market was really leading the world in innovating in around gaming—and specifically, then, around mobile gaming. If you think about the demographics of, uh, the Asian market, you also have many young people who, uh, even if they were living at home, probably didn’t have the sort of space, um, in their houses that, you know, an American family might have enjoyed—and that the mobile phone was even more the primary device that people used.

And so I think the Asian market had tremendous learnings that Western companies could benefit from, as they tried to improve their own businesses.

Ilkka Paananen: Maybe the biggest obstacle was a mental one—that we knew very well that most, if not all, of the Western games companies, like, haven’t really done well here. 

And, and, you know, and, and this story it kept repeating itself: so a Western game company arrives, uh, enters a market, high ambitions, a lot of excitement—and then leaves, like, two, three years later because nothing worked out.

And we tried to sort of learn from this. So we talked to quite a few people who had had the same experience. We tried to be very open-minded, and we actually spent quite a bit of time talking to, like, the local, you know, game deal scene and trying to understand what the market is, is about.

And that was a really humbling experience. And we start to realize, like, how incredibly difficult it will be. 

But at the same time, the market opportunity was so big that default that it, we, we should try. 

We decided to, you know, enter market—uh, the Japanese market. We opened up an office, hired local talent and off we went.

Roelof Botha: With the explosive growth of Hay Day and Clash of Clans, Supercell caught the eye of SoftBank—the Japanese conglomerate with a reputation for bold tech investments.

Ilkka Paananen: I actually met with Taizo Son, uh, who was the brother of Masa Son, the founder of SoftBank. 

And Taizo obviously had, had built this incredible games company with, uh, GungHo. And we got along really well. 

And, and then, a few weeks later, I think he asked me whether I would like to meet his brother, Masa. And then, of course, I, I, I wanted to meet with him—you know, obviously a huge, uh, legend and one of the best entrepreneurs of, of all time.

So I met with Masa, and, uh, and he was, you know, he was interested, like, in, in investing to us, or even buying the company. 

And then I basically just told Masa that, you know, we have absolutely no intentions to sell the company.

There’s still, like, so much opportunity left, and, you know, we will just keep on doing what we are doing.

Roelof Botha: Ilkka had the ambition and passion to keep building, and he was protective of Supercell’s unique creative culture. He felt it was too early—and too risky—to give up control at such a pivotal stage in the company’s growth. At the same time, he knew that a major investment would offer Supercell the critical resources and market insight to break into East Asia. But when he told Masa Son he wasn’t willing to sell the company, Masa’s response took him by surprise.

Ilkka Paananen: He said that, uh, “Well, that’s perfect, because I just wanna partner with you guys. And I’ll give your VCs some liquidity, and let me, like, buy, like, 51%. And even if I own the majority, you know, I’ll, I’ll give all the control back to you guys—the founders. 

Because I, I don’t really know much about games. I trust you guys, and all I want is that 51% economic interest in the company.” 

Obviously, it was a great outcome for the, the investors. 

Um, but it also a great outcome for us as founders, because we actually became even more independent after, after that deal—which is, might be counterintuitive. 

Roelof Botha: In October 2013, Softbank acquired 51% of Supercell for $1.53 billion—a decision that would pave the way for expansion into East Asia. 

Joost van Dreunen: One, one of the things I admire in this context is Supercell’s ability to, to, to not just, you know, have the press release say that they’re gonna stay mostly independent and they’re gonna be their own company after you get a big check from a firm like SoftBank. 

But they, they actually did. And the reason you find out then, of course, is because they wrote it into the deal, right? 

Um, they were able to keep their headquarters in Finland; decisions stayed with the team—right with the cells of Supercell’s organization. 

Um, and there was no real expectation of going public. 

Roelof Botha: Despite earning 51% of the company, SoftBank enabled Supercell to maintain incredible independence. 

Uh, I think that’s rare. I can’t think of any other examples where that has happened. 

And this was three years after the company was founded, which was an incredible achievement.

I can tell you, the rest of us were very disappointed when they got the SoftBank, uh, acquisition—my heart sank, ’cause it meant that Supercell would never be an investment opportunity for Sequoia anymore.

