Zero to 290,000 Creators: What I Learned Building Supercell’s Creator Program

People ask me how to build a creator program, and they usually want the tactic: the payout structure, the application form, the tier names. Those matter, but they’re the last 10 percent. We took Supercell’s program from zero to more than 290,000 creators, including 1,679 official creators and 459 Super Creators with 3.71 billion combined subscribers. Before the lessons, I want to be honest about the thing underneath all of them: we love our creators, and we treat them as family, not as a marketing channel. Everything that worked grew out of that.

Here’s what I mean. Our creators share our passion for the games. A lot of them are flat out better at our games than we are. They understand our own products at a depth and volume we can’t match. So we don’t think of them as a distribution list. We think of them as partners in making the games better.

1. Start with the players who are already making content

We didn’t invent our first creators. They existed before we had a program, making videos because they loved the games. The job wasn’t to recruit strangers, it was to find the people already doing the work and make their lives dramatically easier. I know this pattern well, because I was one of those people before I worked here. If your program starts by cold-recruiting influencers, you’ve skipped the step that makes the whole thing real.

2. See what creators actually give you (it is not just reach)

This is the part most companies miss. Yes, creators bring eyeballs, and more people watching our games is genuinely good for the business. But that’s the smallest thing they do. They give us honest feedback. They help us design: some of our games have been shaped by creators who had early access and told us the truth about what was working and what wasn’t. And they are community managers in their own right, caring for audiences of thousands or millions with a dedication we could never staff for. Once you see all of that clearly, “influencer marketing” stops being the right words for it. It’s a creative partnership.

3. Want your creators to win, and mean it

Our goal isn’t to extract content from creators. It’s the opposite. We want more of them to succeed, and we want the best of them to succeed so completely that they can leave everything else behind and create full time, chasing the thing they love. That is not charity. When a creator gets to live that dream, they make better content, they invest in the games for the long haul, and yes, more people end up watching our games. Their success and ours turn out to be the same event. So we built the program to share in it together: revenue sharing, in-game video placement, a Creator Academy that trains people for free, and a real management platform. A program that extracts is a campaign. A program that shares is an ecosystem.

4. Give the program a job in the actual business

Loving your creators is not an excuse for fuzzy numbers. The program does measurable work. Squad Busters pre-registration drove more than 40 million signups through the creator network. We ran 40.5 million QR bounty claims in a single year. Engaged players connected to creators showed roughly double the 30-day retention. When you can point at numbers like that, the program stops being a budget line people question and becomes infrastructure people protect.

5. Build the boring parts, because they’re the moat

No other mobile game has launched with this level of creator coverage, and the reason isn’t a clever campaign. It’s that we built the unglamorous layer underneath: revenue sharing, in-game video placement, training, and a management platform that scales to hundreds of thousands of people. Anyone can run a creator promotion. Very few will build the system that makes creator coverage a permanent advantage.

If you’re starting out, resist the urge to design the tiers and the payouts first. Find the people already creating. See everything they give you, not just the views. Build the program so their success and your success are the same success, then build the infrastructure that makes it impossible to copy. Do that, and the relationship stops being transactional and becomes what it should have been all along: a group of people who love the same games, winning together.