Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen on a 25-year career in mobile gaming

• Ilkka Paananen discusses his career from Sumea through to Digital Chocolate and Supercell.
• The entrepreneur says luck played a part in his career – a key element in a successful career in games.
• Paananen also offers his thoughts on the current mobile market, Supercell’s challenges and why he’s more excited than ever about the industry.

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Ilkka Paananen has built an illustrious career in gaming. He’s most famous as the CEO of Supercell, whose teams have built globally successful games from Clash of Clans, Hay Day and Boom Beach to Clash Royale and Brawl Stars.

He’s now being awarded the BAFTA Fellowship, an accolade that celebrates individuals for achievements across their career in the screen arts.

He joins a list that includes industry luminaries like Hideo Kojima, Shuhei Yoshida, Siobhan Reddy, Gabe Newell, Yoko Shimomura and Shigeru Miyamoto, among others. The latter’s work at Nintendo has been a key inspiration on Supercell’s mantra of building games that will be remembered forever.

Paananen says to be successful in games, you need three things: luck, to work with a great team and to operate in the best possible culture. 

“There’s a lot of people who do all of those things but then somehow miss out on the luck part,” he tells PocketGamer.biz. 

“I’m just very grateful we had all those stars align.”

Paananen has always had an interest in games, but his career started with a slice of luck. As a student, he attended the Helsinki University of Technology to study on the business track. He says there were two typical career tracks for students: becoming an investment banker or a management consultant, working for the likes of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Though he had a keen interest in entrepreneurship.

During one summer job he found himself sitting next to an engineer named Sami, who said they were thinking of founding a company with a few friends. They were all games people, though, and needed someone to handle everything else, from finance and admin through to sales. They asked Paananen if he’d be interested in joining.

“I said well absolutely. I was still a student at the time, I think 21 years of age,” he says, adding he told them he’d even do it for free. To give him a credible title worthy of someone representing the company, he was named CEO. That would be his first company, Sumea, formed in 2000, a developer of mobile games – well before the App Store and iPhone set up the industry for astronomical growth.

“I remember walking out of the café where they had the meeting and thinking, wow, I guess I’m now the CEO of this company, I’ve never really had a real job in my life, I’ve only read business books at the University and on case studies and all that.”

We asked if that meeting hadn’t happened, would Paananen be working in games? He says he’d probably be an entrepreneur, but maybe in a completely different field. But he says: “Once you get into games, it’s really hard to get out because it’s such a fun industry.”

A career in games

By 2004, Sumea was sold to Digital Chocolate, a mobile games developer and publisher set up by EA founder Trip Hawkins. “I oftentimes call Digital Chocolate my MBA in business and entrepreneurship.”

By the time of the acquisition, Sumea had grown to around 40 to 50 employees, while he recalls Digital Chocolate had around 20 staff. Paananen says he was given lots of autonomy as he eventually became the company president.

But in 2010, Paananen left the publisher. After 10 years, he felt he wanted to do things “fundamentally different” to how the firm was operating. “They would need to almost reset the company.” After discussions with Hawkins, and realising the company had its own culture and past, he decided to leave.

In 2011, he founded Supercell, built on a new culture based on his years of experience working in games. The company’s cell structure is well-documented by now, empowering small teams to build games. After its initial browser game Gunshine was a failure – something the company would famously come to celebrate with subsequent cancelled titles – it hit the jackpot with mobile games Hay Day and Clash of Clans.

The developer has since had five billion-dollar hits and for many years was lauded for its hit-rate and lean teams. That success led to multi-billion-dollar overtures from Softbank and Tencent. 

While it seemed the company could do no wrong – and its portfolio remains highly lucrative after celebrating a record year in 2024 – some of that magic has faded. It hasn’t released a new blockbuster since Brawl Stars in 2018, shutting down a live game for this first time with the 2024 release of Squad Busters.

Supercell has since been through a restructure, splitting the developer between new games and live games, adding in new leaders like its president Sara Bach and significantly expanding its teams, hiring 300 new staff in 2025 alone.

