Top 50 Developers of 2015: #1 Supercell

hello and welcome to pocket gaming obviously top 50 developers of 2015 i'm john jordan so number one on this year's chart is supercell it's not the first time that supercell have been number one in our annual kind of roundup of developers so they were number one in 2013 which was the first year clash of clans kind of really took the world by storm um it was released in 2012 um and since since that time it's basically gone on to make billions of billions of dollars for supercell and kind of defined really um kind of mobile strategy gaming and even to degree kind of mobile um kind of core gaming really that was the first game to take off and i guess um in combined with uh supercell's other games so at the same time 2012 they released a heyday that was very much in the or building on the foundation that zynga kind of created with its farm bill franchise

so much more casual but again kind of kind of interesting in a sense i've always argued that heyday's more is kind of more interesting getting the clash of clans in terms of how it kind of takes gameplay mechanics and social mechanics and links them together um so those two games have been kind of you know sitting on sitting on the top of the charts um for a number of years now i guess um one of the reasons that supercell is back to number one this year is partly because um clash of clans and heyday just show no signs of going away they're not losing their audience they're just making more money i think it was it was calculated by one of the um analyst companies that's clash of clans made 1.8 billion dollars in 2014 which is just a phenomenal amount of money um for what still is a fairly simple game in terms of gameplay mechanics obviously it's much more complex in terms of the games as a service aspect um but i guess kind of what we've been impressed with uh more recently is um the wreath of boom beach so boom beach is is i mean it's i find it personally a bit of a kind of a marmite game so obviously it's very popular um obviously supercell

has a lot of money to find users on it um and so you'll always on facebook or whatever platform you're on you'll see adverts for boom beach um but obviously it's a very different game um to clash of clans so there is a base element to a degree there is an attacking other people's basis element to a degree but much looser in terms of the clans the clans aren't really there there's much more um then i guess you could say gameplay point of view it's much lighter in the way that you approach it and much less competitive um and i guess what's most interesting is the way that um supercell has released that game which could have been cannibalistic to its clash of clans audience um but it's managed to kind of as we're seeing there were lots of companies it's managed to run it almost as like a companion product it's almost as if it's like it's like a clash of clans light to a degree um it's almost like a like a sister product um and we've seen over over over the years that supercell the one thing it is brilliant at is is operating its games

and keeping players engaged and keeping them kind of playing and thus spending money and i think what we've really seen in 2014 with with obviously um boom it's been launched there but it's kind of really taken until the start 2015 to boom to really kind of find its position um and kind of find its way up the top closing charts and find its kind of self in those top 10 top loading charts and that's kind of testament not just to the basic kind of gameplay and the foundation the design foundation that supercell kind of created with that game but equally the way they've operated it and i guess um when we were looking at the kind of at the start of the year we're looking at which which kind of companies we're going to be on the charts and what position they're going to be at supercell clearly we're always going to be very highly rated just because the the games are of such high quality and the financial successes is is kind of second to none um but kind of we were kind of interested you know when you've been that successful you know how can you keep the passion going you know it's kind of like in a sports team if you if you're winning the champions league every to every year you know at what point you know does barcelona kind of kind of kind of drop off the pace and

just you know they kind of lose lose a bit of edge and someone takes over and it's interesting the clash of clans is interesting supercell sorry is it hasn't really seen a brain drain like other developers have seen so normally you get a big success people can start getting paid a lot of the bonuses go through the roof um there's only so many ferraris you need um and the girlfriend they want to do something else i haven't really seen that with supercell they're very still a very tight team um just over a hundred a bit over a hundred people um and then just kind of still keep that kind of that's the kind of start-up mentality and that's kind of interesting and i guess the way that we've kind of seen that underlined is um supercell historically was always very um quite open about killing games so it would have games that it thought were good it would it would develop them it would put them into soft launch for months at a time and then um then if it didn't think they were working for whatever reason normally um supercell is very analytically analytic driven company if you thought the analytics weren't good enough even though it spent you know maybe millions of millions of pounds dollars sorry developing these games and operating the move just go um you know we're not it's

not gonna it's not gonna um kind of meet what we think our games should meet that kind of standard and it will kill them and kind of uh i guess famously i guess it was a self-made fame that i used to tell everyone whenever they killed a game they'd be like champagne and champagne in the studio because they killed a game they'd something that could have been released and would have diminished their reputation hadn't happened and that's a very hard thing to do for games companies game companies will always go oh it's not quite as good we think but we'll release it and just see what happens you know see if something sticks and supercell as always it's killed games and i guess and that's the most impressive thing that had its fourth game or we're calling its fourth game didn't actually happen if it's fourth game but a imagery game called spooky pop that's been that was in soft launch for a number of months um everyone was expecting it to come out they were you know starting to promotion around it starting to get previews around it um and then all of a sudden uh it was just pulled it's gone there's no announcement about it um so maybe they've got a bit quieter on that kind of stuff but i think that shows um kind of the confidence of a company obviously it comes from a company that has three games that are generating millions of dollars every day so it's a different sort of confidence but i kind of think

the interesting thing is lots of companies in that situation almost find it harder then to kill a game because you have a reputation um that all your stuff is brilliant and you can and supercell let's face it has enough money to basically get a game somewhere in the top racing charts it can just market it to that extent if it wants to um so i think it's kind of a mark of why we made superstar number one is is that it killed off that game so there we are supercell number one in our developers list of 2015.