The Best Games Haven't Been Made Yet

It was a near-record year that virtually matched our 2024 results. The year was driven mostly by an incredible, historic year of Clash Royale. On the other side, launching new hit games remains as hard as ever – not just for us, but across the entire industry, especially in the West. Squad Busters became Supercell's first-ever killed game after global launch. We should all learn as much as possible from that, so I will share some important learnings in this post (many of them painfully obvious in hindsight!)

It is an interesting time to be in the mobile games market. The market is largely flat with modest growth, at best. Case in point, according to Newzoo, the market has grown just 3% per year on average in the last 5 years. In many ways, it feels like our industry is at a crossroads. Are we satisfied with the status quo – relying on optimization and incremental improvements to the great games we've already made? Or are we brave enough to dream bigger and be more ambitious about what this industry could become? And if we are more ambitious, what do we need to do to kick the industry into new growth?

I believe the answer is innovation. For an almost 16-year-old, 900-person company like Supercell, that's not easy. But it's not stopping us from trying! This is maybe the most important reason I'm writing this year's post: to reach out to ambitious game creators who are driven to build and launch the most innovative games for the widest audience of players possible. We are committed to pursuing this needed innovation in as many ways as we can, and we want you here creating new experiences for players with us at Supercell.

But before I get into all of that, let me start with what went well. There's a lot to celebrate!

Clash Royale: A Historic Year

Last year, I called Brawl Stars' growth 'historic.' Now I'm about to use that word again for Clash Royale.

Royale’s re-engaged players doubled. New players grew almost 500%. Every major measure of playtime and engagement grew significantly. And maybe most importantly, Clash Royale once again became the game to play with friends around the world. It felt like 2016 again. (Has it really been almost 10 years?)

I want to take a moment to celebrate this, because what happened deserves celebrating. A game approaching its tenth year didn't just hold on – it exploded. That's extraordinarily rare in our industry. It's proof of what's possible when a talented team relentlessly focuses on making things better for players.

The obvious question: What did the team do? So I went to Aleksandar (Sasha) Marković, General Manager of Clash Royale, and came away energized by what he shared.

First, Sasha and the team are remarkably grounded given what they achieved. Clash Royale is currently declining from its recent peak, so anything they've learned comes with the awareness that challenges remain. As Sasha put it: "While this rare 'explosive growth' that doesn't happen for most games has happened twice for us in the past two years, there are no certainties here. And while we may have learned a bit about this kind of growth, we haven't yet learned how to sustain it."

One precondition for Royale's recent growth, and Brawl Stars’ before it in 2024, is the players themselves. For massive, rapid growth to happen, word-of-mouth discovery has to happen. "You and your friends have to talk about the games you're playing. Not true of every audience or demographic." This may explain why Clash of Clans, Hay Day, and Boom Beach have seen more gradual growth and declines, while Brawl’s and Royale's ups and downs are more... dizzying.

So what drove Royale's explosion in 2025? It actually started before last year. The team made changes to progression, simplified the game by removing extraneous systems, and added desirable new content, both in-game and out-of-game. "All of this makes the game more approachable and makes progression more possible for players. Itself, this doesn't create anything immediate, but it creates the ability for returning players to have a much better time, IF they return," Sasha told me.

Whether players actually return involves a bit of pyrotechnics, apparently, Sasha started talking about the unpredictability of sparks catching fire. In these forever games, there are many "sparks" in the form of new content and features. If community sentiment is generally positive, any of these sparks can catch fire. If sentiment is negative, they almost certainly cannot.

"In 2024, we started giving away Evos and had the first signs of sparks, but also at the same time as the Goblin Journey update, which didn't land. Disappointment became negative and dampened sentiment for a while." But in early 2025, when sentiment had returned to a better state, a pretty unexpected spark helped start a blaze – with the help of Michael Bolton, no less! The Barboltian campaign around Valentine's Day and the free Barbarian Evolution gift marked the start of Clash Royale's explosion. Evos had been around since June 2023, so as Sasha said: "We think players like new content eventually, but perhaps not always in the moment."

It also takes innovation and risk-taking. The team launched Merge Tactics, a new gameplay mode born out of Supercell's canceled Clash Mini project. Turning a failure into fuel for something new.

What does catching fire look like? "First you see active players engaging more. As they do that, you see recently churned players return, then longer-tail re-engagement. Finally, you see entirely new players show up. At first, it happens very slowly, but the virtuous cycle of word of mouth snowballs." None of our internal forecasts for either Brawl Stars or Royale predicted the ensuing rise in metrics, right up until it actually happened. Forecasting in games is hard.

The story doesn't end there. The Royale community is frustrated with some recent changes, and the team is listening and working to address it. The same dynamics that enable virtuous growth can enable a vicious cycle. As Sasha noted: "At some point, once you begin a slide, it makes sense for word of mouth to turn negative."

