Rayport, who wrote the Harvard Business School case on Supercell's reorganization, is explaining how the mobile game maker learned its tiny teams were underserving its hits. The comparison came up when the Clash of Clans team was deciding how big it should be after hiring its first middle manager.
…there is clearly much evolution to be done across the five existing franchises. They've done huge transformation. We can talk about it in a different podcast, but just to give you a sense of the drama of it, the comparable game to Clash of Clans is King Digital Entertainment's Candy Crush saga.
Which we've talked about on another podcast. And the company's want to find that. Yes,
lo, so many years ago. And at that time, when the Clash of Clans cell hired that first middle manager, one of the questions was, how big should the cell be? And so Stewart, who ran it logically, called up his counterpart, who was running the Candy Crush team within King Digital Entertainment and said, I'm running Clash of Clans with 17 people. You have comparable revenues. How big is your team? And the answer was 700. Oh, my goodness. So inevitably, you've got to conclude that 700 may not be the right answer, but 17 is clearly not the right answer. Somewhere between those two numbers is the right answer. And that right answer is the thing that allows you to build essentially the commercial engines that deliver on the potential of those existing hits. You cannot judge the success of the reorg without asking the other question, which is, when is the next hit game going to come out of the new game side of the house? And that's got to be a metric that they're watching very closely within the company. Yeah,
I assume you'll be watching as well. Maybe you'll write another case about it.
Can't wait. Huge fan of Ilka's and of Greg's and of the whole team there, as well as of the company. These folks really do play a high-integrity version of the free-to-play game of their own, which is you don't have to spend a dollar a Euro to have access to the full glory of every single one of…
want to get the best chicken feed, you do have to spend a dollar. That's