Supercell revealed its 2025 financials today as well as posting boss Ilkka Paananen’s annual blog, which contained his thoughts on the mobile game industry’s current lack of innovation, how Clash Royale caught fire in the last year and what went wrong with Squad Busters.
In a media call this morning, Paananen also made the case for foreign workers in Finland and gave some brief updates on new games mo.co, Boat Game and Project Rise. But first, those financial results:
Supercell’s 2025 at-a-glance
- Revenue was €2.65bn / $3.0bn, down 4% year-over-year
- EBITDA up 6%, reaching €932m / $1.06bn
- Supercell games have around 290m monthly active players
- It also doubled its investment in new game development
- Its AI Innovation Lab will “triple in size” in April with offices in Helsinki, San Francisco and Tokyo
- Headcount is up 30% year-over-year, ending the year with 890 staff
- Supercell paid €220m in corporate tax
What’s happening with mo.co, Boat Game and Project Rise?
There was no mention of mo.co anywhere in Paananen’s blog, which was odd – after a teaser-style, invite-only launch in March 2025 the game is now playable to all worldwide without restrictions.
Mo.co has also undergone a reboot of sorts, and is being referred to as ‘neomoco’ by its community managers. So we asked Paananen if this was a last roll of the dice for the game (a big Squad Busters reboot shortly after its launch appeared to be the last chance for that game before it was killed). Here’s what he said:
“No, I wouldn’t say that… it’s basically just gotten a lot of great feedback and the team has a very clear vision, which we’re about to see hopefully at a later point this year. But we believe that we have some really strong, great signals.”
“But you know this also speaks about Supercell, I’m pretty sure that most other gaming companies would have already launched that game, but our mo.co team, their bar is just so incredibly high that they want to make it perfect before they bring it to a bigger audience.”
On Project Rise and Boat Game, Paananen said there’s “quite a bit of work to do” on both games and as ever the decision to go global is with the game teams.
‘Immigrants make Supercell – and Finland – better’
Amid government clampdowns on immigration, Paananen also stressed that over 70% of the Clash Royale team are not from Finland, and highlighted the importance of foreign workers to Supercell and Finland overall.
“Sometimes you see criticism of immigration and you see opposition of immigration,” he said. “I want to say very clearly that Supercell wouldn’t be what it is today, we wouldn’t have achieved the results we just did, without these extremely high-skilled people who choose to move to Finland.”
He continued: “I believe that we should be thanking them for choosing us with all the other countries, all the other opportunities that these highly skilled people have…you know, these people make us better, make our games better. And I actually believe that they also make Finland better.”
“Not an industry thriving – an industry coasting”
In his annual blog, Paananen paints a fairly bleak picture of the western mobile game industry right now. “I think we can all agree that the mobile games industry is not living up to its potential,” he said.
In particular, he says western game-makers have fallen behind developers in China, Japan and South Korea, and uses a striking stat to make the point: according to Supercell’s own analysis, of the 22 games launched since 2020 that have grossed over $1bn, only two were made in the west: Royal Match and Monopoly Go.
The problem is that western developers are “getting very good at optimizing what already exists,” rather than creating something new, says Paananen.
“Live game excellence alone doesn’t grow an industry. It maintains one,” he continues. “For the market to truly expand, we need to bring new players in.”
That’s why Supercell doubled its investment in “new games and innovation” in 2025 and expects to double it again for 2026, says Paananen.
He later admits to not fully creating the right environment for new game teams to truly thrive.
“For over two years, I’ve talked about new game teams operating like startups. Honestly, we only went partway there,” he said. “We attracted entrepreneurial founders and gave them independence, but we didn’t create the full conditions that make startups work. That was my failure. Now we’re trying to fix it.”
Those fixes mean only backing new game teams with “extreme ambition” that can operate within tighter constraints to drive innovation, he continued. If a game successfully launches, those teams will take a chunk of the game’s profits directly.
Paananen adds that founders with the right ambition can join the Supercell effort in three different ways, depending on the idea – through its Spark Program, AI Innovation Lab or Supercell Investments.
Clash Royale and ‘sparks catching fire’
Clash Royale is approaching its tenth anniversary, but saw re-engaged players double in 2025, said Paananen. New players also grew “almost 500%”.
“Every major measure of playtime and engagement grew significantly,” he added, but there was a note of caution in amongst the praise.
Clash Royale GM Aleksandar Marković said that like Brawl Stars before it, Supercell’s teams have learned “a bit” about these comebacks, but they “haven’t yet learned how to sustain it.”
Nonetheless, the tweaks to the game that worked were loosely described as changes to progression, the removal of extraneous systems, and a host of new content likened to “sparks catching fire” by Marković.
Paananen explained the idea further: “In these forever games, there are many “sparks” in the form of new content and features. If community sentiment is generally positive, any of these sparks can catch fire. If sentiment is negative, they almost certainly cannot.”
A campaign involving Michael Bolton, Valentine’s Day and free Barbarian Evolutions were ‘sparks that caught fire’ in this instance. June’s addition of the Merge Tactics mode also helped, a modified version of a killed soft launch game, Clash Mini.
But there was also acknowledgement that quickfire growth can also turn into decline just as fast. “The same dynamics that enable virtuous growth can enable a vicious cycle,” added Paananen.
What went wrong with Squad Busters (part three)
Supercell has already given two explanations of this, when it was killed and later in a longer post-mortem. But it seems to enjoy dwelling on its failures, so there was further confirmation here that Supercell was indeed feeling the pressure to launch another game, and felt it wasn’t taking enough risks.
So it went ahead and launched Squad Busters only to discover retention wasn’t quite right and the game didn’t have the broad appeal Supercell thought it did.
The three big lessons here were, according to Paananen: “Even large beta samples don’t predict global behavior”, “don’t skip testing meta and long term retention” and “don’t build a massive marketing push before the product vision is deeply validated”.