But wrapping up our conversation, Sasha wanted everyone to know: "The team won't ever compromise trying to deliver value for all kinds of players. We have players who love to gain trophies, increase levels, earn new card forms, play for free, or spend their money. They aren't 'one thing.' And in the mind of the team, Royale is the best mobile-native gameplay ever released. We love it. We are crazy about it. This is why we will never break that promise."

Here's what Clash Royale's year – and Brawl Stars' year before it – proves to me: there is enormous untapped potential in our live games. Games that have been around for years, even over a decade, can still become much better versions of themselves for players, unlocking explosive new growth. The ceiling is so much higher than we thought. That's incredibly exciting!

Squad Busters: Busted! What We Learned

After 75 million players downloaded Squad Busters and spent over $100 million on it, after an aggressive design pivot, the team made the difficult but appropriate decision to shut it down. It was Supercell's first-ever killed game after global launch.

When I say launching new games is harder than ever, Squad is a case in point. Why did we launch it? Why didn't it work? What can we learn? I asked Eino Joas and Paula Báguena to share their thoughts.

Development began in 2020. After three years focused on core gameplay, the team released the first closed beta in February 2023 with 5,000 players. Results didn't meet goals – D7 retention was 29%. The team spent three months making material changes, adding more player agency with boosts, abilities, and map events. The second beta in May 2023 with more than 140,000 players showed significant improvement: D1 retention hit 61%, D3 was 44%, and D7 climbed to 38%.

At the same time, top content creators from our Creator Program consistently rated Squad their favorite game in development. Apple and Google were excited. The team had demonstrated they could pivot quickly based on player feedback.

And honestly, internal pressure was building at Supercell to take bold risks. But don’t get me wrong – not top-down pressure from me or the leadership team – just the human reality that we hadn't successfully launched a game in six years. As Eino put it: "We had a success rate of 100% on our previous five launches. We all felt that our risk appetite was getting too constrained, and we weren't being bold enough."

So we launched.

Many things went well. The team scaled up significantly, with dozens of Supercellians from other teams jumping in to help. The execution was remarkable – they made a lot happen in a very short time. As Eino said: "It wasn't actually just a team effort. It was a company effort."

But the game didn't work with a large enough group of players. Most concerning: player behavior and retention after global launch didn't match what we saw in closed betas.

The key learnings, which feel obvious in hindsight:

• Even large beta samples don't predict global behavior. You cannot draw reliable conclusions even from 100,000+ players.

• Don't skip testing meta and long term retention. Squad's betas focused almost exclusively on core gameplay and only validated D7 retention. Soft launch was only one month—not enough to validate longer-term retention and monetization.

• Don't build a massive marketing push before the product vision is deeply validated. We wouldn't repeat this under the same circumstances.

As Eino reflected: "We wanted the game to be for everyone. Everyone could pick it up, understand the controls, and enjoy it. But there was a huge gap between expectations and reality. We had 40 million pre-registrations, 75 million installs, but not a lot of those players stuck around. They came in and didn't find what they were looking for. We were blind to that."

Paula, Squad's community manager at launch, added: "The players in our ecosystem are the most passionate about Supercell. That comes with high expectations. They hold us to a high standard. But we should hold ourselves to an even higher one."

The bottom line: the team believes they should have run a third, longer-duration beta. That might have exposed the mismatch between the game and player expectations earlier. It sounds simple. It wasn't.

Squad shows yet again our culture of celebrating failures with champagne – and learning everything we can from them. It also shows how hard it is to launch an outlier hit game at our level of ambition.

At the same time, we and the industry need a new hit game more than ever. More on that below.

Not an Industry Thriving – An Industry Coasting

I think we can all agree that the mobile games industry is not living up to its potential.

As said, according to estimates (e.g Newzoo), the market has grown on average by 3% per year in the last 5 years. That's not an industry thriving. It's an industry coasting. I have a theory on why this is. But before that, some striking facts.

Billy Ren, one of our market insights specialists, recently analyzed mobile games launched since 2020. Out of roughly 53,000 games launched, only 22 (about .04%!) grossed $1 billion or more – which is roughly what meeting our ambitions looks like. Here's what's striking: 20 of those 22 came from developers in China, Japan, and South Korea. Only 2 were developed in the West: Royal Match by Dream Games and Monopoly Go by Scopely.

Why is the West falling behind? Yes, local Chinese developers have a natural advantage in the world's biggest market. But we in the West should look in the mirror. The fact is, we have not brought radical new gameplay innovation to the market – not in the way Clash Royale, Pokémon GO, or Brawl Stars each did in their time. Those games didn't just succeed; they expanded the market by bringing entirely new audiences to mobile gaming.

