Clash of Clans: The Village That Made Supercell a Giant

In February 2015, during the most expensive advertising slot on American television, Liam Neeson stared into the camera and delivered a threat in the gravelly voice of his Taken films. He was not hunting kidnappers. He was hunting the player who had raided his village in a mobile game, under the username AngryNeeson52.

The game was Clash of Clans, released by Finnish studio Supercell on iOS on 2 August 2012 and on Android on 7 October 2013. By then it was earning more than any other app, and fourteen years after launch it is still being updated, most recently with Town Hall 18 in February 2026.

A small studio with a big rule

Supercell was founded in 2010 in Finland by Ilkka Paananen and a group of game industry veterans. Its first game, a browser and Facebook title called Gunshine, did not take off, so the team shifted to tablets and phones. In 2012 it released two games that changed everything: the farming game Hay Day and, a few months later, Clash of Clans.

The studio became famous for its structure: tiny independent teams, called cells, that decide for themselves which games to make and, crucially, which to cancel. Supercell openly celebrates the games it kills, reportedly with champagne, treating each failure as a lesson.

Build, raid, repeat

Clash of Clans mixes two simple pleasures. First, you build: a village of gold mines, elixir collectors, walls, cannons and archer towers, all organised around your Town Hall. Upgrades take real-world time, so the village grows a little every day. Then you raid: you train an army of barbarians, archers, giants and wizards, drop them around another player's village, and watch the chaos unfold.

The magic is that every village is designed by a real person, and every attack is a puzzle. Where do you place your giants? Which wall do your wall breakers target first? A good raid feels like a heist plan coming together.

Clans add the social layer. Players donate troops to each other and team up in Clan Wars, with Clan War Leagues added in October 2018. A second village, the Builder Base, arrived in May 2017.

The money machine

Clash of Clans became one of the most profitable apps ever made. In February 2014 it was making about $654,000 a day. By 2015 that had grown to about $1.5 million a day, making it the top-grossing app on both the App Store and Google Play. By 2018, it had earned more than $6.4 billion on the App Store alone, the most of any app on that store at the time.

That success paid for a famous marketing push. The Liam Neeson ad, aired during the Super Bowl in February 2015, became the most-viewed Super Bowl ad on YouTube that year.

Still growing after fourteen years

Most mobile games peak and fade. Clash of Clans keeps reinventing itself:

• July 2022: troop training became free.
• October 2023: a version for Windows PCs launched.
• December 2023: Hero Equipment gave the game's heroes new gear to collect.
• May 2024: a crossover with footballer Erling Haaland.
• March 2025: the Clash Anytime update removed training times and hero healing waits, so you can attack again straight away.
• May 2025: Netflix announced a CGI animated series made with Supercell.
• February 2026: Town Hall 18, a Dragon hero and a new pet.

Why it matters

Clash of Clans defined the "build and battle" genre on phones and showed how a free-to-play game could stay healthy for well over a decade with steady, generous updates. Its success also turned Supercell into one of the most valuable game companies in the world. In 2016, China's Tencent became its majority owner, buying out SoftBank's stake in a deal that valued the studio at about $10 billion.

And with Angry Birds and Snake before it, it helped confirm Finland as a mobile gaming superpower. Read the earlier chapters in our features on Snake and Angry Birds, and see how the Clash family's 3v3 cousin fits in our free games guide. Clash of Clans itself is free to play on iOS and Android, with optional purchases.