In July 2026, SuperCity turned 15 years old. During this time, the game from Playkot evolved from a browser-based city-building project into one of the company's longest-running products (and indeed, the genre), earning over $100 million and amassing 40 million installs. The story of SuperCity is interesting not just for the numbers. It's a tale of how the game repeatedly faced technological or product dead ends and found new forms each time, without destroying what players valued about it.
The column was prepared by Denis Adlerberg and Valeria Fedorova.
SuperCity
Today, SuperCity is developed by an autonomous studio within Playkot. Its CEO Denis Adlerberg and the game's Chief Product Officer Lera Fedorova cite the project's main asset as not its age or even accumulated content, but the audience's trust. However, this very trust creates the main constraint: a mature game cannot be abruptly remodeled to fit the latest market trends. It must be developed in small, steady steps while preserving familiar rituals and simultaneously giving players reasons to return.
The Game That Didn't Start with a City
SuperCity did not begin as SuperCity. The initial concept was called SportVille, with the English version being Fitness City. According to the team, the idea came to Playkot founder Alexander Pavlov during a workout: to create a city entirely dedicated to sports, with stadiums, clubs, and themed activities.
Say it, do it! Just a few months later, the new game saw the light of day. Early playtests revealed that a single sports theme was not enough. Players didn't understand why they should only build stadiums and why their options were limited to one idea. The team quickly pivoted the project toward a more universal city. From the original concept, certain buildings, stadiums, resource cycles, and characters remained, which eventually transformed from sporty types into the first residents of SuperCity.
With the new name came an even more important decision — the emotional tone. SuperCity was envisioned as a kind world without truly dark plots, where challenges end happily. Aliens, yetis, dinosaurs, or the Loch Ness Monster might appear in the game, but the player's task is not to defeat them but to understand what happened and help them.
This approach became the first distinction of SuperCity from numerous social farms and city-builders of the early 2010s. Most of the market was built around repetitive economic cycles: produce a resource, convert it, and invest it into the next upgrade. SuperCity made the basic cycle more meditative and added "super-stories" — quest chains about helping characters. Players were not just expanding the city, but turning potential "monsters" into neighbors.
The Initial Growth and the Problem of Success
The launch on Facebook in 2014 marked a period of international growth for the project. SuperCity received industry recognition as one of the best new social games of the year, and the game's popularity led to advertising integrations with major brands: their buildings became part of the players' cities.
But the rapid scale created a new problem. The audience was consuming content faster than the small team could produce it. Developers had to establish regular delivery cycles, expand the team, and gradually transition to a model that would today be recognized as full-fledged LiveOps.
This model worked for a few years, but by around 2017, the project faced two threats. Players had learned the repetitive mechanics, and the social games market began rapidly yielding to mobile. Simultaneously, the end of Flash support — the technology on which the game was built — was approaching. For many browser projects, this became a point of closure.
Within the team, there was also uncertainty whether SuperCity would survive this transition. However, instead of gradually phasing out the product, Playkot continued to invest in it. The game migrated from Flash to HTML5, the team improved analytics, and began making more data-driven decisions: looking at what truly engaged players, developing parallel game cycles, and investing not just in new offers but also in new modes.
This period is crucial to understanding the entire subsequent history. SuperCity became an evergreen product not because it once found an infallible formula. On the contrary, the sense that the game "will always be" was formed after several crises. Each time continuation required the team's faith, investments, and readiness to evolve the product along with the market.
Expeditions as a Second Gameplay Layer
The most productive product hypothesis emerged at the turn of 2019–2020.
The team revisited the core gameplay and introduced expeditions — standalone story adventures with their own maps, tasks, and progression.
According to Lera Fedorova, this wasn't just another event, but a second deep layer of the game. Expeditions significantly impacted long-term revenue, prompting the team to develop the format: adjusting duration, testing new types of maps, and turning the experiment into a sustainable part of the product. The first version of the mechanic was assembled by a dedicated team in about two months; and later, the experience of SuperCity became one of the inspirations for a separate expeditionary game, Spring Valley.
Another successful hypothesis was the suburbs — a restartable location for high-level players. They restore villages and obtain resources for the main city. Such a layer resolves a problem typical for mature content games: the most active users quickly "consume" large updates, and infinitely increasing the amount of manual content is too costly. The suburbs occupied the audience between major releases and became a stable source of revenue that almost didn't require constant reworking.
