Super Evil Megacorp is back with new games and a UK office

18.08.2023 - 08:34 / venturebeat.com / New / New Games

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Super Evil Megacorp was a splashy game startup when it debut 11 years ago and then came out with its mobile esports title Vainglory. But that game petered out and Super Evil went through transitions. But now the company is back with a few successful games across multiple platforms, and it has more than 100 people.

And now it is opening a virtual office in the United Kingdom, and it has added Anna Sweet, CEO of Bad Robot Games, to its board of directors. The mission is still heavily focused on mobile, but now the company hopes to create triple-A cross-platform games, said Kristian Segerstrale, CEO, in an interview with GamesBeat.

As its name would suggest, Super Evil Megacorp was very ambitious. Segerstrale joined as its COO and started it on its mobile esports journey with Vainglory. He raised money and led it through its pioneering work as a shooter game on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. But by late 2019, the game had weakened and Super Evil Megacorp decided to hand it over to Rogue Games. By 2020, Rogue Games also gave up and then the remaining members of the community took it over.

After Vainglory, Segerstrale said, “For sure, we had a very painful adjustment. After that, we have had a great period of growth, like during the glorious early days. When Vainglory tapered off, we were forced to reset fairly aggressively around the time that I took on the CEO job. We ate a little bit of humble pie, and then we set out to create a company that’s resilient. We went back to the basics of building great games.”

Segerstrale, a former EA mobile executive who became CEO in 2017, began investing in other games. That involved taking advantage of the company’s EVIL game engine and crafting good economies for games with lots of collectibles and social play.

It made Catalyst Black, which won Samsung Galaxy’s Game of the Year in 2022. It also worked with Netflix Games to make its first licensed game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, which hit the top of the Apple Arcade charts.

“We try to connect with communities and build fandom as much as we can. And that has led us to a way of building the company where we haven’t relied on the breakout success of any specific title,” Segerstrale said. “We constantly become better at our craft and try to become better at what we do over time.”

The company has experimented with mobile free-to-play and subscription. These experiments were driven in part by changes, like Apple’s focus on privacy over user acquisition, which