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Headline lessons
Small Giant started with a very sober view of the category they were entering. According to Timo the games industry is one of the most competitive markets in the world, where you are not only fighting other studios but competing for attention against everything else people can do on their phones. That mattered for Small Giant Games, because it set the tone early. They approached it as a competitive business from day one, not as a craft project that would āsell itselfā.
The founding team also had real continuity. Timo, Otto and Markus had worked together for years, and they did not have to invent trust from scratch. Their roles were naturally complementary. Timo was oriented toward the commercial side and partnerships, Otto toward building and leading the game, and Markus brought a systems mindset that became a core part of how the company operated. Two other co-founders, Tommi and Ilkka were world-class artists who created the core visuals for the games.
That systems thinking was not a later scaling optimisation as it soon became part of the foundation. Markus would look for repeatable processes to reduce manual work wherever possible. From the beginning, they wanted to build a company that could do a lot with a small team, rather than defaulting to headcount as the solution. This came as a result from their Habbo era, with the company growing into a large organisation and making ācorporation-likeā mistakes. They explicitly did not want to repeat the corporate mistakes from the Habbo era, and built around ultra-efficiency and a lean team.
After the first two games failed, Small Giant stopped treating genre choice as a matter of taste. Their first game Oddwings Escape was seen as a ābeautifulā game that even Disney liked, but there was a clear reason it didnāt performed as expected. They had not designed the monetisation and revenue cycle mathematically, so the game could not fund a company no matter how good it looked. That forced them to rethink what kind of game could ever produce a centaur-scale outcome.
The key constraint became depth and monetisation capability. They were not looking to build a small ad-driven casual title. They wanted a game where players could invest for years, and where the economy could support meaningful spending. That pushed them toward āmidcoreā and toward genres where the business model is structurally capable of funding a large company.
They approached this as a market selection problem. The team used public lists and tools to map where the money is in games and which categories reliably produce top-grossing outcomes. In that research, midcore stood out as a clear āfunderā category. But they were not only picking a table that already existed. They were also asking whether there was an empty space between categories where they could build something new.
That is where their core positioning formed. They built a bridge between the accessibility of a casual match-3 and the depth of an RPG collection game. This was Small Giantās strategy for managing risk. Pure originality is a high-failure path, so instead they recombined proven mechanics into a new āsoupā that felt familiar and fresh at the same time. The concept also became legible as an investment story, because it matched a clear market trend and a clear monetisation structure.
Audience fit was part of the arena as well, not something they postponed until later. As they tested and began marketing, they saw that the game appealed strongly to women, and that was unusual for the category. To reflect this, they balanced the gameās character and art world choices, and later through creatives that matched what the audience responded to.
After the first two games failed to gain the traction they were hoping for, they wrote a new playbook so they would not repeat the same mistakes, especially the mistake of building something ābeautifulā without a working revenue engine underneath. A big part of that reset was deciding to validate like a business, with clearer measurement and stronger analytical thinking.
Their search process had multiple legs. They did rapid prototyping to explore new directions, while designers also studied successful mechanics and genres to understand what actually works. Alongside that, they used data-driven market research through public lists and tools to map where the money is and which categories have real monetisation depth.
They also structured the company to keep learning without becoming a one-shot studio. One team built a smaller game with a goal of being market-ready in roughly 2ā3 months, while another group focused on finding the ābig thingā that could reach Supercell-scale outcomes. That setup mattered because the team was not large enough to do everything at once, so they needed a structure that let them ship something while still hunting for the breakout.
On execution, they avoided the trap of trying to be radically original everywhere. The team saw that pure novelty was a high-failure path, so they protected the core strategic bet but copied best practices at the execution level to move faster and reduce avoidable risk. That same logic showed up in their kill decisions. When something was not turning into a breakout, they were willing to shut it down quickly and move on, even when that scared investors, because supporting āalmost goodā projects would have drained the companyās limited resources.