Building Data Platforms for 300M Players: Supercell's Global Scale

Summary

Supercell is a Helsinki-based mobile gaming company with approximately 300 million monthly active players worldwide, operating games including Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and Hay Day across more than 160 countries.
Boris Nechaev, Head of Data Platform at Supercell and employee number 11 with over 15 years at the company, leads the data platform team that uses Databricks to enable player personalization, A/B testing, content moderation, and business analytics decisions.
Supercell's experience demonstrates that small, efficient data teams equipped with strong infrastructure and AI tools on Databricks can deliver outsized results and support real-time global operations at scale.

Building Data Platforms for 300M Players: Supercell's Global Scale

Supercell is a mobile gaming company with 300 million monthly active players playing Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and other titles across 160+ countries. Competing globally at scale means matching players fairly and in real time, requiring sophisticated data infrastructure to power player matching, personalization, and safety.
Hear from Boris Nechaev, Head of Data Platform at Supercell, on how their lean, efficient team uses Databricks to enable better decisions across the company. Learn how they leverage data for player personalization, A/B testing, content moderation, and business growth, and why small teams with strong data infrastructure and AI tools can outperform large organizations.
🤝

Chapters

FAQs

What does Supercell use Databricks for?

Supercell uses Databricks to power its data platform, supporting player personalization, A/B testing, content moderation, real-time player matching, and business analytics across all of its games. The platform enables a lean team to make better data-driven decisions at the scale of 300 million monthly active players worldwide.

What games does Supercell operate and at what scale?

Supercell's most popular games include Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and Hay Day, with approximately 300 million monthly active players across more than 160 countries. The company is based in Helsinki, Finland, and Boris Nechaev, who leads the data platform, has been with Supercell for over 15 years as employee number 11.

Why is real-time player matching a significant data infrastructure challenge for Supercell?

Matching 300 million players fairly and in real time across a global player base requires low-latency data infrastructure capable of processing player activity and skill data continuously and at massive scale. This demands a data platform that can support both real-time decision-making and longer-horizon analytics for game design and personalization simultaneously.

How does Supercell demonstrate that small teams can compete at global scale?

Despite serving 300 million monthly active players across 160+ countries, Supercell operates with a lean data platform team that covers analytics, machine learning, and experimentation for the entire company. This video highlights that strong data infrastructure and AI tools on the Databricks Data and AI platform allow small teams to deliver results that would otherwise require much larger organizations.

