Despite leading one of mobile gaming’s most successful companies, Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen believes the industry is approaching a critical juncture. From the shoeless, relaxed environment of their Helsinki office – a touch of Finnish culture, it’s noted – Paananen is pushing for a significant shift: game developers need to embrace bigger risks and forge entirely new experiences.
The call for bolder moves comes even as Supercell’s existing portfolio, featuring global hits like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars, continues to perform strongly, collectively generating over a billion dollars last year. However, Paananen points to a growing concern: stagnation in the market.
Why Innovation is Crucial Now
Paananen highlights a telling statistic: in the past year, a striking 60% of the total time players spent on mobile games was dedicated to titles that are at least six years old. In contrast, only 10% of playtime was spent on games released within the last year. This indicates a significant lack of breakthrough new hits that are truly capturing player attention and market share.
The challenge isn’t just competing with other game developers. The mobile phone has become a central hub for entertainment and communication, meaning games are competing for limited free time against a vast array of options, including social media, music streaming, and video streaming. Without fresh, exciting experiences, mobile games risk fading into the background.
Furthermore, the landscape of game development itself has evolved. While early mobile games were often simpler and less expensive to produce than their console or PC counterparts, this is no longer the case. Modern smartphones offer sophisticated capabilities, significantly raising the bar for what players expect and driving up development costs substantially. Building a cutting-edge mobile game today is a costly undertaking.
Supercell’s Approach to Breaking New Ground
Recognizing this dynamic, Supercell has proactively increased investment in new game development over the past couple of years. They’ve expanded their teams and established new game studios, all with the mandate to explore uncharted territory in mobile entertainment.
“We have a lot of very, very talented, ambitious teams who are trying to reimagine what mobile games might look like in, say, 2030,” Paananen states. While he doesn’t have a definitive answer for what those future experiences will be, players can certainly anticipate games vastly different from what’s currently available on mobile.
Empowering these creative efforts is a core principle at Supercell: granting a high degree of independence to the individual game teams. There are currently ten teams actively working on new titles in various stages of development. A central guiding question for these teams is focused on longevity: “Why would people play this game in five or 10 years?” This reflects an ambition to build enduring franchises akin to long-standing entertainment companies.
Navigating the Risks: Recent Game Journeys
Taking bigger risks inherently comes with challenges. Supercell’s own recent journey reflects this. Their game Squad Busters, launched last year, saw a strong initial start but hasn’t maintained its momentum, with Paananen admitting it hasn’t yet met the company’s ambitions. In response, Supercell has brought in a new general manager and the team has made significant changes to the game in hopes of improvement.
Another new title, the monster hunting game Mo.co, launched in March using an invite-only model. While a different approach, it hasn’t yet set the world alight, highlighting the difficulty of predicting success even for established players.
Industry expert Neil Long, founder of mobilegamer.biz, notes that mobile gaming is an “extreme business” characterized by massive successes but also very visible and costly failures. He points to cases like Activision pulling a mobile Call of Duty title within a year of launch, despite extensive development, as an example of why some companies shy away from big risks. Long suggests that the era of massive, splashy launches might be shifting, with some developers finding success by releasing games and continuously iterating based on player feedback.
Despite the challenges, Long credits Supercell’s historical success to a simple, effective principle: taking complex game ideas and making them incredibly easy, accessible, and fun to play, often with a signature cartoony style.
Looking Ahead: The Potential of AI
Like many in the tech world, Paananen is optimistic about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive innovation in game development. Supercell is already using AI for internal prototypes and sees its potential to enable entirely new interactive experiences that might challenge traditional definitions of a “game.”
To further explore this, Supercell established an AI Innovation Lab in Helsinki, giving external parties free rein to experiment with Supercell’s intellectual property. Paananen describes this initiative as a “massive success” and plans to replicate it in San Francisco. While AI’s full impact is still years away, Paananen sees it as an inevitability: “It’s not a question of if it’s going to happen. It’s question of when it’s going to happen and who will make it happen.”
Neil Long agrees that AI has already proven useful in specific areas like accelerating development pipelines or analyzing player behaviour. However, he echoes that revolutionary, entirely new game types created solely by AI are not yet a reality, acknowledging that the future remains open.
Supercell’s path forward is clear: push boundaries, embrace independence, focus on lasting experiences, and leverage emerging technologies like AI, all while navigating the inherent risks of an ever-evolving mobile gaming landscape.
