Supercell posted record revenue in 2024, with Brawl Stars noted as the star performer. But the Finnish firm also described new launch Squad Busters as “disappointing”, despite passing $100m since launch in May last year.
The Finnish firm announced its financial results and published its annual blog from CEO Ilkka Paananen this morning, and noted the contrasting fortunes of those two titles throughout. It described Brawl Stars’ comeback as “historic”, but also described the Squad Busters launch as “disappointing”, and said that it has not yet scaled up to the game team’s – or Supercell’s – aspirations.
Its financial results for the year, which Supercell presented before deferrals, were as follows:
2024 financials at-a-glance:
- Revenue of €2.8b or $3b, up 77% year-over-year (an all-time high)
- EBITDA of €876m or $947m, up 78%
- Supercell paid €41m in Finnish taxes
Other notable numbers:
- Supercell now has 686 staff, an increase of 31% since 2023
- There are about ten new games in the works
- Five new games teams have been added to Supercell through ‘Spark’, its game team incubator
- Supercell’s portfolio now has 300m monthly players
Further tidbits:
- Now that NextBeat owns Beatstar and Country Star, Supercell is in talks to move remaining Space Ape games Chrome Valley Customs, Fastlane and Transformers: Earth Wars “into new ownerships”, a Supercell spokesperson told us
- Supercell considers a “big” game team to be 60-80 people
- There are no plans to replace its recently-departed CMO, former King exec Fernanda Romano
- Supercell would not comment on how much it earns from its web stores
- Paananen also noted that, as we’ve reported before, Supercell is now effectively two companies, a ‘live’ game outfit and a ‘new game’ incubator
On Squad Busters, live games lead Sara Bach said that despite the positive signals during testing, Supercell realised after launch that “a lot of players want something different from this game than what we had thought”. She said to “expect some big and bold changes” to the game soon.
On new games, CEO Paananen noted that it continues to test Mo.Co and Project Rise, but can’t say if or when either will make it to launch. “When do these games actually come out? I can’t tell you, and the reason is that it’s not in my control,” he said, stating that the teams themselves will decide whether those games proceed to full launch.
What follows is a cleaned-up transcript of the post-presentation Q&A, attended by us and pocketgamer.biz. It has been edited for clarity and readability.
Pocketgamer.biz: Are there any regrets over launching Squad Busters so soon, what’s the reaction internally to the launch and how will its performance shape future releases?
Paananen: As you can imagine, there’s been a lot of discussion about that very thing. And of course we’re excited about the start and the fact that the game has crossed more than $100m in its first seven months.
It’s a promising start, but that said, truthfully, the thing about being a game team at Supercell is that the bar is incredibly high. And it’s fair to say that the Squad Busters game team’s aspirations are way, way higher. And the game is nowhere near their ambition level. And we’ve learned so much about the launch and what actually this larger mass of players want. And you know, I feel like the game team has a really great plan on how to shape the game so that it’ll fit better what [its players’] taste is.
So actually more people have joined the game team, and they’re in pursuit of this mission. So I think there’s actually quite a lot of excitement about it. But then, of course, we learned a lot from that launch…we had a number of sessions for the whole company, where we could talk about the learnings. And also, the nice thing is that, obviously, everything that they learned from the Squad launch, we can now apply to any future game launches.
Mobilegamer.biz: You said that the mobile market is flat overall – do you feel like growth is going to come in mobile, or are you looking elsewhere? Are you looking to PC, console, browser games, other platforms?
Paananen: I think the biggest single growth driver will be new, innovative, better games. And I think we’re still scratching the surface on what’s actually possible on mobile. So I’m hugely bullish on mobile as a platform, over the years and even the decades to come and that’s going to be our primary focus as a company.
But that said, and I think we’ve spoken about it publicly, we are exploring also other platforms and the reason why we are doing that is that, we are curious what type of new gaming experiences would these new platforms enable us to do. And in the coming years, i’m sure you’re going to see some some examples of that, but it’s still early days for that.
Mobilegamer.biz: What does that innovation look like exactly, because you’ve released several multiplayer battle type games now…is it a different type of game completely?
Paananen: So that’s obviously a multi billion dollar question…we’ve been in games for a long time and nobody has a crystal ball, and that includes us. So I think how the innovation will eventually come about is that it has to be laser-focused on creating something that you are passionate about, and something that you believe is different. And then you sort of build that, you put it out, and then, obviously you hope other people love it too.
At Supercell I’m not a head of a product. I know it sort of sounds funny, but I think the difference between Supercell and many other gaming companies is how I think about my role as the CEO. I don’t approve what type of games we do. None of our games are my ideas.
You know, with the Brawl success, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. And that goes with all the other games as well. So instead of my product being the games, what I actually see as my product is actually our people, our teams and our culture, our organisational design.
So that’s what I spend my entire time on, and that’s what I’m focused on. And then, of course, I have this belief that if we can have these best teams operating in the best culture, and if you can continue to also be lucky, that’s eventually how, over the next few decades, great, new, innovative games will come about.