How a City-Builder Turned into a LiveOps System
In its early years, SuperCity was primarily a city-building game. As long as players had enough basic content, there was hardly a need for a rich event calendar. A full-fledged LiveOps model started to emerge when part of the audience reached the end of available progression.
Today, the calendar is organized as a system with various temporal rhythms. It includes a long main event, accompanying gacha activities, short offers, one-day mechanics, and monthly cycles. Even periods without a main event are pre-planned as "rest days," where players can check out offers without engaging in intense competitive racing.
Where previously there might have been two events a month with long gaps in between, now the studio releases as many as 15 updates a month! The aim isn't to fill every minute with activity, but to adjust the monthly, weekly, and daily rhythm to the audience's habits. This calibration didn't yield an explosive leap, but it made the project's results more stable and predictable.
An Audience That Grew Up with the Game
Over 15 years, part of the SuperCity audience practically aged along with the project. Many people have been playing for years, and some have stayed since its launch. For them, the game long ago ceased to be just entertainment: it’s a familiar space where they relax, communicate, and maintain relationships with other community members.
According to Lera Fedorova, players used to value novelty and a constant stream of impressions more. Today, for many, SuperCity has become an "island of tranquility" and a set of familiar rituals. New audiences are also coming not just for city-building: expeditions and story adventures attract people who value stories.
These habits directly impact development. Unlike many mobile games, in SuperCity, activity can be higher on weekdays: part of the core audience spends weekends with family, while during weekdays, they meet friends in the game. Events and releases are scheduled according to this routine.
The team also considers interface features: contrast, font sizes, button placement, and the clarity of payment actions. For a mature audience, it’s especially important to understand whether an action is paid or free. An unexpected change in a familiar pattern may not increase conversion but could shatter the trust built over the years. This is why the internal formula for development often looks like 70–80% familiar experience and 20–30% new.
Why a 15-Year-Old Game Cannot Simply Be "Supported"
The word "support" creates the impression that a mature project only needs not to be broken and regularly supplied with content. In the case of SuperCity, this would mean gradual fading. The game competes not only with other city-builders but with the entire entertainment market — from modern mobile games to streaming services and short videos. To earn the audience's time, the product must continue to change.
However, age creates complexity on every level. The game has accumulated over a thousand architectural objects; the team must find new landmarks, consider preferences of different countries, and ensure rewards remain valuable. Land in the city is limited, so large buildings cannot be endlessly distributed. Production also had to be restructured: unique expedition maps were replaced with modular biomes, which turned out to be cheaper and even better received by players.
The game's economy follows a similar path. Over 15 years, inflation has emerged in the game, with multiple currencies and resources valuable for newcomers but almost useless for high-level players. Restoring the balance of the main hard currency took about a year and a half: the team simultaneously changed its income sources and usage methods. Denis Adlerberg jokingly refers to this process as the "Central Bank mode of SuperCity," but behind the joke lies an important principle: in a mature game, there is rarely a single "killer feature" that can fix a systemic problem.
The Next Chapter: Constant Evolution, Not Feats
The next stage in SuperCity’s development is associated with abandoning the model where a major product "feat" is required every six months. Instead, the studio aims to build a manageable flow of small but significant changes: improving existing modes, updating monetization, quickly adapting suitable practices from mobile games, and systematically working on quality of life.
An important focus remains on bringing back former users and finding new audiences similar to the current core. Reactivation yields results, but its potential is limited: a single player cannot be brought back endlessly. Therefore, the long-term task is to learn to more precisely find people for whom SuperCity can become a familiar space for years.
Big ideas are now tested through small MVPs. If a new mechanic resonates with the audience, the team quickly distributes it throughout the game. This was the case with the ability to choose the desired reward: first, the solution was tested in specific offers, and after a positive response, integrated into many gacha events and other systems.
Behind the $100 million revenue and 15 years of SuperCity's life are not just a few successful mechanics. It’s thousands of decisions about what to preserve, what to change, and where to resist the temptation of sharp updates. The game has survived platform changes, the death of Flash, several generations of teams, and audience transformations.
Its story shows an evergreen product is not a game that once became successful and then refused to die. It's a product that repeatedly learns to remain itself in an ever-changing world.