Ilkka Paananen Games Lecture: 2016

Ilkka Paananen, CEO of the company behind free-to-play mobile hits like Hay Day and Clash of Clans, explains why failure should be celebrated.

Giving a 2016 Games Lecture, Paananen, head of acclaimed games creators Supercell, told an audience how the company toasted failures with glasses of champagne.

“[In some games companies] it really is all about doing the same thing over and over again – and no mistakes allowed,” he said.

“It’s in very, very stark contrast to what the games industry is all about – or any creative industry. So in fact you want to innovate. You want to try different things, which by definition leads to making mistakes.”

Paananen co-founded Supercell in 2010 with a vision to create a company where developers would make creative games without being stopped by bureaucracy or long-winded processes.

He talked about how traditionally, developers would have to fill in detailed proposals for their games, which included budget and marketing plans. He said that though these processes were “well-meant” – developers would spend longer preparing for meetings than designing games.

“We realised that games is a form of art – it’s not a science,” he said.

“It sounds like such a self-evident thing to say here but it took us all of those years to realise it.”

Paananen said that Supercell is based on a sports team model where the best talent works together supported by a company culture which lets them take risks. One of the company’s principles is “killing” games which don’t meet the team’s high expectations – even if years have already gone into development.

“Failing absolutely sucks, but we wanted to create this environment where failure would be as safe as possible – even more importantly we would learn from these failures,” he said.

“Because I honestly think that Supercell has been built on top of the learnings that come from these failures. And, fundamentally, we believe that quality is worth killing for.”

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