Nothing Bad Ever Happens in the Oldest Game at Supercell

If you walk into one of our studios on a Friday, you might think the Hay Day team is running some kind of lumberjack convention. From the designers to the data analysts, everyone is in plaid. It's Flannel Friday, a weekly tribute to Greg, one of the game's most beloved characters. Even people working from home wear theirs on video calls. As Diana Nedelcu, a Release Manager on the team, puts it: "If I see that it's Friday, I know what to wear. At home or in the office, it's one less thing to worry about."

Then there are the champagne bottles. The Hay Day team has taken Supercell’s habit of celebrating failures with champagne a step further: at a team day in December, every member received a personally labeled bottle with their name and the phrase "license to dare." These sit on desks as a daily reminder that trying something and getting it wrong is worth more than never trying at all. When something goes sideways, champagne emojis start appearing on Slack. It's become the team's reflex. Not panic, but fizz.

How a 14-year-old farming game found a new gear

Hay Day is where it all started for us. Launched in 2012, it's a farming game where nothing bad ever happens. Animals don't die, trees can always be revived, the world is a cozy escape from everything else. And it has one of the broadest player bases of any of our games: young and old, all over the world, people who've never touched another mobile game and people who've played everything.

For a while, though, the industry had written Hay Day off. The team calls it "phase four", essentially maintenance mode. Just a few people keeping the lights on. Steady. Reliable. A classic, if you will. But there was still something that kept the players excited and coming back to the game.

We realised we had made a mistake. So, about three years ago, we decided to rebuild the team. The ambition started growing along with the team fast. New people arrived from all over, bringing energy and perspectives the team hadn't had before. Baptiste Robbes, a LiveOps Manager who joined during that wave, describes what he found: "I never thought that work would be like this. I was used to more competition. You want to have the best idea and only the best idea survives. Here we're not competing against each other. We're competing as one team."

That growth made bold moves possible. Someone new to the game noticed that the onboarding experience was slow and clunky for a modern audience. So the team rebuilt it. For a live game with millions of players, that's a genuine risk. "No one is going to point fingers if it doesn't work," says Charlotte Taylor, an Analytics Lead. "We face the problem as a team, pop the champagne, and figure out how to do it better."

Who's in the room?

The onboarding rework only happened because someone was new enough to the game to notice the problem. A veteran at level 80 would have scrolled right past it. That's a small example of something bigger: the Hay Day team doesn't just have different job titles in the room. It has genuinely different people.

Diana is a law school graduate from Romania who switched to gaming after a summer job at Ubisoft and never looked back. Baptiste studied engineering in France, found it boring, and moved to Berlin to work in games. Neža moved her entire family from Slovenia to Helsinki to take a QA role on this team. Charlotte has spent 11 years across casual, mobile, and PC games. Nadya has been at Supercell for six and a half years and plays Hay Day at level 80.

40% of the team is women. Over half the leadership is women. Not because someone mandated it, but because it’s simply what happened when we were looking for the best.

Those different backgrounds show up directly in the game. Wedding decorations inspired by a colleague's marriage. Oktoberfest themes from a German artist's hometown. Indian festival events guided by Indian colleagues. Finnish blueberries as a cultural nod. Instead of just randomly adding things to the game, additions come from having a team that actually, genuinely reflects the people who play and care about the game. Nadya captures what this feels like from the inside: "When everyone is different, everyone feels equal. You aren't 'the woman in the room' or 'the expat.' You are just another valuable perspective."

Nothing bad ever happens in Hay Day

That's our game's famous promise to the players. Animals don't die. Trees come back. The world is safe. And somehow, the team behind the game operates on a strangely similar principle.

Not that nothing goes wrong. Of course things go wrong in real life all the time. But when they do, the reaction isn't blame. Neža describes it simply: "It’s immediately 'how are we going to fix this? Who's going to help?'" 

That safety is what makes the weird ideas possible. The team once filled every player's farm with frogs for April Fools'. Why? Why not? "Sometimes we just come up with silly ideas and it's like, you know what? Let's do it!" Diana says. "The community went nuts. They loved it."

And the community is a big part of why this works. The team reads Reddit. They watch TikTok. They celebrate player reactions in Slack. "They can bring so much happiness in one sentence," Diana says. "It's amazing how much we're there with them and they don't even know." Sometimes player ideas make it directly into the game. It's a living, breathing relationship, not a one-way broadcast.

What's next

You'd think that after 14 years of farming, the Hay Day team's ambition might start slowing down. You might even say that that was understandable. But that's just not what's happening. Charlotte says the team knows Hay Day is already a great game, they just truly believe it can be even greater. "Everyone believes we can be a greater game than we are right now, and they're all pushing for the same thing."

There are always more risks to take, more ideas to snowball, more perspectives to add. So, if this sounds like the kind of team where you'd do your best work, we're hiring.

Flannel is optional. But encouraged.

Explore open positions