Building studio culture by empowering teams
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Some gaming CEOs take their company cultures very seriously.
Rob Pardo, the founder of Bonfire Studios, has been around the business enough to know about building cultures at different game studios. Having filled prominent roles at Blizzard, he is also no stranger to the GamesBeat Summit, having participated in a panel on a similar topic back in 2019.
This time, he interviewed Ilkka Paananen, one of the founders of Supercell, creators of hit mobile games like Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Brawl Stars, and Boom Beach.
It starts with the name. Supercell’s philosophy is that teams must be independent, work in small cells, and operate free from control in order to do their best creative work. Supercell focuses on the creative process, unleashing the maximum potential of their people and the teams they make up.
The company flipped the traditional organizational pyramid upside down and tried to enable a truly bottoms-up creative paradigm. It embedded the responsibility at the team level and made them the true performance unit, rather than the more traditional profit/loss center orientation. Lots of companies talk this talk; it is easy to say, hard to do.
The studio was formed for this very purpose. Its founders created a workspace that is employee-driven. Paananen believes that the best people make the best games.
And so, in building studio culture, the objective was to create teams of self-actuating collaborators. To provide maximum freedom, but in ways that would not have teams of strong personalities grind to a halt over disagreements.
Supercell has a philosophy that teams must have a common goal and clarity of
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