Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen has said more games are incoming on top of Clash Mini, Squad Busters and Mo.co as the Finnish firm reported a year-on-year decline in revenue and profitability.
There was no firm news on when or if any of those soft launch games will go global, but Paananen did provide plenty more detail on the company’s decision to grow its teams in the last year, hiring 175 people during 2023 to reach 525 employees.
Supercell framed its 2023 financials as “steady” but revenue was down year-on-year by 4.2% at €1.7bn (~$1.82bn) and profitability as measured by EBITDA was down 8.2% YOY to €580m (~$621m). It also said it had paid €110M (~$117m) in taxes to the Finnish government.
Moving onto its games, Paananen notes that Brawl Stars is now the company’s biggest game by player base. He also noted his excitement for in-development games Clash Mini, Squad Busters and Mo.co, and added there are “more coming”. More details on those titles will be forthcoming “hopefully in the not too distant future,” he said, and there are roughly 5-10 other new games in development.
Paananen went into great detail on the “painful” process of talking to his team about the company’s fall from the “#1-ranked global publisher of mobile games in 2016 to outside the Top 10 in 2023”, which Paananen outlined at the company’s annual offsite in August 2023.
He described it as the “harshest” presentation he’s ever given to his team, and it was prompted by the fact that Supercell “had fallen behind” companies like Dream Games, Riot Games, King and Playrix, who had all grown their live games. He also noted the success of new games like “Royal Match, Genshin Impact, Monopoly Go, CoD Mobile, and others”, while Supercell had not launched a new game since Brawl Stars in 2018.
The company would have to change, Paananen said, but expanding its teams to meet player demand was approached with great caution.
“Nothing is closer to my heart than the people and culture we have at Supercell, so the idea that I would drive something that would destroy it…well, there are no words to describe how that would feel. Stressful doesn’t quite cover it.”
He also elaborated on last year’s blog in which he said that the company was now taking a different approach to its new games and live games. “Creating a new game from scratch and running/growing a live game as a service are quite different problems,” said Paananen. “We needed different solutions for each.”
“We have not been rigorous enough about deciding about starting new game teams at Supercell,” said Paananen. “Too often we have ended up with teams which have not had all the required skillsets or the team dynamics have not been what they should be when you start a crazy journey like this. Our bar should be as high as it would be for starting a new company. Going forward, we will be much more rigorous and are implementing a dedicated system/process to evaluate potential new game teams on this front.”
He also said that new game teams “must put their game in front of players as fast as possible”, which means we may see more limited betas for games, as we saw in 2023 with Flood Rush and Mo.Co.
With its live games, Paananen says he now thinks of those teams as ‘scaleups’ and Supercell continues to hire and expand where necessary. Paananen also spoke of rebuilding the company’s leadership team, which included the addition of Sara Bach as head of live games and new CMO Fernanda Romano.
In the earnings presentation that accompanied the financial results, head of live games Sara Bach also noted that Clash of Clans remains its biggest game by revenue and is also now Supercell’s biggest game team, with around 56 people.
Bach also noted that Clash Royale had a “slightly challenging first half of 2023”, Hay Day continued to grow in the last year and that Brawl Stars hit $2bn in lifetime revenue in January.
Later in a Q&A Paananen was asked what he thought of Apple’s new App Store terms for developers in the EU in response to the forthcoming Digital Markets Act, how viable alternative app stores might be and if Supercell had discussed an app store with Microsoft, as has been rumoured. He could not really answer, but did state that Supercell values the long relationships the company has had with both platform holders.
