At Supercell, we talk a lot about ambition, ownership, and taking risks. We also talk a lot about failure. Not because we enjoy it, but because we've learned that sharing what went wrong is the fastest way to help others take bold swings without repeating the same mistakes.
It’s a ritual. When a project gets killed, we pop champagne. Not to celebrate the failure itself, but to mark the courage it took to try and the learning that comes after. It's a way of saying: this hurt, we know it hurt, and yet… it was still worth doing.
The logic is simple. If failure feels dangerous, people play it safe. If failure feels survivable, or even honored, that’s when people take real risks. And real risks are how you end up making things that matter. We believe we won't reach our mission any other way. Failure isn't a flaw in the creative process. It's a necessary part of it. Companies don't fail because they take risks. They fail because they stop taking them.
Earlier this year, we brought together colleagues who've lived through some of our most instructive failures: games killed after years of work, marketing campaigns cancelled days before launch, entire business units shut down. They stood in front of 800 people and talked about what happened, how it felt, and what they took away from the experience.
Two-thirds of the people in that room had joined Supercell in the last three years. For many of them, this was the first time they'd heard these stories in detail. That felt like a good reason to share some of them more widely.
The pattern we kept seeing
Across three very different cases (a long-running prototype, a live-ops puzzle title, and an out-of-home advertising buy) a single pattern stood out:
The most instructive moments came when we drifted away from the principles we deeply believe in: bold ambition, genuine love for what we're making, and the willingness to take real risks.
That's not a comfortable thing to admit. But it's also why these lessons matter beyond our own walls. Every organization has values. The question is: how can you tell if you stop living them?
Lesson 1: Ambition needs constraints
Big goals only become bold choices when you set firm limits. Without guardrails, teams will drift into safe tweaks and late pivots.
What happened: Clash Mini spent years making incremental changes and deferring hard decisions on art direction and identity. Only when time and scope finally ran out did the team make the bolder moves that actually shifted the metrics. But, by then, it was too late.
Fan, one of the game leads, put it this way:
“Ambition is just a goal, an idea. Risk-taking is action. So I think constraints really help us remove a lot of actions or options that aren't going to help us.
One of the really important things we did was say: “Okay, we don’t have time. We can probably only make just one last update. And we have to increase our metrics or monetisation by, say, 10 times.” So a lot of the small things, a lot of the easier things, were off our table immediately. Previously, I always wanted to take risks, because I had 100 options. I had all these things I could do. So which risk should I take?
Once we set the constraint, so “This is the last update you guys can do; you have to increase your monetisation by 10x”, suddenly we had only one or two options left. Then, as a team, we had a healthy debate. We talked to each other: “Okay guys, let’s do this. This is the only option we have.”
We did it. It turned out pretty well. So I found that experience very helpful. I’d like to share that with anyone struggling to take risks, people who feel like they have too many options or too much time. I hope that can help a little bit.
— Fan, Game Lead, Clash Mini
Why it matters: In any field, ambition without constraints leads to over-scope and panicked pivots. Deadlines, success criteria, and explicit trade-offs force the right debates early. A small, well-defined box gives an idea its shape.
Lesson 2: Love your game, or kill it faster
If the people making something don't genuinely love and understand it, players won't either.
What happened: Hay Day Pop was a puzzle game built by a team with a strong track record, but not a strong feeling for the genre. They executed well, shipped fast, and responded to data. But they never innovated in the core puzzle. And they knew it.
Tuomas, one of the game programmers, was blunt:
If you think about Hay Day Pop, it was really a game that we as a team didn’t know much about. We don’t play this type of game. All this user acquisition, this kind of business model, it’s not in our DNA.
Maybe taking a little step back into our team’s history: many of us actually worked on Clash Royale. That was a very different story. We played the game every single day. We lived with the community. We knew what the players wanted. It was kind of easy: “Okay, let’s make Clan Wars. Let’s make 2v2. It’s going to be great.” It was easy.
But with Hay Day Pop, we didn’t really know what the players actually wanted. So for me, the biggest learning is: love the game you’re making. Because if you don’t, it’s actually very, very difficult, and you’re just blindly guessing based on metrics. Like, is this going to work? Is it not? But if you like the game yourself, it’s going to be so much easier, and much more fun.
— Tuomas, Game Programmer, Hay Day Pop
The project was killed during COVID. The real value came afterwards: the team regrouped with fire in their hearts, determined to make something they truly understood.
Why it matters: Sustained excellence needs intrinsic motivation. When love is missing, teams default to safe bets and metric-chasing. The humane decision is to stop, salvage the learnings, and redirect talent to work they believe in.
Lesson 3: From "Will it work?" to "Will we be proud?"
Effectiveness matters, but the true bar is pride. Taste compounds over time and defines the brand.
What happened: In late 2013, we were about to run our first-ever out-of-home campaign for Clash of Clans. The creative was finished by the deadline, but it wasn't good enough. We cancelled the campaign at a cost of roughly $2 million.
Ryan, who led the effort, described what he learned:
This was around Christmas of 2013, so a really long time ago. I came in to do something that not only had never been done at Supercell, but also hadn’t been done in the industry. That was to launch our first ever brand campaign for Clash of Clans. It included animations on television and online, and also out-of-home. And remember, this was a long time ago. We were trying to do something that hadn’t been done before...
We just didn’t get the creative done. It was finished by the deadline, but it wasn’t good enough. And so we ultimately cancelled the out-of-home portion of the campaign at a cost of $2 or $2.2 million to Supercell. But the path to get to that decision was very difficult and emotional. I learned that Supercell is really different...
I was trying to make the decision from a place of: Will this work? Will it be effective? And what I learned is: that’s the wrong question to ask. Or at least, it’s not the only question to ask. Maybe the more important question is: Will we be proud of it? And in this case, the answer was no. So that was a reason to kill it.
— Ryan, Brand Marketing Lead, Supercell
Why it matters: Teams sometimes ship "good enough" work that ticks KPIs. A pride standard protects long-term trust and teaches people to say ‘no’ when something isn't worthy, even if it might work.
The human side
Before any of these lessons could land, there were feelings to process. Anger. Shame. Bitterness. The sense that months of work and millions of dollars had been wasted.
Ryan, on learning the out-of-home campaign would be cancelled: "I was so angry. I felt like someone from another team was telling me what we could do on our team. Truth is, I felt lied to. Culture of independent teams, right? I had only been at the company four months, and I'm like, this is bullsh*t."
These feelings are real, and they're allowed. They're proof that someone cared enough to take a genuine risk. But if we don't talk about them, they can quietly make the next risk harder to take. That's why we share them openly: to show that it's normal to feel this way and still make hard decisions. Strong convictions come with strong emotions. The goal isn't to make failure painless. It's to make sure the pain doesn't stop people from swinging big again.
What comes next
It's bigger. It's bolder. Because so are the lessons we'll learn in the future.
There's a reason we keep doing this. Talking openly about failure creates the conditions for people to try hard things. It signals that the worst-case scenario isn't shame or silence but rather a toast and a conversation about what comes next. That changes how people work. It changes what they're willing to attempt.
If there's one thing we hope people take away from this, it's that failure isn't the end of the story. Everyone on that stage is still here, still working on ambitious projects, still learning.