Clash of Clans studio published new game under a fake name

In the wake of some media products’ overwhelming success, the creators behind the art sometimes turn to pseudonyms when releasing their next project in order to test whether it can succeed in its own right. Such was the case with Clash of Clans developers Supercell, who released their most recent game under a completely fake name and developer.

As reported by Kotaku, Supercell, the developer known best for Clash of Clans and Clash Royale (the two of which have a combined player base of almost 1 billion downloads), released a game last Autumn titled ‘Valleys & Villages’ under the developer name ‘Osmium Interactive.’

When asked why they chose to soft launch the game (which is now officially called Everdale), the game’s project lead Lasse Seppänen explained that “Early on, we realized that we needed the experience of many real players to truly understand how team play really works at a deep level.”

They continued, saying “At the same time, the launch of any new game from Supercell is going to be met by a lot of attention and scrutiny – which ordinarily would be a great thing. But we felt that this game in its early state wasn’t yet meeting the high-quality bar that we set for all Supercell games.”

Explaining the benefits to going down this path, Seppänen said “For us, the importance of the player feedback was the biggest reason to try this new way of collecting it, and by player feedback we mean both the qualitative comments (from reviews, social media comments, etc) and the data we track as players progress through the game (retention, action completion rates, usage of features, do players get stuck, etc).”

This isn’t the first time that a game developer has released a game under a fake name. Hideo Kojima has famously done this many times – and despite the denials – the upcoming game ‘Abandoned’ by Blue Box Studios is speculated to also be a Kojima project – though we will have to wait and see for that one.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of Supercell’s decision? Is it smart, or deceitful? Will you give Everdale a try? Let us know down below.

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