Supercell: Still Shipping, Still Learning, Still Compounding
Supercell CEO’s annual CEO letter did what the best corporate communications do. It made the company feel both formidable and fallible in the same breath.
The excellence in operations is self-evident as the company surged to $3B in revenue with $1B in pure profit. And the excellence in communication was truly on display during the “Spit in the Face” backlash. More about that later…
The headline narrative was “the best games haven’t been made yet,” but the operational story underneath was more interesting: Supercell just proved again that it can reignite an aging live game at massive scale, tighten governance after an expensive miss, and course-correct a modern creator backlash without turning it into a culture war.
If you want a clean takeaway, it is this: Supercell has become a portfolio operator that can manufacture relevance. That is a different skill. And I’d even argue that it is a more durable one than what they had before. Because in a mature market, shipping hit games is only getting harder every single year.
1. Supercell grew a live game, again!
Clash Royale scaled during 2025 after which the decade old title returned to it’s previous (high) levels
The most “real” part of the story is Clash Royale’s comeback, because it came with measurable texture instead of vibes. Re-engaged players doubled, and new players grew almost 500%.
That matters for two reasons:
Reigniting a game is harder than shipping a new game that works. A new game can win by being fresh. A ten-year-old game has to win by being worth returning to. You do not just tune the economy, add a couple of features, and start user acquisition. You have to re-earn attention from players who already decided to leave.
It shifts the mental model of “growth.” For years, Supercell’s identity was the mythical hit factory. Now the more useful lesson is re-engagement as a growth engine.
One constructive critique here is about what Supercell chooses to highlight. The letter still frames the ambition as “invent the next category,” but the actual proof point is “operate a franchise so well it feels new again.” Those are not contradictory, but they are different operating systems. If you are an operator or an executive reading this for learning, do not miss where the real competency signal is coming from.
2. The company is growing and adding layers, gates, and leadership
The Squad Busters section of the blog post is a governance announcement.
Ilkka calling it a miss, publicly, is uncommon. Leaders usually hide behind “learnings” without naming the underlying decision failure. Here, Ilkka uses the miss as credibility capital. It reads like humility, and it also reads like internal messaging: “We are going to operate differently, and this is why.”
In the source material, the implication is not subtle: tighter runways, stricter gates, and a clearer split between operating franchises and incubating new bets, with new leaders owning game creation and live operations.
The early Supercell was built on “small autonomous teams, minimum management.” The modern Supercell reality is that autonomy without hard gates becomes expensive optimism. And in the modern mobile market, small teams just don’t cut it. While a big organization cannot run purely on faith and taste. It needs decision points that prevent momentum from turning into sunk cost. Squad Busters looks like the forcing function for that shift.
Constructive criticism: Supercell could be explicit about what those gates are designed to protect.
If the gate is “long-term trajectory,” great. Define it better. Is it a retention shape? Is it payer conversion? Is it depth of mastery? Is it evidence of a meta that can evolve for years? Calling something “obvious learnings” is fine PR, but as a leadership artifact, the stronger move is to spell out what the organization will refuse to compromise on next time.
The industry copies Supercell. When the criteria stay implicit, people copy the tone instead of the discipline.
3. CEO communication that is best in class, beyond gaming
Most CEO letters fail in one of two ways: 1) They either read like a legal document with a human signature or 2) like a founder monologue that dodges responsibility with charisma. Supercell’s letters have historically been neither. They are corporate instruments, but written with a founder’s voice. They do multiple jobs at once, and they do them unusually well.
The source material is blunt about what these letters are doing.
They get ahead of financial disclosure timing. They build corporate citizenship. They reinforce the founder brand. They support hiring. They align the board and internal teams around a narrative. They also provide the industry with a template that is often copied, albeit sometimes incorrectly.
That is not a critique. That is what elite corporate communications look like.
The reason Ilkka’s writing stands out is the operating posture behind it. He admits the miss. He frames the ambition. He takes ownership quickly when something goes wrong in public. That combination is rarer than people think, especially among founders this successful.
There is another subtle strength here: the recruiting call-to-action is transparent.
The letter sells Supercell as a platform for builders: capital, talent density, a model, and now a reshaped machine with a clearer runway and profit participation. You can dislike the funnel, but you cannot call it dishonest.
Constructive criticism: do not let the mythology outrun the evidence.
The source text itself points out that “launchpad for builders” is directionally right, but externally thinner than the narrative suggests. Many original builders are gone, the newer employees haven’t succeeded as well in new games, as they have mastered the live operations, and the dedicated Supercell Investments team is still perfecting the secret sauce.
The fix is to keep the story anchored in what is objectively true today: Supercell’s commitment to taking shots, shipping anyway, and treating failure as part of the machine instead of an embarrassment rewarded with layoffs.
4. The “spit in the face” debacle: why it was not a big deal, and why it still mattered
The “spit in the face” moment is worth discussing precisely because it was so modern.
A small yet vocal creator class read the Clash Royale resurgence framing as an omission of a creator-driven catalyst, specifically naming Jynxzi and the broader wave of creator tournaments and meme culture that helped the comeback travel.
Two things can be true at once.
Creators may not have been the cause of Clash Royale’s return, but for sure, they correlated with it. Credit: Ym041994 on r/ClashRoyale
Creators may not have been the root cause of the return, but they correlated with it, and they amplified it.
Also, in 2026, creators are not “nice to have distribution.” They are a negotiating party in the public story of why a game was won. That is new power. If your corporate narrative pretends that the power does not exist, the power will correct you.
What makes this “not such a big deal” is exactly how it was handled. Supercell edited the post afterward with the CEO explicitly acknowledging creators and naming the most vocal of them, Jynxzi.
That is the whole ballgame. The correction was swift, non-defensive, and practical. No grandstanding. No insinuation that creators should “stay in their lane.” Just: fair point, we will adjust.
If you are running a modern live game company, there is a bigger lesson here than “credit creators.” The lesson is that narrative control has changed. The clean corporate story is now co-owned by external power centers: creators, community leaders, platform partners, even meme pages. Your job is not to surrender your narrative. Your job is to make your narrative resilient to reality, which means including the external contributors early, before you get forced into a public edit.
Constructive criticism: if “sharing and helping each other” is the theme, then “sharing” must include who actually carried the story into the market. Otherwise, the line lands weaker than intended, even if the omission was just an oversight.
Supercell, importantly, is not a novice here. It runs one of the most powerful creator communities in gaming. The backlash is better read as a reminder that even the best-in-class operators will occasionally misweight the external layer when telling the story internally.
Philosophical Musing: The Positive Synthesis
If you want to be positive about Supercell without being naive, praise the right things.
Praise the portfolio craft. They re-ignited Clash Royale in a way that produced real growth, not just a temporary bump.
Praise the governance evolution. Using Squad Busters as a public “we will change how we operate” moment is leadership, not weakness.
Praise the communication standard. The letters are still among the best leadership communication artifacts in gaming, and arguably beyond gaming, because they combine performance, accountability, narrative, and recruiting into a single coherent instrument.
Praise the handling of the creator flare-up. The edit is a small act with big implications: it signals humility, speed, and a willingness to share narrative space with independent distribution.
Then keep one constructive thread alive: do not let the “new hits” myth distract from the operational truth that Supercell’s current edge is portfolio compounding and elite live operations, plus the willingness to institutionalize gates when the organization grows. The industry needs to copy the discipline.
