Comfortable Feeling Uncomfortable

It’s Monday, August 28th, 2023, the first day of Supercell’s annual company offsite, and I’m about to give maybe the harshest presentation to everyone at Supercell that I’ve ever given. Public speaking has never been my favorite activity (to say the least), but this time I am even more nervous than usual. How would people react? Would they feel anger, sadness, fear…or, would they get fired up and inspired? And what would they think of the very big changes I was about to announce? Would they think that our culture, that we all are so proud of, was about to change for the worse? But I guess more than anything, I really felt for our people. I was about to challenge them, and ask a lot from them.

The presentation first highlighted the cold facts of Supercell’s performance in the last several years. We had not been able to grow our live games and had fallen behind the best companies who had done so. Furthermore, we had not released a new game since Brawl Stars in 2018. The result, I showed in detail, was Supercell falling from the #1-ranked global publisher of mobile games in 2016 to outside the Top 10 in 2023. It was painful, but honest and necessary, so that we all shared the same context. Next, I walked everyone through multiple significant changes which we believed would help Supercell improve and to close the widening gap between us and the very top-performing companies in our industry.

I would like to share those changes with you in this post, but let’s first rewind to how we came to these decisions. Something absolutely had to change, but what? How? What were the risks?

“Don’t Do It”

In last year’s blog post, I outlined Supercell’s two-pronged challenge of growing live games and simultaneously creating new ones. We were struggling with both. I was delighted to get a ton of feedback from inside and outside Supercell. I spoke to dozens of people, including founders, investors, artists, incubators, accelerators, and members of academia to get their input.

I was surprised that the vast majority of people spent most of their time warning me about what could go wrong if we started changing things at Supercell. In one way or another, most told me: “don’t do it.” Some implied it, others were quite direct, but the message was clear. I was also surprised that this message was more true of feedback from people outside of Supercell vs. from my colleagues inside. I would have expected the opposite.

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