Supercell is generating a ton of cash from its ongoing successful games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. Most of the company is now owned by China’s Tencent. But rather than use its riches to expand its internal staff, the company believes in staying small, according to cofounder Mikko Kodisoja.
Supercell has just 240 employees, and most of them operate in small teams, or “cells,” of five or 10 people. I interviewed Kodisoja at the Gamelab gaming event in Barcelona this week, where he gave a fireside chat. Supercelll has begun its own efforts to invest in or acquire other mobile game developers. It is looking for companies that don’t do the same thing that it does but operate in a way that is similar to Supercell’s own operations.
Supercell’s record is enviable. It made $2.3 billion in revenue from just four games — Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and Hay Day — in 2016. That performance is why Tencent acquired control of Supercell at a $10.2 billion value. Supercell bought a majority stake in Space Ape for $55.8 million recently, and it has also taken stakes in Finnish developers Frogmind and Shipyard Games.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: With your acquisition strategy and investment strategy, can you talk about how you’re approaching that as far as what you think is a good fit?
Mikko Kodisoja: What I tried to say was that — when we look for external teams and studios, first and foremost we’re looking at the team.
The team should have a similar kind of culture to what we have at Supercell, so there can be this full ownership for the teams that develop the games. We’ve noticed that works. If you give ownership and autonomy to your teams, they’re willing to take risks, and something good might happen. All the investments we’ve done so far have been into teams that are willing to take risks — maybe not just now, but in the future. They have work in their portfolios that tells us that they can tackle new innovations.GamesBeat: Are your teams still around five people?
Kodisoja: When they start, it’s about five. I think our biggest team is 16.
GamesBeat: When you look outside, are you looking for teams of similar size? Is that a fit issue as well? You maybe don’t want to invest in teams of 30 or 60 people.
Kodisoja: It depends on what they’re working toward. If it weren’t free-to-play mobile games, but something else, maybe that rule wouldn’t apply. But currently we’re mainly looking into free-to-play mobile, because we think there are still opportunities there.
Image Credit: Shipyard Games
GamesBeat: When you look at free-to-play mobile, do you prioritize things that Supercell doesn’t already have? Does that matter?
Kodisoja: Yeah, it matters quite a lot. The teams that do what we do aren’t first on our list. We want to diversify our portfolio and invest in teams that do something different from what we’re doing. One good example would be Shipyard Games, which we invested in. They’re working on a location-based game. That’s something that we’re not focused on ourselves.
GamesBeat: Are you in a particular rush? If you give a team of five people a million dollars, they have an inherent timetable.
Kodisoja: We have to trust the team when we do that kind of thing. One of the key points there is we want to give full autonomy to the team to operate by themselves. This can work as long as nobody has to micromanage everything. That’s how Supercell works now. Teams are responsible for doing their own job. We don’t need extra processes to work around them. The same applies…
The post Clash of Clans maker Supercell is making investments so its core team can stay small appeared first on FeedBox.