Keynote: Evolving Culture for Player Centric Games - Frank Keienburg, Supercell

[Music] [Music] [Music] and to get us started we've got evolving culture for play eccentric games enhancing engagement and Community Connection that was a lot to say so I'll hand you over to Frank and your first speaker thank you

let's see if this works okay we already talked about the title So today we're talking about evolving the company culture towards a player Centric approach first my name is Frank I've uh ended up in the video games industry in 2005 when I doing a very very boring day in my it job sent a 15minute application to Blizzard Entertainment um who are looking back then for game Masters which is a glorify title for support agents for World of Warcraft in France so I got the job I moved there a few months later and fast forward to late 2014 when a friendly recruiter from supercell reached out and um despite my spouse and me thinking we would go further south after France we decided to move to Finland and so we uprooted our life my two dogs my two cats my spouse and we

moved to Finland where I joined as the head of player support back then helping supercells scaling their customer support efforts from very small to very big in 2018 in summer everything changed when I joined the rosters team to help the team to come to a conclusion if the game should be killed or Go Global at that time you had already killed a plor of games but uh yeah long story short we launched the game and here we are today uh a bit over 5 years later I'm still part of the rosters team today as a general manager of the game responsible for the game itself the people and our community of players I won't touch much on what supercell is I just work under the assumption that most people in this room know what we're talking about but I'd like to kick off the story with something that's very close to our heart and that's our mission statement or our

dream and our dream is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever to make this happen when the founders of the company founded the company they had a a series of experiences from Big organizations and they had these core beliefs that informed the culture of the company at the beginning was of course a very different company much much smaller and one of the core beliefs is core to my story here and that core belief is that core belief of small independent cells many of you might have seen this this graphic already at a point or another supercells Life game teams traditionally have been insanely small so think about 10 to 20 people small including QA Community managers Etc and those teams generally had one lead game lead that there had no other

managers in their team no producers and that means very little bureaucracy basically complete Freedom what to do and we really Tred to to think about like how can we enable people to be as creative as possible how can we encourage people to Great take big risks and all of that without much in their way of doing so and so ilka and the team back then created this model of the reverse pyramid Ila will often be quoted as the CEO who wants to be the least powerful CEO in the industry and so he has very very strong servant leadership mindset so he's enabling game leads in the past who then enable their teams to just do great work and this sounds a bit crazy and of course a lot of companies say ah yeah we're empowering our people but in our case that was much more than lip

service we're talking about no portfolio management we're talking about um the the the craziest stuff really teams deciding when to kill a game which in many other companies would be Unthinkable and on the other side of the coin there was this insane approach to hiring back then I would often joke that it was easier at that time in supercell to spend aill milon bucks than to hire one headcount and that's how it felt because hiring one person when everyone in the company wants the company to stay small and bought into this idea of a small company was incredibly difficult so questions were can you Outsource this can you find a tool to do the job can you drop something else to make it happen and so there was this gaunlet of people you had to go through to make a hire so the barrier to actually convince people to hire was really really o it

was a hill and in consequence team stayed small surprise surprise and you could argue that served us pretty well we released four games into the wild um many others got killed but those four games they did pretty okay um all of them generated more than 1 billion USD lifetime Revenue Ilan block post last year posted that Heyday crossed 2 billion lifetime revenue and the two Clash titles together crossed 10 billion USD lifetime Revenue so why change fast forward 2018 we did make the decision to launch brao star and bra star was a bit different than our other games and the difference came from the fact that our other games had a really deep deep economy but Broar didn't it relied on content more Brawlers more game modes more skins and ultimately

more updates so we ended up on this content treadmill with a team that back then my super standard was already on the bigger side so I'm saying 20 people and eventually we had to ask ourselves some questions is broadstar actually compatible with this philosophy of small teams while our players out there they keep asking us to do more things and then are we delivering the best game for all players under these circumstances well spoiler the short short answer is no we don't and we didn't in the first half of 2020 um we really reached our Breaking Point as a team Co hit of course it hit all of us right one way or another and while we had a bunch of things going on for us transitioning this new world of working from home we

had all the trust you know we are not relying on control mechanisms a lot we're not relying on people supervising other people that was a promoter of this change but on the other side we were also very much used to just turn around and throw an idea in the room and we couldn't just do that anymore and besides that there were like other complications like nobody in supercell did any documentation and I'm I'm not exaggerating the term design document wasn't introduced into supercell until I don't know 2023 maybe so we are very much on the let's just get stuff done side of things and so and then we want to do it fast that means like oh if you tell me it takes 20% of your time to document something never mind then that's focus on getting it done but in the working from home situation where we did not also sit in the same room that was really really

painful so people started making decisions in an equilibrium at home by themselves instead of talking to other people then at the same time of course because that's how things go from March on we started working from home and in may we released the biggest Bress update since Global release and that up update completely changed the matter we introduced a battle pass called brawl pass B monthly season really complex construct ripped out all the other progression systems before huge update and guess what just one month later in June we released the game in China which was not a small undertaking and it was the first time that a supercell runtime was a secondary runtime before all the games were completely Global so it was it was a a rough Journey the first half of 2020 and at the end of that before we entered into the summer break yes the

