Two Supercell games earn more per month on the App Store than a thousand Electronic Arts mobile games. Many people know this, so we talked with Finnish developers about something else, about inspiration, promotion and the future of the market.
The first Supercell projects were hardcore games (Gunshine, Battle Buddies). Why did you decide to change course? What made you take up midcore?In fact, we don’t use the word “midcore”, we look at our games a little differently.
We know that they have qualities that attract a variety of people, both young and old, and gamers, and those who usually do not play. This was true for both Gunshine, a project for Facebook and browsers, and for Battle Buddies, which was developed for tablets.
This also applies to our current games. For example, the visual style of Clash of Clans is more suitable for casual players. Social elements in it are able to keep those players who do not want to dive deep into the “competitive” part of the game. But also in Clash of Clans there is a whole abyss of features focused on hardcore players (strategic battles, honor boards, upgrades). We have even witnessed the emergence of an entire ecosystem of fan apps and podcasts made specifically for those who want to learn how to succeed in the game.
Clash of Clans and Hay Day are examples of game design for many developers today. And what did you rely on when developing them, what inspired you?
Inspires everything around. The Clash of Clans team is a fan of Pixar, how its animators manage to create characters that both children and adults like. They are also big fans of Capcom, admire their characters, how carefully they are drawn. The team also drew inspiration from games such as Travian, Backyard Monsters and Gauntlet.
The unit responsible for Hay Day was influenced by Farmerama.
Lasse Louhento, the main person on this project, says that he is inspired by game development itself. A whole new world opens up for Lasse when he sees the first game object on the screen.
At the same time, Lasse says that there is no single source of inspiration, game development is a team effort in which everyone is inspired by something.
Supercell has released two very successful and completely dissimilar mobile projects in a row. What is the secret of your success?Success is creating a cool game where users want to spend their time.
To create such projects, we believe it is necessary to develop with passion and love for games. We support this passion by breaking the company into small teams. Our structure is something like a combination of small cells, and together we make up a Supercell (super cell).
For example, at the time of the launch of Clash of Clans, his team consisted of only five people. We have found that when people work in small teams, each employee becomes more responsible for what they do. This allows us to focus on quality rather than quantity. Thanks to all this, we create games that we love ourselves.
Did you expect such success?None of us could even imagine that Clash of Clans would become such a popular game.
Every day we meet with awe and a sense of pride that our players continue to respond positively to the game and advise their friends to play it.
How did you promote the game? How did they increase its visibility in the App Store? Did you spend a lot on marketing?The main “engine” for the promotion was the players themselves.
Thanks to the fact that fans invited their friends to play Clash of Clans, it became popular.
From the first days of the “soft” launch in Canada, fans independently, without any participation of Supercell, began to organize all sorts of events to attract a gaming audience, including organizing contests with real prizes.
To date, fans of the game have even created their own applications in which other players can share images of their own villages and vote for them, and there are even regular fan programs about the game on YouTube.
We work with some advertising networks, but they don’t give much.
We spend as much resources as we can to make our games even better, to please our fans, because we believe that the best way to get virality is to make a cool game that players will love, that they will want to bring their friends to.
Today, everyone is talking about midcore, and Supercell was one of those companies that popularized this direction. Do you think such games are the future of the mobile industry? Which games will be popular this year?As we have already said, we do not think of our games as “midcore”, we believe that they are just suitable for the widest audience.
If we talk about the future, it is difficult to predict anything, because so much is changing in the industry even in one year.
One of our main beliefs is that tablets are the main gaming platform. So, especially in light of the recent launch of the iPad mini, we expect even more explosive growth in the market of “tablets” and games for them.
We also expect that their quality will seriously increase, this will also affect those games that are aimed at hardcore players. We, in turn, will try our best to make sure that our projects are played for a very long time.
What are your plans? Are you going to continue working on existing titles or develop something completely new?First of all, our users are important to us.
We are very grateful to them for the success of Clash of Clans and Hay Day. For their sake, we continue to support existing titles.
And, of course, we will follow our passion to make cool games and have already started working on new titles.
Are you going to translate Clash of Clans and Hay Day into Russian?Clash of Clans is likely to be localized into Russian in the very near future.
The appearance of the Russian-language version of Hay Day is also not excluded. We want as many people from all over the world as possible to enjoy our projects.
At the moment, our efforts are focused on localization in the Far Eastern markets. When we have the Russian versions of Clash of Clans and Hay Day ready, you will be among the first to know about it.
Are you looking for new people?We are always looking for talented people, team players who prefer to work in a small team and feel that Supercell games and culture can suit them.
The questions were answered by Heini Vesander, head of the PR department of Supercell