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Headline lessons
Seriously’s starting advantage was founder readiness. Petri had spent years leading large creative projects at Remedy (a Finnish game studio behind titles like Max Payne and Alan Wake), then joined Rovio early enough to see what it looks like when a mobile games company scales fast up close.
The entire Seriously team in LA, 2018
The founding team also had a shared history. Petri and Andrew had worked together “in the trenches” at Rovio for years, so trust was already there when they decided to do it together. Petri described meeting Andrew in London and deciding to start Seriously in basically “five minutes,” which tells you how much prior trust removes hesitation at the starting line.
From the beginning, they split responsibilities across two hubs. Petri built and ran the studio, product, and creative work in Helsinki, while Andrew ran finance, management, board work, and entertainment-adjacent areas like media and animation from Los Angeles. Underneath that structure was a simple founding approach: start with experienced people who can operate independently and move fast without heavy process, then build from that veteran core.
Their arena choice was anchored in a timing view. Petri saw the games industry in 2013 to be an “incredible market,” and attributes fast-growing markets as a real tailwind. In general, Petri sees that when a market is growing fast, even mediocre execution can look good because the category is pulling everyone forward. Once a category matures, it becomes meaningfully harder, and each new cohort feels like it’s entering a more saturated version of the same game.
On top of timing, they held a clear strategic thesis. They believed mobile was where the next big entertainment IP (Intellectual Property) could be built, and the goal was not just to ship a game but to create a property that could extend into broader media over time. Best Fiends was planned from day one to be IP-first, and Petri ties this directly to defensibility. In a saturated entertainment market, brand is what cuts through, and the more crowded things get, the stronger and more deliberate the brand has to be.
In the early build phase, the dominant constraint was speed under pressure. Best Fiends was seen as the fastest and most efficient creative process Petri ever led, partly because they felt strong pressure to come up with something fast. They started from a wide-open blank slate, then narrowed aggressively as the game itself revealed what was worth keeping.
Their validation style was not “design by spreadsheet.” They relied on experienced creators building the game, and they did very little, if any, traditional focus testing. Instead, they leaned on extensive playtesting by watching people play, and they adjusted based on what the experience was telling them.
A key internal loop was what Petri calls “listening to the game.” When mechanics didn’t fit, they dropped them and changed direction rather than forcing the original plan to work. The goal was to keep moving, learn from players, and build toward what actually worked for them.
They also validated how they worked as a team. Petri makes a clear point that you cannot copy another company’s operating DNA, even if you admire it. What works at Supercell will not automatically work for you. Their approach was to build the way of working that matched their people and their stage, and to accept that process should evolve as the company grows.
Seriously moved extremely fast from team formation to launch. February 2014 was the first time the team was in the same room, and they launched in August. What they shipped was clearly minimum viable, but they pushed to make it as polished as they could even at MVP stage.
They also executed the IP-first thesis in parallel with product development. While the game was being built, they worked on IP outlines and brand books, with the intention that Best Fiends could eventually extend beyond the game into broader media. They pulled in high-end partners early to hit an entertainment-quality bar, including Pilot, which Petri points to as having worked on major brand guides (including Star Wars), and the composer Heitor Pereira. The combination is the point: they moved fast on the core product, but they still invested early in premium creative and brand work so the property would feel top notch from the start, not like something they would “upgrade later.”