The champagne flowed, spotlights dazzled, and speeches praised a decade of excellence. But there was a giant elephant in the room that everyone avoided. We were all celebrating what used to be, closing our eyes from what is, and avoiding the conversation of what’s to come if this continues.
The three best new games from Finland were Pax Dei, Supermoves, and Squad Busters. All beautiful games that deserve an A for effort. But also all games that are struggling to find an audience.
The winners of this year’s gala highlighted the contradiction perfectly: Game of the Year, Pax Dei by Mainframe, couldn’t sustain 200 concurrent players post-launch, and just a week before the gala, laid off a third of its staff. Supermoves by Makia Games was a close second. Despite the game not finding an audience, it led to the closure of the company.
Squad Busters from Supercell came in third. The game launched with a $100M push and still ranked at the bottom of Supercell’s own portfolio with a projection of becoming the company’s first under a billion-dollar game since 2012. Now, those not perhaps as close to the industry may shrug it off by saying that award shows tend to be out of touch and seldom celebrate commercial success.
And I agree. To me, the Finnish Game Award demonstrates the tip of the iceberg that the local industry has crashed against. The numbers don’t lie.
Many of the key studios in Helsinki have downsized or shut down. VC funding has slowed to a trickle. New studio formation has flatlined, and industry veterans are increasingly shifting toward angel investing and consulting (guilty as charged).
What is happening in Finland shouldn’t be shrugged off as cyclical. Just accept that we’re going through a tough phase and will automatically bounce back. Just look at Turkiye.
How come they don’t have the same problems? That’s why I want to have the hard talk about the state of our gaming industry. Understand why the once-dominant gaming ecosystem has declined, and what can be done to reverse the course.
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a wake-up call. Reasons for Decline: Comfort Over Competition We discuss how blindly following Supercell’s culture model became a trap for Finland’s game industry in this TWIG segment.
His breakdown of the issues reminded me vividly of my own experience coming back to Finland in 2018 after four years in the US. The first week back, I was hit by a massive culture shock. Having gotten used to the American way of life, where teams spent at least 10 hours a day at the office campuses, I felt like we were giving an advantage by consistently putting in 20% fewer hours.
To me, this signalled the focus on comfort over competition. Work-life balance seemed to be the main measure of studio success from the employee’s perspective. There was also a misguided perception that Finns work smarter, not harder, than their counterparts around the world.
On a broader scale, many Finnish studios, particularly post-2016, traded strategic ambition for creative purity. Rather than adapting to changes in distribution and monetization, they doubled down on the old ways. Few took risks on genre innovation.
Even fewer invested in the kind of market-first thinking that defines modern, successful mobile gaming companies. After Apple’s privacy changes, the studios that ignored business thinking were left in the dust in the new cut-throat market. On top of that, the Finnish game industry overlooked the hypercasual boom entirely—and, by extension, missed the playbook that today’s hybridcasual hits are built on.
The state-backed infrastructure in Finland hasn’t helped much either. Public funding bodies focus on early subsidies, taking away the impetus to move fast early on. Immigration policy bundled with punishing taxes, brutal climate, and a slim cultural scene makes it harder to attract global talent.
But in the end, it’s not just about tax incentives or cost of living. It’s about mentality. The Supercell Syndrome: Copying the Outlier Supercell is by far the biggest success story from Finland.
The company’s founder and CEO, Ilkka Paananen, has directly and indirectly unlocked the hyper-growth of Finnish gaming. When Supercell peaked with Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, its organizational model became the law of the land. Small, independent “cells” with full autonomy.
No producers. No hierarchy. Just talent and trust.
It was brilliant—and completely unrepeatable. But repeat it, people did. The success of a startup sits on a three-legged stool of talent (culture), capital and timing.
Overemhpasizing one distracts from the importance of others. Failing on one causes the startup to fail. ” Founders pitched five-person dream teams.
Investors fell for it. Even seasoned operators who should have known better leaned into the gospel of no process, no structure, no compromise. Supercell’s meteoric rise to the top was a combination of talent, capital, and timing.
The model worked for Supercell because they were an outlier: a unicorn of timing, talent, and capital. But for others, who only heard the PR-version of the culture, it became a trap. Teams were too small to run live ops.
Too isolated to scale. Too sacred to pivot. Too distant from business realities.
They inherited the skeleton of Supercell’s model without the spine. Ironically, even Supercell eventually became a victim of its own story. As CEO Ilkka Paananen admitted in his recent blog posts, after Brawl Stars, they stalled.
While other publishers evolved their monetization, engagement loops, go-to-market strategies, and ways of working, Supercell stood still—confined by what made them successful in the market that didn’t exist anymore. Now they’re adapting. Moving away from rigid “cell” structures.
Running bigger live ops. Bringing hungry outside talent to build new games. Building a new playbook for today’s market.
Being at the forefront of AI. The growth of Brawl Stars in the past year is proof that change works—even at the top. But what about the culture?
This is just my opinion, but talk about culture should be reserved for the memoirs of hyper-successful founders as inspiration to mortals like you and me. Culture should not seep into startup pitch decks or all-hands meetings at studios that haven’t even shipped yet. Founders who are still in the trenches don’t need to define culture.
That means obsessing over product-market fit, not writing value statements. Culture isn’t a slide. It’s the sum of your actions: how you work, what you choose to prioritize, what trade-offs you make, what problems you ignore, and what corners you refuse to cut.
Pre-product founders building culture decks are like unemployed actors practicing their Emmy-award speeches. Been there, done that. The Future Outlook: From Myth to Movement So where do we go from here?
First, we have to let go of the myth. Supercell was never a blueprint. It was a black swan.
Real ecosystems aren’t built on outliers—they’re built on durable, adaptable businesses. ” What’s working now is clear. Here are just a few examples: Dream’s unwavering work ethic combined with brutal focus on production quality, genre expertise, and market viability.
Scopely’s deep integration of product, IP and publishing combined with a relentless don’t-give-up attitude. Voodoo’s blend of prototyping at a massive scale, performance marketing and product analytics. Moon Active’s hyperfocused data driven live ops mastered to a perfection.
Miniclip’s M&A. Yes, it’s easy to buy. But it’s extremely hard to integrate.
It’s not enough to be creative. In today’s mature market, you have to be competitive. Not just visionary, but commercial.
And most of all, you need to evolve—not once every five years, but continuously. Finland has the raw materials: world-class cost-efficient engineers, seasoned artists, and a legacy of excellence. But l egacies don’t build futures.
Only hunger does. ” It’s a reminder that where you’re going matters more than where you’ve been. And for the Finnish games industry, it’s time to stop staring at past wins and start focusing on the road ahead.
Deconstructor of FunMay 26, 20257 min read