Supercell's Ilkka Paananen
The CEO discusses the new browser games company and the "healthy pressure" of long-term investors
We believe there's a whole lot of people who are looking for a little bit of a deeper game experience and a richer social experience as well. So far, a lot of games have been pretty shallow in terms of social interaction, it's not really like playing together.
I'm not saying it's going to move to the other end of the scale but we think that's there's room for richer experiences. As a company we're not going to release ten games this year. We believe that we're going to release a lot fewer games that people will want to play, not for months but for years. Our role model is more a company like Blizzard than the sort of companies you see on Facebook.
It was varied per investor. Obviously some had a lot of insight and knowledge in where it's going and we really wanted to get guys on board who shared the vision. Talking to Phil Harrison and David Gardner it was very obvious very early on that they really shared the common vision. When visions are aligned I guess they took a look at the team and realised what we had - so from that point of view it wasn't all that hard.
Firstly, the investors are in it for the long term, they're not in it for short-term win. That's a good starting point. I would say it creates some good, healthy pressure and there's people you are responsible for. But definitely, everybody is in this for the long term and that's really important for us.
The market is certainly extremely hot but I think as long as people can prove that they are actually making money and prove that we as an industry are making constant progress and it's growing, if that continues I wouldn't be worried about a bubble.
From our perspective we actually don't pay a lot of attention to it because we're in it for the long-term. We're not thinking about this year or the year after, we're looking at the next five to ten years. We're focused on creating a really, really great game experience for our users - if we're able to do that, that people are willing to spend a lot of time on, and some of their money on, that's where we're aiming.
Exactly. First of all the whole client side is done in Flash because it has the widest range. Technically speaking Flash is a plug-in - although we say "no plug-ins required" we've been getting a lot feedback from users - but in practice the majority of users have it.
We selected Flash because it gives us the widest reach and gives a great user experience. We have to make the games super-accessible. And we're going to be using Facebook and Twitter as log-ins for users. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for the player.
I think it all starts with the fact that we believe we have a product that is worth talking about and it's different. We've only been live for two weeks and there are a lot of people who are really passionate about what we're doing. We think we already have the beginnings of a very loyal and fanatical following. And we just need to get more people like that.
We've been getting a fair amount of press and publicity across the web, we think that will help us get to a certain stage. And then we'll buy into advertising, and on top of that the product is extremely viral. We're not making it enforced viral, but more that users will need to take down a mean boss by calling in their friends, which should make it more natural, if you will. Our plan is to get to a critical mass and just trust that the product is viral.
Iikka Paananen is CEO of Supercell. Interview by Matt Martin.