Supercell has been actively experimenting with internal processes for over a year. At the Slush 2024 conference, CEO Ilkka Paananen admitted that the company was forced to make changes because it had stopped growing.
Squad Busters
According to Paananen, last year he was seriously worried about Supercell's future.
“We founded Supercell to create games that would make history and be played for years. The fact was that for several years, we were essentially not growing while the market was. We were losing share. If that trend continued, say for a decade, we would eventually become obsolete and thus not achieve our mission. This could have become a huge problem,” Paananen recalls.
Supercell, Paananen states, had two options — to rethink either the mission or the company's processes. As a result, Supercell made a series of significant changes. Notably, it set challenges for launching new potential hits while simultaneously developing game services, began considering new games as startups, split the company's teams into independent "cells" and "subcells," and decided to “super systematically” create teams for upcoming projects.
This bore fruit. Paananen is not ready to disclose numbers yet, but he stated that 2024 has been "fantastic." All of Supercell's game services showed growth — according to Sensor Tower, their revenue and downloads doubled.