Interview with Ilkka Paananen, CEO of mobile game maker Supercell, on Tencent's majority stake, attempting to create another hit franchise, and team building
Mobile games maker Supercell has been one of the great, understated, breakthroughs of the European startup world.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2020 interview lands mid-arc for Supercell. Two years earlier the company had posted its first down year under Tencent ownership — $810M profit on $2B revenue in 2017, off from $1B the year before — and Paananen here frames the two questions that still define the company: whether a founder can keep autonomy inside a Chinese majority owner, and whether Supercell can mint a second franchise on the scale of Clash of Clans' $10B+ decade.
The later record shows both bets playing out unevenly. The next-hit question produced Squad Busters' $100M+ start within a 2024 rebound to nearly $3B in revenue, followed by a 4% dip in 2025 — while Paananen's answer to the industry question hardened into open criticism of rivals buying successful titles instead of building them.
First-order effects
- Paananen's defense of the Tencent majority stake sets the operating template: Supercell keeps small teams and its own culture while Tencent holds the economics, making the CEO's autonomy argument the public justification for the structure.
- The stated push to create another hit franchise puts internal team-building — not acquisition — at the center of Supercell's growth plan right when its post-Clash revenue curve had flattened.
Second-order effects
- Rivals pursuing title acquisitions now face a vocal counter-position from Supercell's CEO, sharpening a build-versus-buy split across mobile gaming publishers.
- Tencent's majority ownership, presented here as benign, becomes the lens through which regulators later examine the company — culminating in Supercell cooperating with a CFIUS security probe of Tencent's data practices.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 'quasi-exit' — founders selling control to a strategic owner while retaining operational independence — becomes a durable path for European gaming studios that want scale without a full sale.
- An industry where hits are this hard to manufacture splits structurally between builders like Supercell and acquirers, with consolidation pressure rising on the buy side as organic hit rates stay low.
The trend: Mobile gaming is consolidating around a handful of evergreen franchises held long-term by strategic owners like Tencent, forcing every studio to choose between building the next hit and buying someone else's.