In 2022, Clash turned a decennial page. For us, 10 years is just the beginning, though! With bigger and bigger ambitions and dreams comes the need for a bigger team. That’s where we’d like you to join the story.
It began in 2012. Supercell had decided to try making games for these new-fangled things called “iPads”. Clash of Clans came out and did better than anyone could have dared to dream. We’ve connected players across the world, even in places as remote as Antarctica, sparking real-life friendships, marriages and even the sort of connections that lead to babies being born. That’s a pretty wild impact from a game made by a few people from the smallish country of Finland.
Today, we’re still in the amazingly lucky position where every day Clash brings fun into the lives of tens of millions of players. You might think after all this time, it feels like there’s less to do on keeping Clash running, that it’s become routine even. Lots of us felt like that before joining but oh boy, were we wrong. Instead, it’s as if the longer the game goes on that there’s more and more cool things we’re excited to see added to the game, both as its creators and as players.
So we’ve decided to grow our team, letting us try out more of those cool new things so we can bring players the best possible version of this amazing game. If you’ve read this far, you might be the right kind of person to join us as we figure out the next 10 years of Clash’s journey.
We have many roles open here
The Clash of Clans team is currently over 40 people from 17 different countries. Our longest-serving member has been on the team since it launched globally 10.5 years ago and our shortest-serving has been here about 10.5 weeks!
We count not just the development team but everyone in operations and marketing who works on Clash as part of the team. It doesn’t matter what title is printed on your business card. Everybody on the team gets to have a say in every aspect. It’s all of our job to make Clash as good as it can be for as many players as possible!
There’s a few big themes we’re working on: Improving learning, building our core, being more lively and improving the Clan experience.
Improving learning: Clash is a big, complicated game and we don’t do a good enough job of providing players the tools they need to learn the game. Ideally, we’d want to build tools that allow our players to teach each other.
Building our core: It’s weird to say as a ten-year-old game, but we’re still sorting out our core. Last year we released the Clan Capital, and later this year we’re rebooting the Builder Base part of the game. Both parts of the game, as well as the OG Home Village, still have lots of missing features players would love to see.
Being more lively: We know today’s players want to see more happening between our game updates, and we want to work towards keeping Clash fresh all year round with more events and limited-time gameplay modes.
Improving the Clan experience: Clans and the social part of the game are so important that they made it into the game’s name. But there’s lots of embarrassingly old stuff that needs a 2023 rethink as well as missing features we’ve never gotten around to yet. We want to fix that.
We don’t expect everyone joining the team to be an expert in the game. In fact, we think it’s very important that every kind of player is represented in our team; we have casual and hardcore players, newer and older, rushers and maxers. We do expect everyone in the team to play the game, so they know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not, so you can bring up problems that we can try and figure out how to solve together.
Sometimes, especially when you’re new, the sheer size of the game and its number of players can be pretty intimidating. It can feel scary to make changes because WHAT IF IT'S NOT GOOD? or WHAT IF I MAKE A MISTAKE?
It happens; we’re only human. We don’t always get it right, and we do make mistakes. If we do release a horrible bug, we fix it for players as fast as we can and try to make sure bugs like that can’t happen again. If we miss with some feature, we’ll take the feedback from players and fix it in a version 2 or 3 or however many iterations it takes to get it right.
Giving the community a lovely present, whether it’s something massive like Clan Capital or just a smaller quality of life tweak. It feels like being Santa Claus (another Finnish celebrity). It truly is a remarkable privilege to be trusted by so many players with the stewardship of something many of them have been playing for years and years. It inspires us as a team to do better and better by our players.
Our game lead Stuart shared some thoughts in an interview that you'll find by clicking/tapping/pressing here
Jump deep into game design and how the new Builder Base 2.0 revamp was created from game designer Alex's intervew
That's great! So, our CEO, Ilkka, writes these really long (but fascinating) annual blog posts that give a great picture of what are this values driving us and what's been going on.