Full transcript

[00:19] Welcome back to Summit Live. We are super excited to have Supercell on here. I'm here with Boris. You are one of the early early early employees of Supercell, but for those of you who don't know what it is, let's hear. Yeah. Hello everyone. Super happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm Boris
[00:36] from Supercell. We are a mobile games company based in Helsinki in Finland. Our games, some of our most popular games are Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Hay Day, and a few others. Yes. I'm a big player of them all, and I
[00:52] don't know if you want to start rolling some of the tapes, but I had the pleasure of being at what are I consider the coolest offices all over the world. If you have cooler offices after you see this video, please send my way. I want to know. But they have
[01:07] you know, if you play their video games like the the characters, like giant balloons in the stairwell, or rooms with giant coins in them. So like I had the honor to meet with some of your team members, and you go in and it's like a castle and giant
[01:24] knights and everything around there. And but how how many people every unique people every month play one of your games? So now we have around 300 million monthly active players from across the world, the whole world. So we are very
[01:40] sort of have a very global player base. Yeah, it's incredible. I you know, you could see the the I saw the control room with all the dashboards of data pipelines, but then you have dashboards of who's playing what, who's playing other video games. Yeah, here's uh of it rolling. Uh just
[01:57] beautiful offices. No shoe policy, is that still in place? It is very much. It's a quite custom in Finland to have just socks in the office. Yeah, and uh Pekka Cafe. Yes. Every day you get to have great food?
[02:12] Yes, we do. It's located on the fourth floor of our office. It's sort of like a visitor uh floor for us and yeah, we are very happy to host uh people outside of the company there and offer refreshments. Here's beautiful and you can see like here's the the gaming studio.
[02:28] Um you know, while we talk about this, you know, why don't we just start talking about like what are some of the the uses that you have? Also, what number employee were you? Uh how many how big are you now? Uh I think I was employee number 11 and that was uh more than 15 years ago. I've
[02:45] been a pleasure being with the company for more than 15 years now. Great, and what what team are you on or what team do you lead? Uh yes, so I'm uh leading the data platform and product team. Uh we which consists of data infrastructure team. The first one is
[03:01] data infrastructure looking after all the foundations, cloud, data bricks, governance, uh data ingestion and whatnot. Then we have an analytics engineering team that maintains all the data sets, centralized data sets, provides tooling for everyone to work efficiently with data sets on data
[03:17] bricks. Uh then we have an experimentation team. This is mostly AB testing and hypothesis-driven uh experimentation in our games and other functions. And finally, machine learning team which uh tries to personalize our games for our players.
[03:32] Yeah, a lot of great use cases. Um uh I'm a big gamer. Um I think since I first saw you many years ago and been back, I've played both Clash Royale and Clash of Clans every single day. Maybe there's a Genie space
[03:47] you could say, you know, how how who plays the most. We can ask Genie. Yeah, we can look up your uh your engagement rate. Yeah, but yeah, there's like I have like 8,000, you know, level ups. Yeah, that's very impressive. Uh pretty much every I don't know if
[04:02] people at home can see or not, but level 16 and all of these I was showing you level 15 for a lot. Max upgrade on builder base, uh but it's super, but it's also collaborative. You are not just playing yourself. You have teams
[04:17] that you play with. Oh, yeah. Uh and you want to make it a good gaming environment, lower the toxicity, but uh in-game upgrades and stuff. Like what what are some of the the the key use cases you have? And I think we have a QR code, by the way, um if people want to
[04:34] really drill down more. Yes, so maybe the main uh sort of use case for Databricks for us. Of course, everything that you've mentioned and we do quite a lot of different things. Maybe the main use case for us is to enable as best decisions as possible for everyone at Supercell. Essentially, we
[04:50] want to cater to our players and we want to make our games as fun uh and personalized as possible. So, we use data as the main component for driving better decision, enabling better decisions for everyone at Supercell. Uh and also we build systems that drive growth. We are of course a business. We
[05:07] would like to to cater to as many people globally as possible and to make our games as fun as possible. And then yes, everything that you mentioned, we of course we have trust and safety function and marketing and whatnot. Uh today actually a bit later today I will be giving a joint talk with someone from trust and safety where we will be
[05:24] talking about how we use uh Databricks uh and build on top of Databricks to moderate content for our players so they can interact with each other in a safe manner. Great. And I also um if you go to YouTube and search Supercell and Databricks, I've seen over the years
[05:40] like some great keynote presentations. You and and the the other team that I've met is just like really, really informative. 300 million unique people every month, that's in- incredible. And they need, they demand real time. Since you're matching up with somebody around the world, that has to be someone that's
[05:57] like fairly competitive. Avoid the frustration that someone pays money and they just outplay you. You want it around your level. That's not easy to do. By no means, no. Yes, yeah. Exactly as you are saying. Yes, some of our games are very competitive. Most of them are real time where players play with each
[06:13] other in real time. So, yes, this demands this puts quite a lot of demands on the infrastructure. Great. And I know we have a huge global audience, 160 plus countries. A lot of people getting their certification or a ton of experience, but you have you and the whole organization have done an
[06:30] incredible job recruiting talent. And I hear you might still be looking for more great talent. Of course, yes. We are always looking for great talent. So, please check out our open positions and and apply. Great. Well, any anything else you wanted to to add on? Yeah, no. Well, great. Thanks for having
[06:47] me. I'm super excited about some of the new announcements that were just that we heard at the keynote session and super happy to explore soon and dig a little bit deeper into the technical aspects of the new offerings. Awesome. Well,
[07:02] hopefully I get to see you again. Your CEO has been super warming and welcome. And one thing that I'm very been very impressed with is using data and also using AI. Your team has been very efficient. So, I've been at other companies where a team of 100
[07:20] people, you know, your organization of 10 leverages not just AI, but the core data appropriately. Well, that's what Databricks offers us to do. You can have a small team and do great things. Absolutely. And I hope you're excited about Databricks One on your mobile
[07:36] phone or on your desktop. That's been a long ask from us, actually, to be able to check stats on the phone. Great. Well, we appreciate the partnership and you being part of the product, but uh uh I I think that's good.
[07:51] Yes, thank you for having me. All right, thank you so much. Yes, thank you.

Learn more about the Databricks Data and AI platform.

The information provided herein is for general informational purposes only and may not reflect the most current product capabilities or configurations.