And that made me, that made me very sad.

26:42 – The Long Game

Roelof Botha: Fueled by the new investment, Supercell accelerated its expansion into the Asian market. A partnership with Japanese game studio GungHo—also majority-owned by SoftBank at the time—proved pivotal in helping the company crack the region.

In 2016, Supercell’s success drew the attention of Chinese tech giant Tencent. Tencent led a consortium to acquire an 84% stake in Supercell, valuing the company at $10.2 billion, making it Europe’s first “decacorn.” 

Joost van Dreunen: Again, Supercell managed to keep the SoftBank-style independence.

Tencent, I imagine, relented on a lot of this because Supercell was such a juggernaut at the time. It was so successful. For a company like Tencent, an—a unique opportunity to buy its way into a global audience, right?

Tencent was clearly looking beyond its own boundaries.

Ilkka Paananen: I think SoftBank and, and Masa, they have this very long-term vision in a very similar way that Tencent has a very long-term vision, and they are both, like, extremely patient as, as sort of shareholders and, and partners.

So it, it sort of gave us the time what we needed, because, I mean, it just takes time to build great things. And, and, and it definitely takes time to build, uh, great games for, like, really tough markets like, say, Japan or, or China. 

So you have to have patience, and you need to have partners who, who have had patience. So we got that from SoftBank, and it has obviously continued with Tencent. 

It’s highly unlikely that you’re gonna have an overnight success in a market like, say, Japan or China. You have to be patient, and, you know, you have to learn something new every day—and just keep on getting better and better.

Two Birds, Two Stones

Roelof Botha: In 2018, Supercell released yet another hit game: Brawl Stars. But by 2020, its revenue began to wane. And while classics like Clash of Clans and Hay Day continued to generate revenue, no new titles were released. The company’s sales dipped, and by 2023, Supercell had slipped out of the top ten mobile game publishers for the first time in a decade.

Joost van Dreunen: So after 2018, Supercell seems to almost go offline in terms of new releases, right? So we get four multi-billion dollar releases, and then all of a sudden, nothing, right? What happened?

Ilkka Paananen: I think about the, the time after the sort of Brawl Stars release—um, there was, like, a few, few years where we are, we’re a little bit sort of stagnant, I would say, as a, as a company. 

So, first of all, like our live games weren’t growing—um, they’re basically flatlining. And the biggest reason, uh, behind that was that, uh, we just quite simply weren’t doing enough for our players.

Our teams were just, like, frankly too small. And, and they were just trying to do too much with too little.

In today’s world, I would say it’s never been this hard to, to launch successful new games. Obviously, the competition is, is tough. There’s, like, so many great games out there, and there are a lot of choice for the consumers, and, uh—the competition doesn’t only come from games. 

There’s, like, other forms of media—like social media, TikTok, these type of things—and they all, like, they’re all competing for people’s free time, and it’s tougher than ever. 

Joost van Dreunen: By 2018, the mobile games market is saturated. Everybody’s out there, everybody’s making games. The quality of games improves. 

There’s quite a bit of money sloshing around—both as investment money, uh, you know, as, uh, gaming is now this investible property.

The math started becoming much more, uh, strained for a lot of companies. I think it Brawl Stars, uh, you know, that was, uh, a success that they had. 

And after that, the economics of mobile gaming just made the metrics almost impossible to get off the ground—even if you were a Supercell. 

Roelof Botha: Supercell had reached another crucible moment. It needed to figure out how to release new games that could break through in what was now a crowded market while also breathing new life into its old titles.

Ilkka Paananen: It became very clear to me that we have to change things. 

I mean, if and when we wanna build this company that would last forever—if we wanna be any, anywhere close to, like, somebody like Nintendo—like, we have to change.

Roelof Botha: Reinvigoration is hard. It requires you to address the culture of organization. It requires you to set new goals, new targets. 

It requires inspirational leadership and a vision, and it requires effort. And that’s especially hard when you’ve been successful—because human tendency is to, is to relax and to enjoy the fruits of the incredible, uh, results that you’ve had.

