From Brawl Stars to MISFITZ: Our Journey

People keep asking us: why would you leave Supercell and King? These are two of the most successful mobile game companies on the planet. The pay is great, the culture is great, and the games reach hundreds of millions of players. So why walk away?

The honest answer is simple. We got restless. After years of working on some of the biggest mobile games ever made, we started seeing the same patterns everywhere. The same monetization loops. The same core mechanics, reskinned. The same risk-averse thinking that comes naturally when your game already makes billions of dollars a year.

We wanted to build something that felt genuinely new. Something that would surprise players instead of just satisfying them. That feeling became Antihero Studios, and that surprise became MISFITZ.

Three People, Three Studios, One Frustration

Let me introduce the team. I'm Brice. I spent seven years at Supercell as the art director on Clash Royale. I shaped the visual identity of a game that reached 500 million downloads. It was the best job I'd ever had, and I loved it. But after seven years, I wanted to create something from zero again.

Frank Yan was a senior game designer on Brawl Stars. He understood what makes competitive mobile games tick better than almost anyone. The session design, the matchmaking, the character balance. He had shipped features to hundreds of millions of players. But he kept pitching ideas that didn't fit the Brawl Stars mold, and he wanted a place where those ideas could breathe.

Andre Parodi was the technical director at King, the studio behind Candy Crush. He'd built systems that scaled to billions of daily sessions. His engineering instincts were shaped by the demands of truly massive audiences. He also believed mobile gaming had stagnated technically, and that there was room to push further.

We all ended up in Helsinki at different points. The Finnish game industry is tight-knit. You bump into people at events, at dinners, in coffee shops. Over time, the three of us kept having the same conversation: mobile games were getting more formulaic. The biggest studios were optimizing existing formulas instead of inventing new ones. And there was a whole generation of players, Gen Z and younger, who wanted something different.

The Move to Barcelona

In 2024, we made it official. We left our respective companies, packed up, and moved to Barcelona to found Antihero Studios. Why Barcelona? Partly practical. It's a growing hub for game development with great talent from across Europe. The cost of living is lower than Helsinki or London. And the weather doesn't hurt.

But there was a symbolic reason too. We wanted a fresh start. Helsinki is Supercell's city. We needed a place where we could define our own identity, build our own culture, and stop thinking in terms of what we'd done before.

We set up in a small office and got to work. Our mission from day one was clear: build "games worth sharing." Not games that optimize for revenue per user. Not games that copy what's already working. Games that create moments so good, players can't help but tell their friends.

Finding the Extraction Genre

We prototyped several ideas in those first few months. Some were interesting. None felt right. Then we started playing extraction shooters together after work. Escape from Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, the early builds of ARC Raiders. The genre had something special. That tension of carrying valuable loot and knowing you could lose it all. The social dynamics of encountering another player and not knowing if they'd shoot or wave.

The extraction genre was exploding on PC. ARC Raiders was breaking records. Marathon from Bungie was in development. But nobody was doing it for mobile. Arena Breakout existed, but it was a Tarkov clone designed for hardcore players. Complex inventories, 20-minute raids, realistic ballistics. It worked for its audience, but that audience was niche.

We saw the gap immediately. Hundreds of millions of mobile gamers play competitive games like Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, and PUBG Mobile. None of them had a casual-friendly extraction experience. The genre's core loop, deploy, loot, survive, extract, was inherently compelling. It just needed to be adapted for mobile audiences: shorter sessions, simpler controls, more social mechanics.

Building the First Prototype

We had a playable prototype of MISFITZ within six months. That's fast, even by startup standards. The Supercell DNA helped here. At Supercell, you learn to prototype quickly and kill ideas that don't work. We applied the same discipline.

The prototype had the basics: a top-down map, loot to collect, an extraction point, and other players trying to do the same thing. But the feature that changed everything was one Frank insisted on from the beginning. Temporary alliances. You could team up with any player you encountered. Share loot. Cover each other. And then, at any moment, betray them and take everything.

The first time we watched playtesters use that system, we knew we had something. Two strangers would team up to fight a tough enemy. They'd celebrate together. Then, as the extraction point appeared, you could see the tension build. Would they stick together? Would one of them turn? The moments this created were the kind of stories players tell. That's what "games worth sharing" means.

From Prototype to 70,000 Players

We raised a $4.5M seed round led by a16z Speedrun and Laton Ventures. The funding let us expand the team and push toward a real pre-alpha test. When we opened signups, we expected maybe ten thousand players. We got 70,000. The data confirmed what we felt in the prototype: average daily playtime of 50 minutes across three sessions, an 80.5% death-retry rate that proved the "one more run" loop worked, and players literally protesting when we shut down the servers.

You can read more about what we learned from those 70,000 players in our alpha test results post.

What Comes Next

We're now deep in development, working toward beta in Q2 2026 and a global launch in H2 2026. The team has grown, but the mission hasn't changed. We're building games worth sharing. MISFITZ is the first one.

If you want to see how MISFITZ compares to other extraction shooters on the market, check out our comparison page. And if you want to jump in and try it yourself, join the playtest. We're adding new players every week.

Building a studio from scratch is hard. Building a new genre for mobile is harder. But when you're working with people you trust, on a game you genuinely love playing, the hard parts don't feel like obstacles. They feel like the work.

Last updated: April 1, 2026