Supercell Annual "Year in Review" Blog Post from CEO Ilkka

...However, the situation changes once a game team starts heading towards Beta and becomes a live game team. All of the sudden, the priority shifts from innovating to serving an audience of millions of players, and doing so in a healthy and sustainable way, without overworking the people in the team.

We realized we had made the mistake of applying the exact same thinking to both new game teams and live game teams. In extreme cases, we stuck to our mantra of “small teams” because that was our culture, and had not realized that our culture should really be at the service of players.

Ultimately, this of course was my mistake. As the CEO, I should have challenged our existing ways of thinking and culture, because as I had written in our culture document a few years back, “what got us here will not necessarily get us there.” I realized that I was actually the one who had the fixed mindset, stuck in the thinking from our past. Definitely one of the biggest mistakes of the many that I’ve made in my career, and one that I will remember forever. And a great learning which in our culture of celebrating learnings that come from failures meant I deserved a big bottle of champagne :)

Today, when we consider what is the right size for a team, we do not simply say “small” anymore. Today, the answer depends on what type of game the team is working on and what phase it is in. We are still learning and trying to find the right balance between “small” and “doing more”. So far, the answer has been to move to slightly larger teams for our live games, developing better and smarter tools & technology, creating stronger outsourcing pipelines, and thinking outside the box as with the Supercell MAKE platform. And yes, I am fully aware that “20-35 people” is still a relatively small team compared to the teams of several hundred people that exist in our industry. But for us, they feel big :-) (As I said, we are still learning and trying to find the right balance.)

...The other conflict that appeared when started to talk about doing more for players was related to the health of the teams. We had already noticed that the combination of the fully independent teams, very high ambition and small team size, fueled by remote working caused by COVID, led to situations where sometimes these small teams pushed themselves too hard to deliver on their plans. In a few cases, extra content for the players came at the expense of peoples’ health and even led to symptoms of burn out.

This really kills me for three reasons:

1. It is just wrong for these people and their families, and it is all too common in our industry, and it is definitely not a legacy that I or anyone else would be proud of.

2. It is in direct violation of our mission to create a company and games that would last for decades – obviously we cannot do that if people burn out.

3. We founded Supercell to be the best place for the best people and teams to make the best games – again if people burn out while creating games that obviously is very far from being the best place for them.

So again, we had a discussion about this and concluded that whatever the team does, doing more for players cannot come at the expense of the team’s health. Overworking teammates cannot be the solution. No one should sacrifice their health & wellbeing for their team or Supercell goals. That means we need to do a better job building teams that are healthy and sustainable for the long term.

Today we believe that growing teams responsibly will not only allow us to do more, but it will ensure that individuals on teams are able to work reasonable hours and take enough time off to fully recharge. We are seeking to reduce the stigma around talking about mental health at work and encouraging discussions within teams to explore healthier ways to work together and deliver the best for the players of our games.