The Hard Truth About the Finnish Game Industry
Written by Michail Katkoff, who owes his career to the Finnish game industry and the wonderful people who built it.
This year’s Finnish Game Awards gala symbolized the state of the industry in the country that for over a decade had been recognized as the leading game industry hub.
The champagne flowed, spotlights dazzled, and speeches praised a decade of excellence. But there was a giant elephant in the room that everyone avoided. We were all celebrating what used to be, closing our eyes from what is, and avoiding the conversation of what’s to come if this continues.
The three best new games from Finland were Pax Dei, Supermoves, and Squad Busters. All beautiful games that deserve an A for effort. But also all games that are struggling to find an audience.
The winners of this year’s gala highlighted the contradiction perfectly:
Game of the Year, Pax Dei by Mainframe, couldn’t sustain 200 concurrent players post-launch, and just a week before the gala, laid off a third of its staff.
Supermoves by Makia Games was a close second. Despite the game not finding an audience, it led to the closure of the company.
Squad Busters from Supercell came in third. The game launched with a $100M push and still ranked at the bottom of Supercell’s own portfolio with a projection of becoming the company’s first under a billion-dollar game since 2012.
Now, those not perhaps as close to the industry may shrug it off by saying that award shows tend to be out of touch and seldom celebrate commercial success. And I agree. To me, the Finnish Game Award demonstrates the tip of the iceberg that the local industry has crashed against.
The numbers don’t lie. Many of the key studios in Helsinki have downsized or shut down. VC funding has slowed to a trickle. New studio formation has flatlined, and industry veterans are increasingly shifting toward angel investing and consulting (guilty as charged). Some have even exited the scene.
What is happening in Finland shouldn’t be shrugged off as cyclical. Just accept that we’re going through a tough phase and will automatically bounce back. Just look at Turkiye. How come they don’t have the same problems? (watch: How Istanbul Became the New Capital of Mobile Gaming).
I love this country, and I’m forever grateful to the Finnish gaming industry for the career that I have.
That’s why I want to have the hard talk about the state of our gaming industry. Understand why the once-dominant gaming ecosystem has declined, and what can be done to reverse the course.
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a wake-up call.
Reasons for Decline: Comfort Over Competition
My friend, Supercell alumni Joakim Achrén from F4 Fund, who co-founded Next Games (acquired by Netflix), recently outlined the painful truth in a 12-point breakdown on why Helsinki fell behind Istanbul.
His breakdown of the issues reminded me vividly of my own experience coming back to Finland in 2018 after four years in the US.
The first week back, I was hit by a massive culture shock. The studio was largely empty every day at 4 pm, and it would have been impossible to find a single person in the entire building at 6 pm.
Having gotten used to the American way of life, where teams spent at least 10 hours a day at the office campuses, I felt like we were giving an advantage by consistently putting in 20% fewer hours.
To me, this signalled the focus on comfort over competition. Work-life balance seemed to be the main measure of studio success from the employee’s perspective. There was also a misguided perception that Finns work smarter, not harder, than their counterparts around the world. And a lot of people talked about burnout despite never being on fire to begin with.
On a broader scale, many Finnish studios, particularly post-2016, traded strategic ambition for creative purity. Rather than adapting to changes in distribution and monetization, they doubled down on the old ways. Few took risks on genre innovation. Even fewer invested in the kind of market-first thinking that defines modern, successful mobile gaming companies.
After Apple’s privacy changes, the studios that ignored business thinking were left in the dust in the new cut-throat market. On top of that, the Finnish game industry overlooked the hypercasual boom entirely—and, by extension, missed the playbook that today’s hybridcasual hits are built on.
The state-backed infrastructure in Finland hasn’t helped much either. Public funding bodies focus on early subsidies, taking away the impetus to move fast early on. Immigration policy bundled with punishing taxes, brutal climate, and a slim cultural scene makes it harder to attract global talent. Not to mention the curricula that remain out of sync with the industry’s current needs.
But in the end, it’s not just about tax incentives or cost of living. It’s about mentality. Many simply overlooked the business side of gaming and missed the link between hard work and payoffs.
