What Ilkka Paananen's BAFTA Fellowship means for mobile

• Supercel CEO and co-founder Ilkka Paananen is being awarded the BAFTA Fellowship.
• Google Play has signed a long-term partnership to become the headline partner for the BAFTA Games Awards.
• Paananen discusses why recognition of mobile games matters at big awards shows.

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This week, UK independent arts charity BAFTA revealed that Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen will be honoured with its most prestigious accolade: the BAFTA Fellowship.

The award celebrates exceptional individuals driving innovation, creativity and positive change in the screen arts, which also includes film and TV. It has been given to industry luminaries including Hideo Kojima, Shuhei Yoshida, Siobhan Reddy, Gabe Newell, Yoko Shimomura and Shigeru Miyamoto, among others.

It’s a high honour recognising Paananen's 25-year+ career that has largely been dedicated to mobile gaming across Sumea, Digital Chocolate and Supercell, launching multi-billion dollar blockbusters. You can read our exclusive interview with Paananen about his career and the challenges Supercell faces right now here.

The BAFTA Fellowship is also inescapably a nod to the mobile gaming world, often overlooked at the prestigious BAFTA Games Awards. What’s more, Google Play has signed a long-term partnership to become the headline partner for the show - perhaps they got the heads up on that Fellowship announcement.

Titles like mobile-first Monument Valley 3, Ball x Pit and Is This Seat Taken? are up for an award at next week's BAFTA Games Awards ceremony on April 17th, though each game is available on other platforms now, too.

We’ve debated the lack of recognition for mobile games at big awards shows on numerous occasions. Last year, Christian Lövstedt, the CEO of Battle of Polytopia developer Midjiwan, published an open letter on the matter titled “the games industry is biased, it is time to fix that”.

He told us: “Players and awards bodies perhaps see a free-to-play game and immediately assume its poor quality. If we as an industry could highlight high quality mobile games in the same way as console and PC games, we can slowly change the reputation mobile has. Or at the very least break down the assumptions that many consumers have rightly developed.”

It’s worth noting the problem could be partly self-made. Companies need to nominate for an award - a process that costs £264 for submissions before September 11th or within 30 days of release and £528 after - but we heard from a previous year that there weren’t many mobile game submissions. So we can debate the lack of mobile recognition, but if games companies don’t see the value, perhaps BAFTA is not entirely to blame.

We asked Paananen what importance there is, if any, to accolades for mobile developers at these big awards shows.

“I think it does matter,” he said. “When we were starting Supercell in 2010, oftentimes people would ask us: ‘you have such a talented and experienced senior team, but why do you guys do mobile games? Why don’t you do real games?’”

He added: “We are of course honoured to kind of represent all of those mobile developers who have heard the same comments. Obviously there are so many great and talented people who make mobile games outside of Supercell. There are so many great companies.”

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