The foot certainly seems to be on the gas at Supercell right now. Following CEO Ilkka Paananen’s promise of “big bold changes” at the reveal of the company's latest financials, new head of live ops Sara Bach’s directive to “grow our live games” and the brave closure of Clash Mini, Paananen has outlined a new internal system for getting games greenlit to Mobilegamer.biz.
The process is called Spark with former Hay Day lead Stephan Demirdjian heading up the new scheme and from the outline so far it’s taking the process of democratic game creation to a very Supercell-style next level.
While Supercell’s established structure of small teams given autonomy to create and grow their titles is still revolutionary to many, Spark goes one further, assessing the ability of teams to work together through psychometric tests and their abilities to work under stress, all applied and measured by a team psychologist…
What’s more - in perhaps the ultimate experiment in democracy and openness - the company is inviting pitches from teams outside the company and applying the same Spark process to see if they and their ideas can make the cut within Supercell.
Supercell’s appliance of science
“Last year, we started to think about how to make Supercell an even better environment to create the best new games,” Paananen explained to Mobilegamer.biz. “Team Lab [the working title for the system that will eventually be implemented as Spark] is all about putting together the best possible teams, rather than these teams spinning up organically or on an ad hoc basis. We wanted to get super systematic about this and consolidate and accumulate the knowledge we have about building teams. We have 13 years of history, so let’s make sure we learn from the 13 years.
“We’re going to focus all of our attention on the team, and put in place an amazing methodology including even having a professional psychologist in the team assessing the team dynamic.
“We set ourselves a goal: we want to be the world’s best at creating these new game teams. I truly believe that one of the core pillars of Supercell culture is this idea that we don’t greenlight ideas, we greenlight teams.
“There’s very little process and structure at Supercell – we tend to be quite allergic to it – but this is one place where we felt that we absolutely needed it.
Demirdjian adds details as to exactly how the new, internal testing will work.
“I felt like we needed to formalise the system behind how new game teams form at Supercell for our new employees, but also the older employees,” he explained. “We assembled a greenlight panel that interviews those teams and the chosen leads, because it was important to me that it shouldn’t be one person that is the gatekeeper.
“We want to infuse, from a cultural point of view, more entrepreneurial thinking. You have to have the right ambition levels, you really aim high, you don’t let yourself be scared or think too small.
“Of course we need to also have people that are able to kill their darlings, that are able to make those really difficult decisions – killing your entire game, maybe even having to kill your entire team, even.”
“If the team feels they are ready and every team member can tell me ‘I’m willing to fight for every single person in this cell because they make me better’ – and I agree – I put them into the final phase of the programme. That means getting ready for greenlight, and they can work on the next Supercell game.”
And has the process already kicked in and borne fruit?
“In a test run that concluded just now in February we actually did greenlight two teams, and we also killed a lot during the Team Lab phase,” Demirdjian reveals.
“We’re quite happy with the results with this initial test and as a result, the decision was made to do another round, which will start after the summer. And this time around, after speaking with Ilkka about this, we want to also open the opportunity to external teams to be part of the journey.”
Want to take the test?
“There are alot of great people, and great ideas also outside Supercell and we want to make sure we’re tapping into the world’s best talent,” adds Paananen. “We want to welcome people who will come in and even challenge how we do things and what type of games to build.
Just when you thought that Supercell’s attitude and methods in game creation couldn’t get more intriguing and scientific, they go and prove us all wrong - again. Will it work? Can it work? And would you want to put your team and game idea through the test?
Check out the full interview here and decide for yourself…