So what is the industry doing instead? Getting very good at optimizing what already exists. A/B testing. Incremental improvements. Squeezing more out of proven formulas. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that work. 

The work of improving live games is not the problem. In fact, it's essential. At Supercell, making our live games better for players is equally important as creating new ones. Without continuously improving these games, we cannot achieve our mission of creating games that are remembered forever. Clash Royale's results last year are a testament to what's possible when a team relentlessly focuses on the player experience – a nearly decade-old game exploding with growth because the team kept finding new ways to delight players. We're incredibly proud of that work and will keep doing it.

But here's the reality: live game excellence alone doesn't grow an industry. It maintains one. For the market to truly expand, we need to bring new players in. People who don't currently play mobile games. And that requires innovation. New genres. New ways to play. Experiences that make someone say, "I've never seen anything like this before." That's what Clash Royale did in 2016. That's what Pokémon GO did that same summer. The industry needs more of those moments.

I've seen what happens when an industry stops innovating. Remember the era of those downloadable PC/Mac games with 60-minute free trials back in 2005? Eventually, the market consolidated around just three genres: match-3, hidden object, and time management games. Endless optimization, minimal innovation. What could have been a massive market became a limited one. Obviously, we do not want mobile games to end up in the same place.

What We're Doing About It

First, we're putting our money where our mouth is. In 2025, we literally doubled our investment in new games and innovation compared to the prior year and this year we’re expecting to roughly double it again. While many companies have scaled back, we've moved in the opposite direction. Our strong live games performance, especially Clash Royale's historic year, gives us the ability to make these long-term bets. We're fortunate to be in this position, and we intend to use it.

Second, we've reorganized Supercell to create the right conditions for both live games and new games to thrive. And while I say “right conditions for both”, I also mean that these conditions are different for both.

We hired Sara Bach in 2023 and have now consolidated nearly everything except new games under her leadership. In mid-2025, we brought on Drussila Hollanda to run all new game development. These aren't just title changes. We've created genuinely separate organizations, with different spaces, different cultures, and different ways of working. Our goal: let live game teams focus entirely on serving today's players, while new game teams focus entirely on inventing the future new hit games that will eventually become live games.

Third – and this is the biggest shift – we're trying to build something that combines the best of startups with the advantages of an established company like ours.

For over two years, I've talked about new game teams operating like startups. Honestly, we only went partway there. We attracted entrepreneurial founders and gave them independence, but we didn't create the full conditions that make startups work. That was my failure. Now we're trying to fix it.

Here's what we believe it takes:

• Entrepreneurial founders with extreme ambition. Great games don't come from committees or processes. They come from small groups of visionary builders who believe, maybe irrationally, that they can create something that changes how millions of people play. We greenlight teams, not game concepts, because you simply cannot predict which idea will succeed. But you can identify the people who won't stop until they figure it out.

• Tight constraints. This might sound counterintuitive, but I've come to believe that constraints drive innovation. In my time as an entrepreneur and investor, I've rarely seen great products emerge from teams with unlimited budgets and endless runways. Too many resources lead to unfocused exploration, not creative breakthroughs. Constraints force prioritization. They force you to find clever solutions instead of throwing money at problems. They create urgency. New game teams at Supercell now operate within real budget-based constraints, not theoretical ones.

• Aligned incentives. If we're asking founders to take startup-level risks, they should share in startup-level upside. New game teams at Supercell now participate in their game's profits if they successfully launch. We want people who might otherwise start their own company to be able to do something like that here, with better odds of reaching players at scale.

At the same time, Supercell provides what no startup can: a launchpad. Our scale, a player base of around 300 million monthly actives, tens of thousands of creators in our Creator Program, our relationships with Apple and Google, our marketing and live ops expertise – these compound a great game's chances of success. Squad Busters, despite its post-launch failure, proved this: 40 million pre-registrations, 75 million downloads in year one. The rocket didn't reach orbit, but the launchpad worked.

What we're building is the best of both worlds. You build the rocket ship. We provide the launchpad. Together, we maximize the odds of creating something that matters.

We Follow People, Not Processes 

I want to be clear: what follows isn't really about programs or processes. It's about the best people and teams. The best product founders in the world – whether they're inside Supercell today or somewhere else entirely. If that's you, we want to talk, regardless of which path makes the most sense.

When we have the right people and/or team, we've done whatever we can to work together with them to create something amazing. Ultimately that is all that counts. The process does not matter.

That said, here are some of the current ways we're trying to find and support these founders:

• Spark Program: For individuals who have the talent and drive but haven't yet found their team, Spark offers something unique: the chance to meet potential co-founders through intense game jams and rapid prototyping, pressure-tested with the support of the program. But Spark isn't only for individuals. Complete teams who want to prove themselves through this process are equally welcome. We've now completed multiple cycles, with over dozens of developers going through the program and many new game teams emerging. We'll continue running Spark and learning from it.

