Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of Supercell, discusses how complete trust in creative teams generates organic accountability.
Insight
Paananen: Focusing on competitors prevents a company from ever leading
“If you follow competition, the risk is that you may become, like, overly reactive, like, what Happens around you, and essentially, the best you can be is just to be a fast follower, but if you're a fast follower, then by definition, you will always follow some…”
Opinion
Paananen: Most large game studios focus on control over creative teams
“The irony, I think, about many games companies, and, you know, ours at the time included, is that many companies are focused on actually everything else but the teams that create the actual games. So many of the, especially the bigger game companies are very t…”
Insight
Paananen: Frontline developers make better decisions than upper management
“Therefore, I would argue that the decisions that these people make, they are of higher quality. They're just better decisions than those of the people at the higher level of management make.”
Insight
Paananen: Companies fail from stopping risk-taking, not taking risks
“Well, how I think about it is, I think, like, in my opinion, like, companies, I don't think they ultimately fail because they take risks. I think fail because they stop taking risks.”
Insight
Paananen: Success makes creating the next hit game harder due to pressure
“In the games industry, like, the more successful you are, the harder it becomes to Create the next hit game, I feel. Because, you know, when you're gonna start, and there are no expectations, and you kind of have nothing to lose, there's, like, no pressure as …”
Insight
Paananen: An absence of failure signals a lack of ambition and innovation
“If a company, like, never, ever fails, essentially means that they probably aren't trying to do a kind of hard enough thing, or the bar just isn't, like, high enough, and that they're not trying to, like, you know, innovate.”