Supercell & Mediatrade: 7 years of collaboration

About the customer

Supercell is a Finnish game company founded in 2010 that has launched seven popular games: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Squad Busters and mo.co. Supercell’s dream is to make games for as many people as possible – games that are played for years and remembered forever. Supercell has built its business on a strong foundation of values defined by honesty and an uncompromising commitment to quality.

The customer’s need

A successful business depends on paying attention to its customers. For Supercell, that means paying attention to a hundred million daily players. Among other things, this requires active interaction between Supercell and its community of players, content creators and fans. Active dialogue with the community is vital for the development and longevity of the games, and many updates are based on the player community’s wishes and feedback. Video is an important tool in community communications.

Supercell’s Community Managers play a central role in video production. The monthly productions would take many times longer if they had to travel to a studio outside the office. That time would be taken away from the Community Managers’ other work, which makes a studio built on their own premises a well-justified investment.

How the challenge was met

As in the rest of its operations, Supercell’s vision emphasised high quality and efficiency. They wanted a multicamera studio where their own staff could produce content independently – both recordings and streams – without compromising on quality. Supercell put the solution provider out to tender in 2017 and chose Mediatrade as its partner.

Key to choosing Mediatrade as the service provider were customer understanding and the ability to combine different technologies innovatively. Innovation was genuinely required, as this was, to our knowledge, the world’s first 4K/UHD multicamera studio that could be operated by one person. The studio had a tablet interface that let the customer control the cameras and audio recording, use the multiviewer and start recording and streaming. The studio could record five camera feeds and two iPads at once and play back one source – all in 4K/UHD resolution.

The studio was built on the fifth floor of an office building, and the space posed its own challenges. The studio had two ceiling tracks for cameras, and operating them safely required combining what were then new technologies and designing an entirely new operating logic together with Futurice. In the end, the corner room of the office building received 1.5 tonnes / 40 metres of camera track rails, 2,000 metres of SDI cable and everything else you can see in the image below.

The studio was commissioned in summer 2018 and hosted hundreds of productions during its lifetime.

Wood City and the next studios

In 2021, Supercell moved from Itämerenkatu to its new headquarters, Wood City, in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki. The new premises meant a new studio, and Mediatrade was chosen to design it from the ground up: we took part in site meetings, helped the customer design the building services for a space suited to studio use, and designed and delivered the new studio solution to the customer’s requirements.

The studio’s production model moved more towards film production, and the studio was named Film Studio. It has two separate set areas: a virtual production area with a large, curved chroma key wall and a video podcast area with a set wall. The studio has a video matrix that provides versatile connectivity and multiviewer layouts, with the cameras connecting wirelessly. The studio supports multicamera recording up to 8K resolution.

Completed on schedule, the studio has been in daily use ever since. Mediatrade has continued as Supercell’s partner, maintaining the studio and providing technical support both to Supercell’s own staff and to other Supercell partners working in the studio.

Wood City’s Film Studio has been a successful concept, and in 2022 Supercell decided to build a copy of it for its Shanghai office. Mediatrade acted as designer on the project in collaboration with Akukon.

In 2023, a construction site opened on the plot next to Wood City, and the resulting noise and vibration disrupted the studio’s normal operations. Using Wood City’s technology, Mediatrade designed and built a temporary studio for Supercell in Ruoholahti, which was in operation until the turn of the year, before the move back to Wood City’s Film Studio in February 2024.

Audio studios

A soundscape that enriches the gaming experience is as important to a successful game as its visuals. In 2022, as Supercell’s headcount grew, new composition studios for game audio were needed. Mediatrade designed and built two composition studios at Wood City in collaboration with Akukon and Audico.

Game music composers use a wide range of digital audio workstations and other software. The audio studios are ready for Dolby Atmos production, and in addition to audio software, various controllers and control surfaces are in use. For voice-over production for games, the studios have separate acoustically treated recording rooms. Suitable high-quality microphones have also been acquired for speech production.

Today

In 2025, Mediatrade is Supercell’s partner for continuous, regular service. Underlining that continuity, everyone at Mediatrade who joined the maintenance team in 2017 is still part of the since-expanded customer team. We make sure our customers can focus on what matters most to them.

In closing

It is only right to stress that none of the projects delivered during our collaboration would have succeeded alone. The foundation has been close contact with the customer’s representatives. We are deeply grateful to Supercell for their visionary approach and uncompromising commitment to quality – this has helped Mediatrade develop as a company in the right direction.

For the delivery, we would like to thank the following people and partners for their expertise and collegiality.

• Jonathan Maxwell
• Toni Poikonen
• Akukon
• Audico
• Autoscript
• On It films
• Canon
• Cartoni
• Creamsource
• DoP Choice
• Egripment
• Fujinon
• Lawo
• Litepanels
• Red Digital Cinema
• Ross Video
• Sigma
• Teradek