team was really at a Breaking Point people were stressed the quality of whatever we shipped went down we introduced more bucks we still didn't do enough for our players who asked us to do more and so we really had to take pause and self-reflect what we are doing here is that is that actually sustainable intermission also have a s of water is really dry here sorry stay stay hydrated not sponsored by the water industry Finland Finland in summer if you try to do business in Finland in July in games good luck um a lot of Finnish people will take four weeks off in a block I didn't even know that existed before I moved to Finland and uh of course Finland has a

lot of nature tons of lakes a lot of forest and a lot of people have access to what's called A mky and A M is a cottage like a a summer house somewhere in the middle of a forest far away from other people and uh I got lucky enough to get access to one into this really difficult Co period where we couldn't travel abroad so for the next two months I spent time at this house in the middle of a forest with my dogs the cats my spouse and occasionally we invented a friend when we felt social but really other contact was minimal and so I spent my time swimming spending time in the hot tub which is Wood Fired by the way so you first have to chop wood um but what I want to say after two months I was pretty relaxed despite all the stress before and that was good because that was really the first real break I took since we launched Brar

and at the end of this journey when it was back to work which meant back working from home of course I was like okay I thought about this I had a very fresh perspective on things and I was like we cannot continue like this and there were really just two options in my head there was option A we can just reduce our ambition with a game do less for our players but at the same time that would allow us to keep the team small not burn out anyone and stay in our comfort zone we wouldn't have to have discussions with other people in the company while we're growing the team it felt like this is a comfy spot here but it would also have meant doing less for our players or we could make significant changes hire more people but potentially have to change a bunch of things in the company and in the team team and of course we cannot

make such a decision in isolation because it's a big company it has been core philosophy forever and so we approached ilka as CEO and we got a spy in and it's not very surprising if you know ilka he's a very ambitious man and so we ended up with him backing us up on hiring more people for the team and of course that did mean it was easy to hire more people there were tons of discussions people challenging us why are you hiring these people but but having the backup from the leadership team was instrumental for us to make this happen and so where did this lead us yes we grew we grew quite a bit um we're now 540 people is I guess today maybe already 550 and the broaders team is 45 people strong now we're still hiring so we expected to grow at least by 10 people maybe 15 people this year and it also came with a little bit of

baggage because when you have a team of 45 people and one lead you're not doing anyone a good service so we have more leadership in the teams now we had to structure the teams a bit more with more Focus for each of the teams and and yeah some teams even hired a producer that is crazy we're still looking for one by the way but at the same time this allowed us to do so much more for our players we leveled up in all areas of the game we manage to scale life UPS better we actually have a life UPS team we manage to do more on the development side we can do more ql changes we don't have this backlog of nice to haves anymore that always get dropped in favor of more important things so ultimately we can just do much more for our community and that really positively positively impacts impacted

our game and our product and our players but it's not only true for our life games it also unlocked us to change something important that we now can dream bigger for our new games and I want to take the example of Moco Moco is an MMO action RPG we tested it recently in the US it's still in development and well it's an MMO arpg that comes with a lot of content needs and so doing something like this with a team of 15 people sounds pretty daunting and so in the past we very often heard these comments on the floor that people were like wouldn't it be cool to make an MMO wouldn't it be cool to make an open world game and the answer was always yeah but we can't so we unlock These Dreams by making these changes and of course the mocho team is not the biggest game team in super by far but it's still bigger than our game

teams traditionally were in that phase of development ultimately we're evolving our culture and supercell for our players out there to do more for them and to really embrace our Dream if you just take one thing away this do then it's this cultural change cannot be avoided and sometimes that means sacrificing your your precious Lambs because it's like and those are the the the written things some people some companies have in employee handbooks and on the walls but it's also about the unwritten ones the ones you just live every day because they are part of your culture if you want want it or not in the case of supercell well it meant doing more for our players to make our dream come true

and embracing change even though that's sometimes pretty scary now if you want to follow my escapades on Twitter sorry X scan the link the left um but also to make our dream come true we need the best people supercell is hiring and you can go to the event page we have set up for this event on the right side thank you [Applause] um we might have time for one really quick question if there is one at the front have we got a microphone so thank you are there challenges around the onsite working um when it comes to scaling and finding great talent um and also diversity as well because I know that that's something suell cares about yeah super good question um one thing I actually forgot to mention in between as well like the the changes to have more leadership in the team and to have a bit

more structure on the team and a bit more process means that we started opening the doors for juniors which wasn't the case before but to your question um and super cell again it goes back to the the microphone still working okay in supercell like the it goes back to the the teams have full power right so each of the game teams can decide how they work and so that each of the game teams can ultimately decide we're working in a hybrid we have remote teams we have remote individual old um so it's completely down to the teams and different game teams now started experimenting with this so we have some game teams like the bra team um we are working in a hybrid so we have a few days working from home um and a few days in the office but it's down to the individuals when that happens we do have some remote rols um especially for example on the sound side our sound gu sitting somewhere in Denmark um but other game teams started being much more Progressive about this and it depends to know where you are as a team do you feel

like we can start opening the door for fully remote or for a sub cell which is part of the game team must sit somewhere else what we started as super cell is now opening the doors to these opportunities by having entities in like Denmark Sweden of course South Korea China San Francisco or the US in general as well as the UK and we're building out that Network even more to be able to hire all these people I think uh yes it's easy to find some specific groups of talent in Finland but of course like if you want to hire the best people you need to have a global approach and and so yeah so your question is we're doing everything possible to attract as many people as possible from different places on Earth