As bossman Ilkka Paananen promised earlier this year, Supercell has been expanding its teams – and it has just landed two senior staff from King and Mojang.
Sara Bach is Supercell’s new head of live games, and joins the Clash of Clans maker from Mojang. She has been working in games for over 17 years and brings with her experience from working at Dice on Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront, a spell at King as senior studio director and later head of games at Minecraft maker Mojang.
Fernanda Romano is Supercell’s new chief marketing officer, and joins the firm after serving as King’s SVP and chief marketing officer. She has also worked as CMO at Alpargatas, the parent company of flip-flop brand Havaianas.
The news follows the appointment of Aki Saarinen as head of Supercell X, a new arm of the company that oversees its web shop, ID and web products. Saarinen recently joined from ecommerce giant Mercari, where most recently he served as marketplace CPO. He has also previously founded Day One Tech and served in senior roles at Reaktor.
The hires will continue for some time, it seems – Supercell has over 20 open roles on its jobs site right now for positions across marketing, product management, live ops, monetisation, production, game design, testing, data, investments and more.
Supercell CEO and co-founder Ilkka Paananen said of the company’s new hires: “Building out the depth and breadth of our leadership team is critical in achieving our goals in our second decade and we have two of the absolute best in the industry joining us here.”
There’s plenty going on at Supercell right now: it also recently ran an open beta for its forthcoming monster-hunting action-RPG Mo.co, which impressed our panel of industry experts with its streamlined take on Diablo-like gameplay.
Supercell has not released a new game worldwide since it launched Brawl Stars in December 2018. Clash Mini has been in soft launch since November 2021, and Clash Heroes is in early development, but has not reached beta yet.
Supercell cancelled soft launch game Clash Quest last year, closing its servers in September 2022, and also revealed and then quickly cancelled battler Flood Rush earlier this year.
Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen has previously stated that of the games currently in development, Squad Busters is furthest along. That game has also been through rounds of beta testing; we asked several industry experts for their thoughts on whether Squad Busters could be Supercell’s next billion-dollar smash here.
