From Early Failures to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’ - Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen
Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen explains how killing their first game and pivoting from Facebook to mobile built one of gaming’s most valuable companies.
- Supercell raised €8M Series A on Facebook MMO Gunshine, then killed both the game and the platform strategy months later.
- Ilkka told investors their entire bet was wrong immediately after closing; he credits great investors for staying supportive through that call.
- At GDC 2012, senior industry figures asked why anyone would play Clash of Clans and whether mobile ‘even counts’ as games.
- Hay Day and Clash of Clans initial metrics were so strong the team assumed the analytics system was broken.
- Clash of Clans scaled from 10,000 to 100 million daily active users in a short window alongside Hay Day and Boom Beach.
- By 2023, Supercell dropped out of the top 10 mobile publishers for the first time in a decade; 2024 was a record-breaking year after reinventing again.
- 60% of global mobile play time goes to titles 6+ years old, which both protects Supercell’s legacy games and makes new launches harder.
- Supercell’s cultural practice: celebrate killed games with champagne and a team debrief, reframing failures as experiments.
2025-11-06 · Watch on YouTube
