Scale Should Follow Signal
Supercell shut down Squad Busters in November 2024. Eighteen months after global launch.
Ilkka Paananen said it plainly in his annual letter: they scaled teams too early and validated ideas too slowly. Hard thing to write publicly. He wrote it anyway.
What I keep thinking about is how familiar the sequence is. Not the game. The pattern.
A strong launch, big download numbers, teams staffed up for the game you expect to have. Then month three arrives and the retention curve tells a different story. By the time you know what game you actually have, you're already committed to the plan you made for a different one.
Squad Busters hit 40 million downloads in two weeks. That's not a small game. But download volume and player signal are different things. The question that matters isn't how many people installed it. It's which ones came back on day 8, and why.
Validation-first live ops doesn't look impressive in the short run. Fewer big swings, more controlled tests, slower event cadence. It looks like you're not trying hard enough. What it actually does is tell you by month four whether you have a game or just a launch.
Scale should follow signal. Most teams know this. Most teams don't do it.
What's the earliest sign you've seen that a live game was in trouble?
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