• AI Innovation Lab: What started as a Helsinki pilot last spring expanded to San Francisco last fall. This April, we're running three concurrent cohorts across Helsinki, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The Lab is focused on founders exploring entirely novel gameplay experiences at the intersection of AI and gaming. We've had some genuinely exciting teams come through already, with several continuing to work with Supercell after their cohorts ended.

• Supercell Investments: We continue investing in external studios and teams who share our ambition to create great games – preferably games we'd never build ourselves. Different platforms, different genres, different audiences. As one example, Channel37's The Last Caretaker recently crossed 1 million wishlists on Steam. It's an amazing PC game, nothing like what we’ve built at Supercell – and that's exactly why we're excited and proud to support it. 

If none of these paths fit but something in this post resonates with you, please reach out anyway. We're not trying to funnel everyone through a single process. We're trying to find the right people and figure out, together, how to make something great.

An Invitation

I don't know if what we're building will work. We're a nearly 16-year-old company trying to recapture the hunger and inventiveness of a startup. That's not easy. We'll probably make mistakes along the way.

But I believe the industry needs more companies willing to try. The mobile games market won't reach its potential through optimization alone. Someone needs to create the next experience that brings new players in. The next moment that expands what people think mobile games can be.

Maybe that someone is at Supercell already. Maybe they're at another company. Maybe they're working on something in their apartment right now. Wherever they are, we want to give them the best possible chance to succeed.

If you're the kind of person who's driven to build something genuinely new for players, and you're curious whether Supercell might be the right place to do it, I hope you'll reach out. We're committed to pursuing innovation in as many ways as we can. We'd be grateful to have you join us in trying.

Financial Year 2025

Finnish law requires us to publish our annual financials, and I'm proud to share them.

The results:

• Revenue: $3.01 billion / €2.65 billion

• EBITDA: $1.06 billion / €0.93 billion

• Corporate taxes paid in Finland: €220 million

On the taxes: many of us at Supercell benefited from Finland's free education and healthcare, financed by taxes. We're proud to contribute back to our society in this way, and to help give others the same opportunities we had.

In dollar terms, we matched our all-time record revenue from 2024, and grew EBITDA by 12%. In euro terms, EBITDA grew 6%. No matter how you measure it, this was an exceptional year. Financially speaking, it was one of the best years in Supercell's history.

Clash Royale was the biggest contributor to these results in 2025. But the bigger point is this: zooming out from any single game or any single year, Supercell has an incredibly strong portfolio. Yes, we've had ups and downs – Brawl Stars and Clash Royale have each had their peaks and valleys. But if you look at the last five years on a total portfolio basis, we've grown. That's an immense strength, and it's entirely thanks to our game teams and their relentless focus on players. They're the ones who make this possible.

Even more than the financial results, what I'm most proud about is our culture and teams. This is despite the fact that in 2025 alone, we welcomed almost 300 new Supercellians – our biggest year of growth ever in terms of headcount. To be honest, I was quite nervous about this pace of growth. Would our culture change for the worse? This is something that I have always been paranoid about. But I am happy to say now that I feel that our culture is stronger than ever and we have the best teams we have ever had.

This is not something that shows up in the revenue numbers, but to me it matters more than anything else and it gives me enormous confidence in what Supercell can become. 

Also, the record profitability mentioned above puts us in an incredibly fortunate position. It gives us the ability to take bigger risks, to invest more aggressively in innovation, to think in decades rather than quarters. While much of the industry has pulled back, we can push forward. That's a privilege very few companies have right now.

And with that privilege comes responsibility.

We didn't earn this position alone. Our players gave it to us – hundreds of millions of people who chose to spend their time and money on our games, year after year. The more than hundred thousand creators who built communities around what we make. The Supercellians who pour themselves into this work every day.

We owe it to all of them to make the most of this opportunity. Not to play it safe. Not to optimize our way to slow decline. But to take the kinds of risks that could create something truly new for players. The kinds of games that don't exist yet but should.

That's what we intend to do.

Looking Ahead

This year, Hay Day and Clash of Clans turn 14. Fourteen years! When we founded Supercell in 2010, we dreamed of creating games that would be played for years and remembered forever. These games hitting this milestone – still growing, still bringing people together – is proof that forever games aren't just a dream.

Somewhere out there, someone has the next idea that will change how millions of people play. Maybe it's you. If so, you know where to find us.

To everyone who played our games this year, to the tens of thousands of creators who are the backbone of our community, and to all Supercellians who make this possible: thank you. I feel incredibly lucky to be part of something like this.

We'll all do our best to make sure our best days are ahead of us.

Ilkka