The Last
Moat

Why Player Care is Supercell's most strategic asset

The Recommendation

Transform Player Care from a support function into Supercell's player intelligence platform

RT-GP1 proved AI can handle support volume. The next step is turning 40,000 daily player conversations into the cross-game intelligence layer that no cell can build alone — and no competitor can clone.

90% Cost reduction already proven

7s Response time (from ~1 day)

40K Tickets/day across 5 games

Part I

The world changed.
Supercell didn't notice in time.

Competitive Landscape — 2025

Supercell is being out-earned in its own genre

Game	2025 Revenue	Developer	Time to $1B
Last War: Survival	$2.2B	FirstFun (Singapore)	~18 months
Whiteout Survival	$1.9B	Century Games (Beijing)	~20 months
Kingshot	$500M+	Century Games (Beijing)	9 months (launched 2025)
Clash Royale	$452M	Supercell	—
Brawl Stars	$273M	Supercell	—
Clash of Clans	$254M	Supercell — #33 globally	—

Supercell hit $3.01B revenue in 2025 (Ilkka, Feb 10 2026) — but Last War alone matched that from a single title launched 18 months ago.

Innovation Gap

No successful new franchise in 8 years

Squad Busters

75M downloads, $100M+ invested → shut down. First game killed after global launch.

mo.co

$140K/month by October 2025. A 65× gap vs. Clash Royale's $162M launch.

“Of 53,000 games launched since 2020, only 22 grossed over $1B.” — Ilkka Paananen, February 10, 2026

Part II

What can be cloned
vs. what cannot

Cloned in months

Game mechanics — every hit gets copied. Kingshot uses Supercell's visual language.

Art style — AI art tools produce Supercell-quality assets at $0.05/image.

Monetisation — Century Games perfected the spending loops.

Small teams — AI commoditised this. Every studio can be small now.

Cannot be cloned

16 years of player trust — built interaction by interaction.

Community network effects — friends, clans, shared history.

Cross-game player intelligence — nobody else sees this data.

The reputation for caring — brand trust that compounds.

The Economics

Player relationships are the revenue function

0.25% of F2P players generate 64% of all IAP revenue

54% more spending in
non-toxic games

$21.10 vs $12.09/month
UC Irvine / Steinkuehler

320% higher churn from
first-session harassment

20× higher LTV in
moderated communities

“Great gameplay is no longer enough.” — Bain & Company, Gaming Report 2025

Part III

The cell structure's
blind spot

Every cell optimises for its own game. Nobody owns the cross-game player relationship.

The Only Cross-Game View

Player Care sees what no cell can see

A player who plays 3 Supercell games and has spent $5,000 over 6 years — no cell owns that relationship. No cell sees the full picture.

Player Care is the only function that sees across every game, every player, every region, every day.

The data platform model already proves shared services work at Supercell. Central infrastructure, embedded specialists in cells, opt-in value.

40,000+ support interactions daily across all games

Billions of game events via Snowplow + Databricks

Cross-game identity — player relationship graph

Real-time sentiment from every player conversation

Trust & Safety signals spanning all communities

Part IV

From support bot to
player intelligence platform

RT-GP1 was proof of concept. RT-GP2 is the strategic platform.

The Evolution

Seven capabilities. One platform.

Resolve

Handle tickets faster and better than any human. The RT-GP1 baseline.

Detect

Proactively identify issues before players report them. Zero-ticket resolution.

Predict

Feed churn signals from every interaction into retention models.

Understand

Real-time sentiment analysis at scale. A “player mood index” across all games.

Inform

Surface product intelligence to game cells daily. “What players told us this week.”

Connect

Cross-game player relationship memory. One player, one relationship, all games.

Elevate

Free Game Masters to become relationship builders. AI handles volume. Humans handle meaning.

New Metrics

From cost centre to strategic asset

Old metrics (cost centre)

CSAT score

Cost per ticket

Resolution time

Agent utilisation

New metrics (strategic asset)

Player LTV impact — revenue retained

Churn prevention rate — players saved

Product insight velocity — speed to game cells

Player Lifetime Relationship — the moat metric

PLR (Player Lifetime Relationship) — a novel metric. LTV measures extraction. PLR measures the moat. Nobody in the industry tracks this systematically. This is the metric Player Care owns.

The Bridge to the Cells

Superpowers for cells, not mandates

We're not telling cells what to do. We're giving them intelligence they can't get anywhere else and removing friction they didn't know they had.

Player Intelligence Briefs

“Here's what your players told us this week.” Top pain points, sentiment shifts, feature confusion. Delivered to each cell. No opt-in required.

Proactive Issue Detection

Game update causes a ticket spike? Cell gets alerted within 30 minutes with scope, severity, and affected segments. Cell decides what to do.

Cross-Game Context

Need to understand Brawl Stars overlap with CoC? Only Player Care has the cross-game view. Queryable in natural language by any cell member.

New Launch Advantage

Every new game launches with Day 1 AI support, proactive detection, and cross-game player context. The mo.co launch could have been different.

The Roadmap

Three phases to the moat

Prove the Intelligence

Q1–Q2 2026

Natural-language query interface over support data
Pilot weekly Player Intelligence Briefs with 1–2 cells
Proactive issue detection (30-min alert loop)
Cross-game player identity mapping

Success: At least one cell says “give us more”

Build the Platform

Q3–Q4 2026

Deploy multi-agent RT-GP2 architecture
Real-time sentiment dashboard for all cells
Zero-ticket resolution for predictable issues
PLR metric tracking begins
Game Master role shift: resolution → relationship

Success: Zero-ticket rate >15%. 3+ cells using dashboards.

Scale the Moat

2027

Day 1 AI support for every new game launch
Player intelligence as standard input to game design
PLR becomes company-level metric
Game Masters recognised as relationship builders
The thing competitors can't clone

Success: Player Care is what makes Supercell, Supercell.

They cannot clone 16 years of player relationships.

Not a cost centre. The last moat.

Appendix

Supporting data and sources

Sources

Research base

Industry & Market
Sensor Tower — State of Mobile Gaming 2025
Bain & Company — Gaming Report 2025
PocketGamer — Top 50 Mobile Game Makers 2025
MobileGamer.biz — Top Grossing Mobile Games 2025
Deconstructor of Fun — Supercell Transformation
Naavik — Century Games 4X Portfolio Strategy
HBS — Supercell 2.0: Clash of Plans
GDC 2026 — State of the Game Industry

Player Economics
UC Irvine / Steinkuehler — Toxicity & Spending
Game Developer — Whale Revenue Concentration
Harvard Business Review — Retention Economics
Keywords Studios — Player Safety Investment
The PX Hub — Toxicity, Retention & LTV
GGWP — Community Management & Revenue

AI & Technology
SemiAnalysis — Claude Code Inflection Point
Anthropic — How AI is Transforming Work
Tomoro.ai — Supercell Gameplay Agent Case Study
Gartner — Multi-Agent System Projections
MIT Technology Review — 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026

Supercell Sources
Supercell — 10 Learnings from 10 Years
Supercell — “The Best Games Haven't Been Made Yet” (Feb 10, 2026)
Supercell — Annual Results 2025 ($3.01B revenue)
Supercell Careers — Player Care Roles
Nitor — Player Support Solution
Snowplow — Supercell Data Integration
Databricks — Supercell Customer Story
PocketGamer — AI Masterplan (RovioCon25)

Case Studies
Riot Games — Player Dynamics (ESA)
Blizzard — Support Quality Decline
Netflix — Recommendation Revenue ($1B+)
Amazon — Customer Obsession as Moat

The LastMoat