The Supercell Syndrome: Copying the Outlier
Supercell is by far the biggest success story from Finland. The company’s founder and CEO, Ilkka Paananen, has directly and indirectly unlocked the hyper-growth of Finnish gaming. And has always been adamant about giving back to the local scene.
But I also believe that Supercell unintentionally contributed to the decline of the Finnish game industry as a whole.
When Supercell peaked with Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, its organizational model became the law of the land. Small, independent “cells” with full autonomy. No producers. No hierarchy. Just talent and trust. It was brilliant—and completely unrepeatable.
But repeat it, people did.
The success of a startup sits on a three-legged stool of talent (culture), capital and timing. Overemhpasizing one distracts from the importance of others. Failing on one causes the startup to fail.
Every new Finnish studio wanted to be “the next Supercell.” Founders pitched five-person dream teams. Investors fell for it. Even seasoned operators who should have known better leaned into the gospel of no process, no structure, no compromise.
Supercell’s meteoric rise to the top was a combination of talent, capital, and timing. The legend shared by the company for the past decades has focused purely on the talent side, telling a story that, despite good intentions, became a trap for countless studios.
The model worked for Supercell because they were an outlier: a unicorn of timing, talent, and capital. But for others, who only heard the PR-version of the culture, it became a trap. Teams were too small to run live ops. Too isolated to scale. Too sacred to pivot. Too distant from business realities. They inherited the skeleton of Supercell’s model without the spine.
Ironically, even Supercell eventually became a victim of its own story. As CEO Ilkka Paananen admitted in his recent blog posts, after Brawl Stars, they stalled. While other publishers evolved their monetization, engagement loops, go-to-market strategies, and ways of working, Supercell stood still—confined by what made them successful in the market that didn’t exist anymore.
Now they’re adapting. Moving away from rigid “cell” structures. Running bigger live ops. Bringing hungry outside talent to build new games. Building a new playbook for today’s market. Being at the forefront of AI. The growth of Brawl Stars in the past year is proof that change works—even at the top.
But what about the culture?
This is just my opinion, but talk about culture should be reserved for the memoirs of hyper-successful founders as inspiration to mortals like you and me. Culture should not seep into startup pitch decks or all-hands meetings at studios that haven’t even shipped yet.
Founders who are still in the trenches don’t need to define culture. They need to live it.
That means obsessing over product-market fit, not writing value statements. Culture isn’t a slide. It’s the sum of your actions: how you work, what you choose to prioritize, what trade-offs you make, what problems you ignore, and what corners you refuse to cut. It’s in the product you ship—or don’t.
Pre-product founders building culture decks are like unemployed actors practicing their Emmy-award speeches. Been there, done that. Please don’t follow my footsteps on this one.
The Future Outlook: From Myth to Movement
So where do we go from here?
First, we have to let go of the myth. Supercell was never a blueprint. It was a black swan. Real ecosystems aren’t built on outliers—they’re built on durable, adaptable businesses. The future of Finnish games depends on founders who stop asking, “What worked before?” and start asking, “What’s working today, what will work tomorrow—and why?”
What’s working now is clear. Here are just a few examples:
Dream’s unwavering work ethic combined with brutal focus on production quality, genre expertise, and market viability.
Scopely’s deep integration of product, IP and publishing combined with a relentless don’t-give-up attitude.
Voodoo’s blend of prototyping at a massive scale, performance marketing and product analytics.
Moon Active’s hyperfocused data driven live ops mastered to a perfection.
Miniclip’s M&A. Yes, it’s easy to buy. But it’s extremely hard to integrate. Miniclip makes the hard part look easy.
It’s not enough to be creative. In today’s mature market, you have to be competitive. Not just visionary, but commercial. And most of all, you need to evolve—not once every five years, but continuously.
Finland has the raw materials: world-class cost-efficient engineers, seasoned artists, and a legacy of excellence. But legacies don’t build futures. Only hunger does.
American country star Jelly Roll has a great line that fits this moment perfectly:
“The windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror for a reason.”
It’s a reminder that where you’re going matters more than where you’ve been. And for the Finnish games industry, it’s time to stop staring at past wins and start focusing on the road ahead.