During these changes, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars have seen sharp rises (and falls) in player engagement and revenue. But the new games division, which includes the Spark initiative aimed at building new teams both internally and from external developers, has yet to lift off.

We ask Paananen if the founding principles Supercell was built on are still applicable in the modern industry, given the company’s restructure and different challenges a mature market faces.

“I absolutely think so,” he states, adding: “When we founded Supercell we thought, okay, no matter what happens, this will never happen to Supercell.”

Paananen explains that companies that become successful can eventually start pushing creatives aside by an “invisible or sometimes very visible force from the outside”. 

Can this culture he fears of external business-focused pressures destroy games and companies?

“We get criticised so much about, if you think like close to 300 million people play our games every single month … if you compare our revenue to the player base we have, you could argue that you could monetise much better. 

“Oftentimes, industry blogs and podcasts and what have you, people criticise us for that. But maybe the reason why people have played games like Hay Day and Clash of Clans for more than a decade, maybe that’s exactly why. We don’t burn out players.

“But it can be so tempting to over-monetise and burn out players because you need to and you want to meet your next quarter’s revenue goals. So I think it absolutely can destroy games and companies.”

Supercell’s white whale

Supercell’s famous culture has developed its critics in recent times following a seven year-plus year wait for a new hit. Asked why Supercell has struggled, he says launching new blockbusters – historically the company is said to strive for a billion dollars or bust – is hard for everyone.

In his annual blog post, the Supercell CEO claimed that since 2020, 22 games have grossed more than $1 billion. Of those, 20 came from developers in China, Japan and South Korea.

Paananen says the mobile games sector now faces significantly more competition for people’s free time. Meanwhile, if the industry was to look in the mirror, he claims it hasn’t really been able to build something “absolutely amazing and different”. 

To take the next step as an industry, “someone needs to put out that game and we certainly are trying to do our part on that”.

But what exactly does he mean by innovation? Is it completely new experiences or innovations on existing genres? Scopely built on the coin looter genre with $6 billion smash hit Monopoly Go, while games like Century Games’ Whiteout Survival and FunFly’s Last War: Survival meshed more casual mechanics with the 4X strategy genre to great success. Dream Games eventually dethroned King’s Candy Crush Saga in the match-3 with a highly polished experience.

Paananen says he’s referring to the type of experience a player hasn’t seen before.

“Pokémon Go I think would be the perfect example. People are very proud to play that game … I think the industry needs another one of those moments.”

An eye to the future

Paananen has now been in the games industry for more than 25 years, largely focused on the mobile space. Curiously, he recalls another summer job working for a telecoms company as a junior analyst in 1999, just before he founded Sumea. 

He was tasked with writing a report on the Japanese mobile market, just as feature phones were coming to Europe. It was back then he could see their potential as computers and gaming devices – though it would take many years for all that to come to fruition.

Given he’s spent two and a half decades in the mobile arena, and his comments about a lack of industry innovation, is he still excited about the industry?

“You know, I’m more excited than ever,” he states. “Sometimes people think that I’m joking when I say this, but I’ve never been this excited. And the reason is, the platform  is so much better than it was 10 years ago. Take whatever smartphone you want, it’s an incredible gaming platform these days. The networks are better, the infrastructure is there, we have things like AI which will open up all new possibilities, especially for smaller teams.

“This idea that Supercell was [built] on these small, creative independent cells – AI will give them superpowers like they never had before.

“So yes, it is challenging, it’s very competitive, but I think that makes it all the more exciting.”

Paananen still has dreams of building a company like Nintendo, inspired by its 136 years in business and the games and memorable characters that BAFTA Fellow Shigeru Miyamoto and the company’s vast and talented development teams built.

He says Supercell is still very far away from that goal, and feels as long as he can help the team get closer to those ambitions, he’ll remain at the company, which is now 15 years old.

After reflecting on a career in games for the past 25+ years and receiving a BAFTA Fellowship, Paananen offers simple advice for the new generation of developers starting out in the industry and those who might want to start their own business.

“Just start it, that’s my number one advice.”