Ilkka Paananen says Supercell is now effectively two companies, with ‘old Supercell’ making new games with small teams, and ‘new Supercell’ running live games in a more scaled, typical way.
Speaking to Harvard Business School’s Jeffrey Rayport at Slush last week, Paananen said that in the summer of 2023 he had identified a “fundamental problem” with Supercell’s approach as the company continued to slide down the top grossing publisher rankings.
“The fact was that we hadn’t actually been growing for a number of years,” he said. “And at the same time the market was growing, therefore we were losing share, and if that trend would have continued for like a decade, at some point the fact is that we would fade into being irrelevant.”
Paananen said he announced changes to the structure of the company at a company off-site in September 2023. “We need to be really great at two different things,” he explained. “The first one is that we have to be great at creating new games, and then secondly, once you’ve created a great new game, we have to make it even better.”
“And the problem was that we were trying to solve these two very different problems using exactly the same type of approach. And that approach, of course, had made us successful, but it wasn’t relevant anymore. It didn’t work out anymore. So therefore we decided to split the problem into two different parts.”
“And in essence we started to think of new games as their own startups and we applied kind of what I would call the old Supercell culture to those parts. And then the live games part, we started to think about them as sort of startups which have already found a product-market fit, therefore they become scale-ups.”
With its new game teams, Paananen said its approach is now a lot more systematic, referencing the ’Spark’ program we revealed in March. The firm greenlights teams, not games, he reiterated, but the bigger problem was how it was handling its live game teams.
“We just realised that we had been way too happy thinking of these very small cosy teams…it sounds terrible but in a sense we had put our own interests ahead of our players’ interests. So even if we very well knew that with bigger teams we could do way more for our players, we still decided to stay in our own comfort zone, because that’s how we always had been.”
So the company decided to think of the live game teams “as their own independent business units” and started to scale them up, as we’ve reported previously. Paananen added that with this growth comes structure, process and even middle management, things that were previously “like curse words at Supercell”.
“But we decided that we had to change something,” he added. “We have to really like place our players first. And if that means that we have to go to the uncomfortable zone, then so be it.”
