Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen talks AI, Brawl Stars, middle management fears and why startups should "go crazy" with fresh ideas

"That’s at the very core of Supercell - we want to take big, big risks knowing most of the time they will fail," says Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen.

He discussed the company’s history, culture and structure with a16z, ahead of the latter’s upcoming SR005.

Paananen also talked trends, AI, advice and future opportunities in the games industry.

"We were so lucky that our first game on Facebook was an absolute failure. Had it been a success, it might be that Supercell as we know it today wouldn’t even exist," he said in reference to 2011’s Gunshine. "It forced us to go back to the drawing board."

Then and now

Paananen noted that, early on, Supercell’s six co-founders had meetings about the "very best people" each had worked with in previous roles. This helped in hiring the first 20 or 30 people in the company. However, down the line, Paananen realised this could come with certain disadvantages.

"If you only recruit from your own networks and the people that you like, then you can run the risk of everybody being a little bit the same," he acknowledged. "Only later on did we realise the value of diversity, and it’s a massive value. It’s easy to build this echo chamber when you just hire like-minded people."

He also reflected on concerns that delayed decisions which ultimately paid off for Supercell once overcome, such as worries around expanding teams to too great a size.

"We were so scared of bigger teams with middle management, processes, bureaucracy and all of that," he said. "In previous years we had underinvested in our games - live games, teams, players, that kind of thing."

Equally, Supercell wanted to create brands in the same "class" as Mario and Zelda, which Paananen believes there is still a "long, long way to go" to reach.

But in recent years team sizes have expanded. The Clash of Clans team doubled in size in 2023 and Brawl Stars now has its first-ever producer. The company proceeded to have a record year in 2024 with $3 billion in revenue and saw each of its games grow year-over-year.

"The shining star is Brawl Stars. I’ve never seen in my career this kind of growth for a six-year-old game. It’s been absolutely incredible," Paananen highlighted.

At the same time, he referenced Squad Busters’ "fantastic start" but understood there are "clearly quite a few issues" with the game, which Supercell is "working really hard to solve".

He noted that Supercell’s largest live game teams are comprised of between 60 and 100 people.

Advice and opportunities

Paananen sympathised with how "incredibly hard" it is to launch new games in the modern landscape, stating this "true for everybody".

He noted that for entrepreneurs just starting out, without pre-existing live service games, they must somehow become "energised" by the challenge of having "super low" odds of success.

"Maybe there’s a one out of 10 chance, or maybe one out of 20," he said. "You have to be a little bit crazy to work on that side of the business."

His advice was to "go crazy and create something that doesn’t exist" rather than iterating on another company’s success.

This echoes Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai’s advice not to adhere too strictly to market research at the risk of creating "average and mediocre" games.

Lastly, Paananen suggested that there must still be innovations to come in social games and raised the potential of AI in supporting smaller teams.