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Ilkka Paananen’s lengthy annual musings do offer signals as to where Supercell is heading next, if you look hard enough.
His latest 1,000 word blog, published on Tuesday morning as part of Supercell’s financials, shows the exec in typically humble mood, acknowledging some of the disappointment around the Squad Busters launch while also saying he had absolutely nothing to do with that big Brawl Stars comeback.
During an hour-long earnings briefing, digested here, Supercell boss Paananen and head of live games Sara Bach didn’t really give much away about what’s next. But look a bit closer and I think you can take away three big things:
- Supercell wants to launch more games, more often, after years of holding back
- It is increasingly comfortable behaving like other big mobile game-makers
- It is becoming more and more like an investor-incubator
Let’s run through these one-by-one, shall we?
Supercell wants to launch more games, more often, after years of holding back
Steve Jobs’ ‘Real artists ship’ quip might well be apocryphal, but it’s a cracker nonetheless. You can talk and test and trial all you want, but you’ve also got to just bite the bullet and launch stuff sometimes.
That’s the sentiment I get from Supercell’s Squad Busters launch post-mortem.
Paananen confirmed that the game has earned $100m since launch in May, but is still considered a bit of a disappointment internally. He then passed the mike to Eino Joas, who led the Squad Busters team through launch, to explain more:
“It had been 5+ years since launching Brawl, and as a company we really wanted to ship a great new game,” he said.
“We wanted to make sure we do not fall into the trap of “analysis paralysis,” and wanted to be bold, and take risks…we do not want to become a company that is so tied up with success that we don’t dare risk failure.”
A less charitable read of this might sense some external or management pressure to just launch a damn game. But assuming there wasn’t, it’s refreshing to see Supercell say that yes, launching a game is very hard, but we decided to do it anyway.
To be clear, a new launch hitting $100m in seven months is a rampant success for most companies. But effectively the thing Supercell was afraid of in the five years since Brawl Stars has now happened: it launched a game that isn’t an industry-shaking monster at all. Worse, it’s considered a disappointment.
And now we’re on the other side of it, it turns out that’s fine, actually. The lessons learned from Brawl Stars show us all that this is a marathon, not a sprint. And it may even have the opposite effect; elsewhere in the blog, Paananen says several times Supercell wants to take more risks – by ‘more risks’, I read ‘do more game launches’.
It is increasingly comfortable behaving like other big mobile game-makers
Supercell has quietly been doing quite a lot of UA in the last year. It has web shops. It has expanded its teams, and added the dreaded extra layers of management. It has split its teams in two, with some dedicated to running its live titles, and others testing new ideas and potential new launches.
You could argue none of this was true two years ago; this is also fine. It still runs very large games with very small teams. And you can’t keep everything the same forever; things get stale very quickly if you don’t. If that means looking and sounding more like most other game companies, so be it.
It is becoming more and more like an investor-incubator
It doesn’t get talked about much, but Supercell is currently working with a whopping 18 investee companies. It has remote teams in the US working on new game prototypes, and Paananen said that 30 game developers have been through its Spark program (which was exclusively revealed by mobilegamer.biz). Three of those game teams have been greenlit, and are now working full-time on their ideas.
That’s actually a ton of new games, isn’t it? And every one of these teams can see the path to actually joining the mothership – it’s one already trod by Space Ape, which is now in the process of becoming Supercell London.
So yes: quietly, Supercell’s interests stretch way beyond running its live games and making new titles like Mo.co and Project Rise.
After launching several industry-crushing hits in a row, Supercell appeared to be playing it safe a little. Perhaps it was labouring a little too hard under the idea that it only releases a very small number of very large games, built with very small teams. But that’s simply not true any more, and that’s a good thing.
