Supercell Investments: A Creative Community or a Missed Opportunity?
Written by Michail Katkoff, founder of Deconstructor of Fun, a battle-scarred games industry veteran who claims to know a thing or two about investing.
“Having an investment from Supercell is like meeting Gandalf in the dark woods and having him agree to join your quest. The odds are still against you, but it’s sure great to have some magic on your side.” A famous quote by Michael Witz, CEO of Redemption Games, on the date the investment was announced.
Fast forward just two years, and Redemption was acquired by the Sauron of Gaming, the great and powerful AppLovin.
Redemption was a good, quick exit for the founders and investors. Though flipping studios for a quick buck is likely not part of Supercell Investments' strategy.
So, what is Supercell Investments' Strategy? Why has it taken 9 years to present one? And does the presented investment strategy stand a constructive assessment?
Supercell Investments Relaunch
Supercell invests in hit games. But also tech. They invest early. And late. They want you to be independent. But they also want you to be a part of a community. But not part of Supercell itself.
Source: Supercell Investments.
Supercell recently relaunched its investment efforts under a new banner — Supercell Investments — complete with a clean website, feel-good messaging, and a renewed emphasis on supporting creative, independent teams.
The goal of the relaunch was “to help founders and teams better understand what Supercell Investments is all about”. But let’s be clear: this isn’t new. Supercell has been investing in studios since 2016. What’s changed now is the packaging, not the playbook.
You’d assume Supercell's investing strategy is about strategic enablement. Instead, the approach comes across as more philosophical than strategic, less like corporate venture capital (which Supercell Investments is) with defined objectives and more like a creative grant program.
It’s not a bad thing to bet on early-stage founders. But when you have Tencent-level resources and a front-row seat to the most successful mobile deals of the decade — and still end up largely on the sidelines — it raises eyebrows.
And that’s where the tension begins…
Supercell Investments VS. What Corporate Venture Funds Typically Do
Corporate venture capital (CVC) typically drives strategic enablement and financial returns. Supercell’s approach, however, feels more like a creative passion project than a structured CVC effort.
Scrolling through the Supercell Investment site paints a love letter to game development, rather than a strategic lever to strengthen Supercell’s core business.
Source: Supercell Investments
Despite ~20 investments, only three are in tech infrastructure (Appcharge, Applivery, and Quago), showing little focus on directly strengthening Supercell’s core development capabilities. While backing early-stage studios offers some exposure to new trends and design ideas, without breakout successes, that market intelligence remains mostly theoretical.
Supercell’s M&A pipeline to date is equally thin, with only one acquisition (the recently closed-down Space Ape). Key opportunities like Peak, Small Giant, and Playrix, which, according to several sources, Supercell had an opportunity to acquire, were missed entirely during the mobile gaming bull run.
Financially, the investments have delivered limited returns, and there’s little evidence of strategic integration across portfolio companies. Most operate independently, offering little scalable benefit back to Supercell’s core business.
Supercell Investments doesn’t follow traditional corporate venture capital (CVC) best practices. It’s well-intentioned, but after nearly a decade lacks the strategic clarity and execution needed to become a true growth engine.
A Net Positive, But a Wasted Opportunity?
There’s no denying that Supercell Investments' initiative helps early-stage founders. More money in the games ecosystem is always welcome. But without a stronger strategy, operator-led guidance, or scalable support systems, Supercell Investments risks becoming a version of “building wells in Africa”—a noble act, but far from core business.
Furthermore, the current size and composition of the compact investment team do not reflect that this endeavor is in the company’s core focus, either.
Just compare Supercell’s investing to Miniclip, Supercell’s Tencent sibling.
Miniclip has completed 10 acquisitions with an average acquisition amount of $650M. Its most active year was 2021, with 4 acquisitions, and it has averaged nearly 1 acquisition per year over the past three years.
Over the last decade, Miniclip has quietly assembled a highly strategic portfolio of mobile hits — investing in and acquiring studios like SYBO (Subway Surfers), 8 Ball Pool developer Play Games, and more recently expanding into midcore. In contrast, Supercell’s own investment record looks sparse — even cautious — especially considering the capital they’ve had at their disposal.
In fact, you can comfortably make the case that Supercell’s investing team missed the mobile gaming bull run from 2016 to 2022 entirely.
While competitors and peers were snapping up breakout studios and riding mobile’s unprecedented growth wave, Supercell’s investments skewed toward pre-seed and early seed bets in tiny studios, often with little follow-up capital, structure, or support.
Instead of acquiring rising stars like Peak, Playrix, and Small Giant, they backed studios that, while creatively promising, didn’t break out — or in many cases, didn’t even ship.
The reason for avoiding meaningful investments into powerful independent studios was likely the fear of breaking the culture that was fixated on small independent teams. Supercell likely felt that they needed to do a lot of management with the new studios that they simply didn’t have the people for.
Hindsight 20/20, this was a mistake. Over the past years, the company has continued to balloon in headcount, and one of its investments, Metacore, has also scaled without handholding from the parent company.
Metacore, Supercell’s most scaled investment till date, has grown its revenues (Liikevaihto) rapidly over the past years without extensive handholding from Supercell. This proved that the fear of making investments into scaled independent studios like Peak was unwarranted.
If Supercell Investments wants this to be more than a well-intentioned hobby, it needs to evolve from a community club to a high-impact Investment engine.
Until then, we’ll keep watching… and wondering.
For more context, you can read this “interview” of Supercell’s long-time head of investments, Jaakko Harlas, where he explains what Supercell Investments is all about. Given that Supercell sponsors the publication, this is technically a promotional piece.
PS: Supercell has an open invite to join the Deconstructor of Fun podcast. There are likely misunderstandings in this analysis that I’m happy to correct through a long-form conversation.
