Mobile gaming's most outspoken CEO wants to take more risks

Supercell's Ilkka Paananen on the studio's unusual new game launch, the industry's big challenges, testing Epic-style alternate payments, and plans for more Supercell games on... PC?

Promotional art for Mo.Co, Supercell’s newest game. Image: Supercell

The thing I had to keep reminding myself, when prepping for an interview with Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen last month, was that the game that generated $100 million in revenue last year for the Helsinki-headquartered, Tencent-backed studio, was the one they were disappointed in.

In February, Paananen had written:

…our first new game launch in over 5 years, Squad Busters, despite generating gross revenues in excess of 100 million dollars during its first 7 months in 2024 and winning the Apple Game of the Year Award, has not yet scaled up to the game team’s (or Supercell’s) aspirations – a disappointing, but energizing truth

As part of my research for the interview, I played Squad Busters, which is a multiplayer competition in which you roam a map, recruiting a small crew of combatants, as you collect loot and attack other players. It was really fun. It also guest-starred Sonic the Hedgehog at that point (and, for just four more days, he’s still available to unlock for $9.99).

But in the world of mobile games, the stakes are too high to be content with $100 million in year one.

Actually, how much do modern mobile games from studios such as Supercell even cost to make?

“Let's put it this way,” Paananen said. “The days of creating games with sort of a single-digit-million-dollar budget, those are probably, well—you should never say ‘over,’ but it definitely is way more costly than it used to be.”

When Paananen and I spoke in late June, we didn’t talk that much about Squad Busters, nor about Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, the long-running mega-hits that have made Supercell one of the top companies in mobile games for the last decade-plus. We chatted more about another long-term Supercell success, the surprising Brawl Stars, and an even more unproven new Supercell game, the just-released Mo.Co.

In more of the abstract, Paananen wanted to talk about risk-taking, about the need to make new games:

“The kind of trap that we don't want to fall into is that we keep on repeating and doing things the similar way that you've always done, [just] because those things look like to us this success.

“I think that's gonna be a kiss of death in in our industry.”

Dramatic words, yes. But that’s Paananen. He is as outspoken a CEO as there is in gaming. His annual “long texts" serve as temperature checks for Sueprcell and for the entire mobile gaming industry.

During our call, he was giving off the vibe of a CEO who wants to try new things, despite his company’s rep for killing a lot of its games off quickly.

And I wanted to wrap my head around how this business even works when you’re a Supercell and every success seemingly needs to be super-sized.

Early in our conversation, Paananen threw me for a loop.