I Was a Player Before I Was Anything Else

Before I had a job title, a team, or a badge that opened the doors at Supercell, I had a village in Clash of Clans and strong opinions about wall upgrades.

That is not a cute framing. It is the single most important fact about how I work, a decade later, as Head of Community. I was a player before I was anything else, and the whole approach only works because of it.

The unpaid years

I did not study community management. I do not think you really can. What I did was play Clash of Clans obsessively, and then, because playing was not enough, I became a moderator on the subreddit.

Nobody pays a subreddit moderator. Nobody thanks one, mostly. You do it because you care about the place, about the people in it, and about the game the whole thing orbits. Looking back, those years were the best training I could have had. I learned how players actually talk when no company is listening. I learned the difference between what players say they want and what they actually reward. I learned that trust in a community is earned in tiny increments and spent in enormous ones.

Most of all, I learned what it feels like to love a game that does not know you exist. There are millions of people in exactly that position for every big game in the world. Every one of them is a relationship waiting to happen. Most companies never make the call.

The invitation

Supercell made the call. They flew a group of fans, me among them, to Finland for a fan event. I walked into that building as a player, one of the people on the other side of the screen.

I never really left. What was supposed to be a visit turned into a job, and the job turned into a decade, and the decade turned into the community organization I lead today.

I think about that invitation constantly, because it contains the entire philosophy in miniature. Supercell did not acquire me through a hiring funnel. They noticed a player who cared, and they opened the door. Our founder Ilkka says that without players, Supercell would not exist. The company acted like it believed that, all the way down to a plane ticket for a subreddit moderator.

What being a player changes

People sometimes ask what a player-first background actually changes about the job. Nearly everything.

It changes your instincts. When we staged the death of Brawl Stars before its global launch, deleting eighteen months of community pages and letting the world believe the game was cancelled, that was not a marketing brainstorm. That worked because I knew, as a player, exactly what Supercell’s habit of killing good games felt like from the outside. I knew the fear was real, so the relief would be real, and the moment would be unforgettable. You cannot focus-group your way to that. You have to have been on the other side of the screen.

It changes how you build. Giving players a genuine seat at the table, community-designed maps, modes, and skins, never felt radical to me. Of course players should shape the game. They are the reason it exists. The radical thing is a game that ships for years without asking them.

And it changes who you hire. I look for people who have genuinely loved a game community from the inside, because you can teach tools and processes, but you cannot teach someone what it feels like to care about a game at midnight for free. The best people on my teams have that history. Some of them were creators. Some were moderators. Some were just players with strong opinions about wall upgrades.

Still the whole point

A decade later, I lead a team of around 100 people across community, creators, content, and technology. The scale changed. The point did not.

Once a game is out, it belongs to the players who love it. My job exists to honour that.

Every program we build, from the Creator Program to the in-game Community Hub, is a bigger version of that first plane ticket: a company deliberately closing the distance between itself and the people who love what it makes. The tools got more sophisticated. The gesture is the same. We see you. Come in.

So here is the thought I want to leave you with, especially if you run a game, or a community team, or the budget that funds one. Somewhere in your community, right now, there is someone moderating your subreddit, running your Discord, or making guides for your game, for free, because they love it. That person understands your players better than most of your org chart does.

I know, because I was that person. The only unusual thing Supercell did was notice.