And so, it requires a certain kind of obsession, and maybe an unhealthy drive, uh, to keep pushing and pushing. 

Roelof Botha: At a company offsite in August of 2023, Ilkka decided to confront the problem head-on. 

Ilkka Paananen: I opened my presentation with a super painful animated slide where I had, uh, Supercell’s, like, top-grossing ranking among the global publishers.

Starting from 2012, when I think we were number one. And then I think around maybe 2019 or ’20, we start to drop. And then it got to the point where we even dropped out of top 10—and, and year by year, I, I, I made all of us watch it. 

And I told everybody, “This is gonna be very painful, but I just wanna, like, open up everybody’s eyes, and I wanna get us to the same page where we are.”

In the same presentation, I, I, I talked about my own failures—and, and true to Supercell culture, had a very big bottle of champagne because the failures were so big. 

And obviously, like, ultimately all of this was, like, my fault—because I ultimately is the Founder and the CEO who was responsible for the culture.

Maya Hoffree: I actually—I joined a little bit before that offsite, so a week before. We were talking about this change and, and then kinda, like, really owning what it means. 

And I think that was super inspiring for me—to sit there and hear the CEO talk about a, take responsibility, but also kinda, like, calling out what he thought were mistakes and, and how, how we learned from them. 

It was clear that change was in the air and I think that was super interesting.

Roelof Botha: To encourage innovation in new games and to iterate on successful existing games, Ilkka proposed reorienting the company around a two-pronged strategy.

Ilkka Paananen: Our mistake was that we applied the exactly the same thinking to both of these, uh, very different problems. 

So then this sort of came up with this thinking that, “Okay, let’s start to again think about these new game teams as their own startups—and, and, you know, and they’re just apply everything that we’ve learned, and I’ve learned about the startup world to these new games.” 

And then they actually start to take a lot of, like, uh, lessons from a scale-up, uh, playbook and start to apply them to the live games. 

And we start to think these two areas of business, like, quite separate, actually. 

Roelof Botha: Illka dubbed the plan, “two birds, two stones.” Teams developing new games would be treated like startups: they would have creative freedom and maintain a small, nimble headcount. The company also launched a new incubator called Spark—a 16-week initiative to test new game ideas, giving creators funding, mentorship and space to see if their concepts could grow into full-fledged titles.

Meanwhile, existing games would be treated like established companies. They would be given resources to grow their teams—going from around a dozen employees per title to 60 or 70—so they could iterate at scale and revitalize Supercell’s classic games. These structures unleashed developer creativity.

Maya Hoffree: How do we make games that are always relevant? There’s always, kinda like, something to do and something happening in the game. 

It means that we need to, uh, understand how to create more content—and, and, and understand what our players want—and continue thinking: how do we improve their experience? How do we give them a more value, and how do we give them more fun and, and create those best-in-class experience that we’re trying to create here? 

But also, how do we strengthen, uh, their relationship with Hay Day—as a game and as a brand—and, and the messaging that the game is trying to create?

I think the other part is, uh, we really challenged our vision. What does Hay Day mean?

And, and just those small things—when we, we talked about Hay Day being a farming game—so is it just a farming game, or how do we expand that even higher and bigger than that? 

We did a very long workshop in which we, we re-looked at our vision, re-looked at our strategy—where are we going in?

And start thinking, “Okay, how do we secure the next ten years? How do we make sure that we continue on being relevant and continue to create this, uh, environment to as many people as possible—so they could play it for a very long time and will remember it forever.”

Roelof Botha: Brawl Stars became the biggest winner of Supercell’s scale-up strategy. It staged a remarkable resurgence, with revenue surging eightfold in nine months, between June 2023 and February 2024.  

Joost van Dreunen:  Rebounds in gaming are unusual—always, in, in, in every platform or category. So the, the rebound we saw around Brawl Stars was, uh, special in that sense too—uh, or unusual. Several years into its lifecycle, all of a sudden it starts to add players, engagement and revenue. Um, and it, I think, has a lot to do with the fact that it was just a little bit braver.

