It Takes a Village to Build Clash of Clans!

First published on the Clash of Clans blog.

Hey Clashers,

I’m Stuart, General Manager of the Clash of Clans team. This is an update on some behind-the-scenes changes we’ve made to the team recently. TLDR: we’ve grown our team a bunch to make Clash better, and faster.

For many years at Supercell, we prided ourselves on creating great games with small teams of experienced people who had no obstacles in their way. And this worked really well for Clash! But as the game got bigger and older, our to-do list of needed improvements was only getting longer and longer. Our small team size had itself become an obstacle. Our belief at Supercell is that it's only by making the best possible game for players that we’ll see the best possible business results. So have you, our players, been getting the best possible version of Clash of Clans? Sadly, the answer is “no”.

And that sucks, so we decided to start fixing that! Since January, we’ve roughly doubled the size of the team. This has required making a lot of other changes to how we work, so that this bigger team can actually get more done, and not just explode in a mess of chaos. And yes, there definitely has been some chaos along the way. We’ve had some amazing people join the team with great ideas about how to do things better, and they’re very excited to be working on a game as great and iconic as Clash. But it’s also been a bit scary for them; shipping things to such a big audience, so please be gentle with them!

This bigger version of the team isn’t at full speed yet. But as our new people are getting more experienced, we’re getting more done faster. You can see that in things like the recent Mashup Madness event. One of our team said, "I can’t imagine how sad that event would have been if we’d made it with the team size we had at the start of the year". And we aren’t done growing the team yet. We’re still on the lookout for more great people, so we can get closer and closer to bringing you all the best possible version of Clash.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for being such a great community. Since the game launched back in 2012, it’s belonged to you, the players. It’s seeing your excitement for the good things we do that makes all our hard work worthwhile. And, less fun but more importantly, it’s seeing your disappointment when we’ve messed up that inspires us to do better next time. So keep all the great feedback coming, whether positive or critical. It all helps us decide what to do and where to go next.

With this bigger team, we have some ambitious plans for 2024 that we think you’ll really enjoy.

And 2023 isn’t over yet! We have our World Finals coming up this weekend! It’s always exciting to see what devious base designs and attack strategies our top players will use. After that, we have a huge Home Village-focused December update that’s going to make most of those strategies old news! It’s a great time to be a Clasher!

Clash on,
Stuart