Building studio culture by empowering Teams GamesBeat

Some gaming CEOs take their corporate culture very seriously.

Rob Pardo, the founder of Bonfire Studios, was in enough business to know about culture building at different game studios. Having held prominent roles at Blizzard, he’s no stranger to GamesBeat Summit either, having attended a panel on a similar topic back in 2019.

This time he interviewed Ilkka Paananen, one of the founders of Supercell, creator of hit mobile games like Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Brawl Stars and Boom Beach.

It starts with the name. Supercell’s philosophy is that teams must be independent, work in small cells, and operate free of control to do their best creative work. Supercell focuses on the creative process, unleashing the maximum potential of its people and the teams that make them up.

The company turned the traditional organizational pyramid on its head and sought to enable a truly creative, bottom-up paradigm. It anchored accountability at the team level, making it a true unit of performance rather than the more traditional profit/loss center orientation. Lots of companies talk this talk; it’s easy said, hard to do.

The studio was founded precisely for this purpose. Its founders have created a workspace led by employees. Paananen believes that the best people make the best games.

The goal when building the studio culture was therefore to form teams of self-employed collaborators. To offer maximum freedom, but in a way that would not stall teams of strong personalities in disagreements.

Supercell has a philosophy that teams must have a common goal and a clear vision.

How do you resolve studio building conflicts to free teams to be self-reliant?

Friction and debate are healthy for teams; what we often refer to as healthy tension. But to build a cohesive studio culture, the environment must not be combative. The best teams are the most passionate. Leadership facilitates and coaches teams to articulate their clear vision, and then allows them to find themselves moving through these tension points with guard rails so things don’t boil over.

This strategy seems to limit the maximum team size. Paananen says: “I don’t think there is a cap. I think every situation is different, every team game is different and every game is different. But basically I think what we’ve changed in our culture, how we talk about things, we’ve made it clear that we always have to think, ‘how can we make our players better’. We use this term ‘improvement mentality’.”

Teams in the company are the right size. It is the clear vision of the team that determines its size. Teams are autonomous organizational structures. This motivates them to keep the scope within the team size and only expand it when necessary.

This is coupled with the improvement mentality. Never be satisfied. That every team’s game, great as it is, can be questioned. Be humble and willing to accept feedback.

Paananen acknowledged making his own mistakes, like keeping teams too small after they started hit games. The small teams were ideal for getting games to market, but after they became hits, the burden of developing a continuous live operation became like walking on a treadmill. After Paananen caught the bug, Supercell began building larger post-launch teams.

Empowered studio teams are more resilient – ​​embedding resilience into studio culture

The company had to make adjustments as it built its culture. This has enabled them to weather various crises. One of them was the pandemic. “The pandemic came and forced us to do and try something different,” Paananen said, “since she [the teams] have become a lot more open-minded because it’s actually… we’ve been able to prove that really great work can be done… We’ve really trusted the teams to find the way… We’ve trusted the teams to decide what’s the best way to work is she.”

He adds: “We pick teams that we just trust and then if we trust those teams, we’re not going to tell those teams what to do. We don’t even try to use control. Not to our in-house teams and not to our external teams… the studios we invest in.”

As Supercell continues to expand, there are always new challenges. It’s the culture that makes them resilient, as teams are able to adapt and align to changes in both the creative space and the industry. This is a powerful discussion between two great creative minds in the industry who have empowered teams in a variety of ways to prevent the negative environments we’ve heard numerous reports of over the past year. Some of these larger organizations would do well to listen to this talk.