I think that they, uh, really put some creative thinking to ways in which they interact and provide touch points with their customer base. There is a huge amount of effort that goes into building a sort of community around Brawl Stars and, uh, evolving the different characters.

Ilkka Paananen: Brawl Stars was the team that was the first one to scale up their headcount. They start to get, like, critical mass of a team, and they learned how to work together. 

And then they just made, like, great updates to the game—essentially made the game better for the players.

And interestingly enough, like, now actually the other titles this year have followed suit. You just have that patience, and you have to, you know, no matter what, you just need to trust the team.

And, and that’s where what I’m actually super proud of. 

Roelof Botha: In 2024, Supercell also released Squad Busters—its first new title in six years.

Ilkka Paananen: With Squad Busters, like, obviously, it was a big moment for the company. We hadn’t put out a game out globally in many, many, many years, so it was, of course, a significant, uh, moment for us. You know, one of the best things about being in games is, is the moment when you ship a new game—you know, it’s just a such a unique moment.

And it really doesn’t happen that often. It’s still early days for that game, and we’ve been super open about, like, some of the issues that the game has, and, and we are, we wanna make it better.

And, and, you know, the team has been making some bold, bold changes. But, uh, uh, and it’s early days, of course, for the title—but it was a significant moment when the game came out.

Roelof Botha: Since recording this interview, Supercell announced it will stop developing Squad Busters.

While Squad Busters didn’t quite match the performance of Supercell’s previous mega-hits, it earned $100 million in its first seven months and—along with the resurgent legacy games—helped propel Supercell to a record-breaking year in 2024.

In true Supercell spirit, it was the Squad Busters team who made the call. It seems more champagne is in order.

Conclusion

Roelof Botha: From what I can tell from the outside, Supercell is thriving. The company made a whole series of decisions early on to build games that endure. 

In an environment or a market segment where there many sort of one-hit wonders—or games that, you know, quickly gain and then wane in popularity—Supercell has been steadfastly focused on building for the long term, building games that users can enjoy for many years or even a decade. 

And I think that’s truly remarkable and it really sets them apart as people who think on a different timeframe than their competitors.

Joost van Dreunen: You have to imagine, um, when Supercell was, you know, for 84% acquired by Tencent, it was worth more than Ubisoft. 

Ubisoft has 20,000 employees, and so it’s just an amazing exercise in terms of how successful people can be if you manage them correctly—if you find the right funding, if you match it with talent, and have the discipline and the courage to kind of walk that all the way through.

That’s, for me, the legacy for Supercell. I never mind that it’s in Finland, never mind that it’s mobile—those are cool things too—but it’s really just the efficacy of small, creative people, well-funded and on time.

Maya Hoffree: I think our legacy is to create games that are remembered forever.

Like, according to our mission—uh, uh, games that as many people as possible play forever, a long time, and remember them forever. 

And to make, uh, a more than just a game—but really, kinda like, a, an experience that people can relate to. 

Ilkka Paananen: We come back to this, this concept of, of failure, and, and I, I just believe more than ever that when you encounter something that feels like a failure, you know, you actually don’t know whether it’s a failure or is it not.

It, it actually might be the thing that will lead you to the next success. 

Games is a business that it’s super hard to, like, predict and, and, and forecast. So, so, like, you know, as a games company, really, like, what you should be focused on is, you know, just trying to have the best people, put together the best teams and make sure that those teams can operate in the best possible culture. 

And in the best culture, you know, how I define it, is the best culture is one where these teams can have a biggest possible impact—meaning that nothing is on, on their way. And the culture is, is almost like a fuel that you pour to a fire; and, you know, it makes everything even better. 

And it’s those type of things that, you know, so I feel that they should be very focused on. And then, you know, if you keep on doing that as best as we can—every single day, every single week, every single month—then you know, the outcome will follow.

But, but you should really, like, be laser-focused on the things you can control, which are, like, the people, the teams and the culture. And, and that’s, that is the most important thing that really matters.

Roelof Botha: This has been Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.