Bits Blog: From the Land of Angry Birds, a Mobile Game Maker Lifts Off

For a country with a population about the size of Minnesota, Finland has produced some giant global hits in the mobile business, like the phone maker Nokia and Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. A Finnish mobile games start-up called Supercell wants its crack at glory too.
The Helsinki-based company calls itself a “tablet first” games company, meaning that it designs its games to take advantage of the larger screen of the tablet rather than just blowing up smartphone games to a bigger display (though it releases versions of its games for smartphones too). For now, the dominance of Apple’s iPad in the tablet market means Supercell is focused mainly on that device.

This year it introduced two games for Apple’s iOS device — a farming game called Hay Day and a strategy game featuring wizards and barbarians called Clash of Clans. Both have done well, but Clash of Clans has been especially successful, occupying the No. 1 slot on Apple’s top-grossing iPad game chart in over five dozen countries for weeks, according to Supercell. The games are free to download and play, but, like FarmVille and a variety of other games, Supercell sells its users in-game currency so they can speed up their game progress and buy virtual goods.
Using this model, Supercell executives say its two games are currently grossing over $500,000 a day, which translates into about $350,000 a day in revenue for Supercell after Apple takes its 30 percent cut on transactions through its iOS App Store.
Besides its country of origin, Supercell shares another similarity, an investor, with Rovio: Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was also an early investor in Facebook. The company has raised $15 million in financing from Accel, London Venture Partners and others, $12 million of it from Accel.
In a phone interview, Ilkka Paananen, the founder and chief executive of Supercell, said he did not believe that Accel’s investment in Supercell was connected to the firm’s investment in Rovio. He said, however, that the quality of Rovio’s games had been a big influence on start-ups in the country.
“One thing they’ve really done for the Finnish gaming community is they’ve done a huge favor in raising the bar for everybody,” Mr. Paananen said.
Separately on Monday, Rovio unveiled a plan to keep its Angry Birds franchise steaming forward, with a new game called Angry Birds Star Wars that it is creating in partnership with Lucasfilm.
Supercell has also opened a San Francisco office to be closer to the action in the technology industry, most notably the two big companies it works with most often, Apple and Facebook. Greg Harper, the general manager of Supercell’s North America operations, said the company believed the tablet was “the ultimate game platform.”
“The technology and hardware performance really is close to on-par with that of consoles,” Mr. Harper said.
Supercell’s executives are especially excited by the prospect of a new smaller iPad from Apple, now popularly referred to as the iPad mini. Although he was quick to say that Supercell had no inside knowledge of such a device, Mr. Harper said a smaller, less expensive iPad could help the device reach a broader audience.
Mr. Harper says he believes that the growth in the tablet market will be a bad development for dedicated portable game devices from companies like Nintendo and Sony. “That market seems in trouble to me,” he said. “The iPad mini could be one of the final nails in the coffin.”

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