Back in February, we broke the news that UK studio Space Ape was effectively dead following its acquisition by Supercell. But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.
Since then, the music team that spun out of Space Ape was acquired by Duolingo, meaning Beatstar and Country Star would also close.
We’ve also seen Offroad Games take control of Chrome Valley Customs and Transformers rehomed at Yodo1 (which we first reported back in February, too).
Now, with a few months’ distance from it all, Space Ape cofounder Simon Hade has had a little time to reflect on the birth, life and eventual death of the studio on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast. You can watch the whole thing below, or listen here. We’ve also told the story in text form here.
Beating Supercell to Android
Space Ape cofounders John Earner and Simon Hade emerged on the other side of a spell at EA-owned Playfish with a network of supportive investors behind them and an idea for a new mobile game studio.
Space Ape and debut game Samurai Siege were effectively created to “beat Supercell to Android,” says Hade. Back in 2013, Clash of Clans was still iOS-only and its monetisation was not as dialled-in on big spenders.
“We really wanted to laser in on the top 1% of players,” says Hade. “This is not a knock on [Supercell]…it was the right strategy for them. They were not focusing on those top, high value spenders at that point.”
“The clans actually clash”
There were also a few PvP elements missing from Clash at that time – Hade says the unofficial catchphrase for Samurai Siege was “The clans actually clash”.
There were plenty of other Clash of Clans clones out in the market at the time, says Hade, including IGG’s 50 Lords and Zynga’s Empires & Allies. But where Samurai Siege excelled was in live ops and targeting high spenders, and its success led to the creation of another, more ambitious build-and-battle game, Rival Kingdoms.
“It was beautiful, the graphics were amazing, it had a lot of really deep systems…but the theme was the problem with it,” recalls Hade.
“It was this dark fantasy theme and when you put that against the bubblegum, cutesy art style, it is just more niche…we went way too dark, way too nerdy.”
Building on build-and-battle
This led to problems marketing the game and it ultimately failed to hit the huge mainstream numbers the studio wanted. But Space Ape’s growing build-and-battle expertise did lead to a conversation with Hasbro and the creation of Transformers: Earth Wars – probably “the most successful game” from Space Ape’s early years, says Hade.
By the time that third builder-battler was out on the market, Space Ape had built a set of tools that could create live ops content for Samurai Siege, Rival Kingdoms and Transformers with relative ease, keeping players happy even with fairly small live game teams.
“We were bleeding edge for that sort of thing,” says Hade. “And when we joined Supercell in 2017 they were quite far behind on that. They’re brilliant at it now, but we were far ahead of them at the time because we had five years of squeezing blood out of a stone with this stuff… and they had just made beautiful games that didn’t need this kind of approach.”
Expanding under Supercell
In 2017, Supercell bought 62% of Space Ape for $55.8m, a deal that came about because the Finnish firm wanted to expand into more genres, says Hade.
“They wanted to do more things that were different,” he explains. “So when we joined them, actually, we hard pivoted away from making build-and-battle games, building out our live ops and analytics and went straight into ‘zero-to-one’ game development – entering new genres, still a data-led approach, but yeah…we turned into a prototyping shop for five years.”
Hade estimates that in this period of the company’s evolution the Space Ape team seriously worked on around 25 different games, not counting myriad other early-stage prototypes. It was exciting stuff, thought tinged with some regret.
The R&D years
“I wish we’d made half as many [games] and continued the thread of making more of those sorts of games that we’d gotten quite good at,” he says.
“I think when you look at the companies that succeeded in that era – 2017 to 2021 – they weren’t taking these big swings trying to make billion dollar games. They were just trying to make something that they knew how to make and make it better. And so we kind of squandered a bit of that expertise. I think that’s a regret.”
“There was an assumption about the market that was wrong…at the time, there were no shooters on mobile, there were no MOBAs on mobile, there’s no fishing game on mobile…so the thinking was, there’s all these unexplored genres – we should go after them, and that will be a bigger opportunity.”
The refocus
The problem was that during this incubation phase, Space Ape didn’t kill games fast enough and wasn’t focused enough, says Hade. “Good ideas just didn’t get the traction, and bad ideas continued longer than they should,” he continues. “It took a fairly serious change to the culture to just focus on fewer things…we probably could have realised that after 10 games instead of 25”
He continues: “We were spread too thin, took too long to kill stuff and didn’t learn anything, because when a game got killed, people went on to another, completely different idea instead of re-rolling.”
When founders Hade and Earner realised the approach wasn’t working and focused the studio’s efforts down on one or two ideas, some staff didn’t like it. But overall there was a sense of “relief”, says Hade. “People want autonomy, but also sometimes they just want guardrails. Having the ability to work on anything is very stressful.”
“[Supercell] gave us a lot of autonomy, a lot of trust, a lot of financial backing, and we maybe got overconfident in our ability….confidence is good. Self delusion is very helpful at times in game development, but it also can flip over. And so I think, yeah, certainly I got a little overconfident.”
From Space Ape to Supercell London
Space Ape did, of course, launch Beatstar and Chrome Valley Customs after that period of refocus and readjustment, but as Hade puts it, “in the end, we did not make a big standalone business.”
Instead, using that ‘lean live ops’ model that Space Ape had pioneered, it became obvious that the UK studio was better suited to helping Supercell scale up its live game teams, given the pre-existing culture overlap and Space Ape’s prior work on Supercell’s older titles like Hay Day and Boom Beach.
And so Supercell bought out the rest of Space Ape in November 2024, effectively turning it into Supercell London. As we reported at the time, there was a bit of turbulence – some layoffs, Transformers got a new home and two new studios emerged, NextBeat and Offroad Games.
What happened next
The latter studio is now happily running Chrome Valley Customs, while the former is now part of Duolingo.
NextBeat was started with some very ambitious plans in the space between music and games. But the complexities of the music industry quickly hit the studio hard. “Every week I was coming in and discovering a new problem that’s not related to building a game…and so we just got to the point where there wasn’t one thing that made me feel that it wasn’t going to happen, but it was going to be difficult…meanwhile, we were having these conversations with Duolingo.”
With all that going on, the giant learning app made the NextBeat team an offer to join its ranks instead, and they moved over to Duolingo this summer. It was a “no brainer” decision, says Hade.
Space Ape’s legacy
Hade sums up the Space Ape story as one of success by most measures – just not a Supercell-scale success.
“We achieved a lot, I think we generated half a billion in revenue – success by any objective measure,” he says.
“This is what we set out to do when starting a company…the legacy of what we created will continue, both within Supercell and outside of Supercell. But yeah, at the end of the day, we did not make a game that that was meaningful to Supercell commercially, which is what we were trying to do.”
