Back then, the founders had no idea what the company would become. But we had the sisu to say no, to hire carefully, to stay focused on mobile, and to be true to our roots: to enable the best people, and the best teams, to make the best games. At Supercell, the idea is simply that the best people will make the best teams, and then the best games will come from that. We try to think in decades. Need proof? “Sometimes figures go up, and sometimes they go down [so] what’s your time horizon? And by keeping resources scare, it means you can really focus on what’s most important. Our goal was to develop a next generation farming game, specifically designed for touch and mobile from the ground up. We want to find exciting new ways to tell everyone on the planet about our games. Many of us even longed for the golden days of PC gaming when games were all about great game play. We work in these small cells, mostly of five to ten people. Of course, taking risks isn’t only limited to creating games. Futures Slide After Fed “Not-Dovish-Enough”, Tech Tumbles On Reflation Rotation Fears, Covid-19 roundup: Trump questions Redfield after hearing remarks; Oxford suggests side effect not caused by vaccine. The premise of the game is to build a village by attacking rival villages and stealing their resources that are to be used in building a village for their clan. The Early Paying Customers are the key to success . The two core pillars around which we wanted to build this longevity would be game play and social. Until this point, every single beta launch we’d had as a company had been lukewarm at best and had eventually led us to kill the game later on. In short, the company itself, now 10 years old, may itself be facing more existential questions of, who are we now, and what comes next? At some point there was no room for our CEO Ilkka anymore, so he had to move out. After that, we decided to stay away from launching major games on Midsummer’s Eve or other national holidays :). A place where the best people could make the biggest possible impact and nothing would stand in their way. It’s a potent mix. Previously President at Digital Chocolate, Ilkka is a games industry entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in growing organizations from the founding team to a size of a hundreds.... Janne Snellman – COO & CFO. A company whose employees will think it’s the best place they’ve ever worked. But one way to fail as a company would be you paralyze yourself. People often ask us if there was a specific moment when we realized we had two hits on our hands. My goal is to be the world’s least powerful CEO. We still believe in the power of extremely small and independent teams of passionate people. The engagement was crazy from day one, and it just kept growing. That’s where the name ‘Supercell’ comes from. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPad to a very skeptical world, he called it “magical”. For Supercell specifically, its majority owner, Tencent, is in hot water in the US (a major market for Supercell); and it’s sitting on a still-popular but now-ageing game franchise that you could argue is in the middle of its own Battle Royale against the many other big games that are vying for people’s attention (and spending power to keep playing and levelling up). The Helsinki-based mobile games maker built an empire out of Clash of Clans, raking in tons of money and catching the eye of world class investors and eventually a new strategic majority shareholder in the form of Tencent at a $10.2 billion valuation. Mobile games maker Supercell has been one of the great, understated, breakthroughs of the European startup world. Page Transparency See More. “We are currently on the look-out for people from all around the world to join Supercell to build the be the best teams and then of course the best games,” he said. They just knew they wanted to make great games that people would play for years. The sad truth was that this was not a game that anyone would play for years. Our dream is to build a game so as many people as possible will play for a very long time. And we killed a game codenamed “Tower” later in the spring. Our goal is to make the best games – games that are played by as many people as possible, enjoyed for years and remembered forever. We’ve found that the best quality work comes from small teams in which every member is passionate about what they do. We used this simple sentence to describe our idea of a new kind of games company that would put people front and center. Many of us were fans of real-time strategy games and had played them online and on other platforms. In the summer of 2010, Supercell was born. Supercell is a collection of these cells. What all of the above requires is time and patience. News Archive. Since these early days, we’ve killed countless games at various stages of development. There were three reasons why. For every game, there’s a company playable, where everyone gives feedback. So how does a hot startup keep its edge? Start Learning From Your Corporate Elders, How to Develop a Product Your Customers Actually Want to Buy. You have entered an incorrect email address! Copyright NEWS.iFindFast � 2018. And it’s just so much more motivating, because you own whatever you’re working on. We are inspired by companies like, say, Nintendo. Instead, we talked about the type of company we wanted to build. The future lay in tablets and smartphones; you couldn’t take a desktop game and port it across. To make it all work, there are three simple yet essential ingredients: insanely talented and creative people, unrestricted freedom, and great team chemistry. The game is really