![]() ![]() We knew that one of those games would have to be at least moderately successful for the company to have a future. What makes this story a classic is that it was the Magic team that ultimately developed Clash of Clans, which, funnily enough, was also codenamed Magic before getting its official name.īy early 2012, we had five small teams working on new games, all for tablets and mobile. But in the end we killed it and started to work on something new for tablets. It looked amazing, and it was a game that had never been seen before on Facebook. We had a passionate five-member team working on that game day and night for nearly six months straight, and we were all really excited about it. Probably the hardest decision at the time was killing a game with the codename Magic. Today it’s clear that this was the right decision, but in the fall of 2011 it was less obvious. As time passed, we shifted our strategy to “mobile first” as smartphones have grown and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish them from tablets. We would modify it later for smartphones. We started by perfecting the game for iPad. We decided to kill all ongoing productions for web and Facebook and bet the entire company on a strategy that we started to call “tablet first”. The time had come to make some hard decisions. To make matters even more complicated, we had already begun developing the next wave of games, which were still aligned with our original cross-platform strategy. And we started to understand just how different this platform truly was if we really wanted to create the best possible games for this platform we could focus on nothing else. We started to call it “the ultimate games platform”. One day, when playing around with some iPads we had ordered to the office, we noticed how all of us had fallen in love with this device. We had a big problem with our product strategy, too. It also became clear that our problem wasn’t just with Gunshine. Mobile games have to be fun even if you only have a few minutes to play. Also, we realized people play differently on desktop than they do on mobile. It was too hard to try to replicate the mouse/keyboard experience on touch screens. When we started planning a mobile version of Gunshine, it quickly became clear that the experience wouldn’t be great on the mobile platform. Despite all our hard work, we realized Gunshine just wasn’t going to be the game we had dreamed of. This game would never become a mass-market phenomenon a game that would have an impact on the lives of millions of people. It was too hard to get into the game if you hadn’t played similar types of games before. The sad truth was that this was not a game that anyone would play for years. ![]() Most importantly, despite their initial excitement, players were getting bored with the game after a month or two. Unfortunately, we slowly started to realize that Gunshine just wasn’t delivering on our original product vision. At some point there was no room for our CEO Ilkka anymore, so he had to move out. A bit later on, when we started to hire more people, we managed to fit 15 people to that little room. It was pretty far from Silicon Valley, but we had everything we needed: one 30-square-meter room, six desks we got from a recycling center, and of course a coffee maker. Our first office was in Niittykumpu in Espoo, Finland. On top of that, we borrowed as much money as we could from Tekes, the Finnish government’s technology funding arm. Our initial funding came from the founders investing their savings into the company. In short, today we believe that the best quality can only be achieved by focusing on one platform at a time. But later on, our thinking changed completely. ![]() An important part of our original product vision, back in May 2010 when we got started, was the idea of building cross platform gaming services – games that you could log into and play from any device. ![]()
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