addictive and if played with enough strategy, gamers can help survive their clans. It seems that most valuable lesson Paananen has learned, it turns out, is the thing that continues to be his top priority: building the right team for the long haul. We didn’t create this company to make money. Typically a VC would just meet the co-founders. Supercell. A company that not only has hit games in western markets but also in the big eastern markets like Japan, Korea and China. I’d learned this the hard way, by making mistakes at my last company. We think there’s another way to do things, and we’ve actually seen it play out time and time again in the Nordics. Nothing is ever good enough and you don’t put anything out. There is no greenlight process from management, no milestone meetings where teams need to justify their project’s existence to finance. Smoosh together all the best parts of gaming from consoles and PCs, add mobility along with a new touch UI and — BOOM — tablets have emerged as today's ultimate games platform.The best games on any platform are those designed specifically for that platform. No compromises. You Might Like: Is 8 Ball Pool Chinese App? Lassi has shipped more than 30 commercial games for platforms ranging from already (thankfully) forgotten J2ME based mobile phones to Xbox 360. We thought to ourselves: “What if you put together a games company the way you’d put together a professional sports team?” In that type of model, the sole mission of the founders and management would be to acquire the best talent for every single position, create the best possible environment for them, and then get out of the way. We never ever think about the next quarter, and very, very rarely think about it and maybe next year, I think that’s a target in itself, you know. What’s cool though is that these people come from over 30 different countries, which helps us build a truly multicultural and global environment. is cleared. We chatted to Ilkka about his philosophy of leadership — where the less the leaders control, the more powerful their companies become. If a game doesn’t hit those targets, that’s it, no matter how much we personally might like it. Supercell is a mobile game developer based in Helsinki, Finland, with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Shanghai. We are inspired by companies like, say, Nintendo. All creative decisions are up to the teams. And that is truly the biggest possible risk for a creative company like ours. Who owns Clash of Clans? Our first is with Ilkka Paananen of Supercell. The game was first released on the iOS App Store (2012) and then on the Google Play Store (2013). Community See All. In search for those perfectly optimized graphics routines since 1996. That really stuck with me. And by definition, taking those risks means that you’ll fail more often than you’ll succeed. The truth is there wasn’t. The main resources in Clash of Clans are gold, elixir, and dark elixir. On top of that, we borrowed as much money as we could from Tekes, the Finnish government’s technology funding arm. Also read: 100+ Popular Chinese Apps in India 2020. We do have this very distinctive style of management, which is that there isn’t much management. Over the years, we realised that even more important than having the best people is having the best teams – just as in sports, where World Cups and Championships are won by teams, not individuals. So technically, Finland is the country behind Clash of Clans’ existence but it is now owned by Tencent, a Chinese firm. Founding A Startup Will Change You As A Person, Legal Concepts Every Entrepreneur Should Understand. The Hay Day beta went live in Canada in May 2012. Despite all our hard work, we realized Gunshine just wasn't going to be the game we had dreamed of. Slowly we started to realize that perhaps, finally, we were onto something. And, finally, a company that not only does good for its players, employees and shareholders, but also for the greater community around it. It’s a sort of national characteristic, hard to translate, but captures things like resilience, guts, courage. Clash of Clans is a Finnish mobile game developer Supercell’s brainchild. The region is the source of some of the best and biggest tech businesses in Europe — its share of multi-billion-dollar exits is the highest in the world, relative to GDP. I’d read the now-legendary Netflix management presentation, which talked about their culture of freedom and responsibility. And at that time, that platform was desktop web and Facebook, so we started to build the game on top of Flash technology. Remember, our original vision was to create cross-platform gaming services, so the idea was that one day players would be able to enter the world of Gunshine via desktop web, Facebook, tablet and mobile. 1.1M likes. But Hay Day was different. That’s why we wanted to create an organizational model made up of very small teams, or “cells” as we call them. The game was developed in Finland but Chinese tech giant Tencent now owns a majority stakes in it. Our first office was in Niittykumpu in Espoo, Finland. And if you’re going to take that… then that changes your perspective.”. Supercell is a mobile game developer based in Helsinki, Finland, with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Shanghai. You would think it would get easier over time, especially when you’ve been lucky enough to put out hits like we have. 'What is the threshold for this is okay to do?' The firm has Lassi Leppinen and Lasse Louhento wanted to create a magnificent strategy game for mobile devices that used full touch screen phones to move around objects, thus making the gameplay intuitive.