Hyper Success with Game District Publishing - Igor Bazhanov, Game District.

so now we've got hyper success with game District publishing so Igor I've got you up coming up next here you go is going to come and talk to us about hyper success with game District thank you much do it yeah proper start of a speech so yeah we will continue the uh publishing topic so today I will talk uh on behalf of game District um this is my first speech on such a huge conference as a poker gamer so please excuse me I'm a bit nervous and please help me so let's let's go a couple of words about myself so I'm Igor bajano I'm a head of growth and Publishing at

game District I have many other companies in my background so among the big ones uh zepta lab legendary G5 right now I'm at legendary and I'm very happy about it so all the previous companies are like European and the game district is a big Mina company this is great great region great company and I'm happy to present it yeah a couple of world's Awards about game District uh uh itself who knows game District Company please raise your hand ah so you you know thank you then you know you know it we can skip the slide uh but just as a reminder it's a pretty big company so more than 500 team members and many internal teams so about 20 internal uh very independent uh sustainable and most of them are

profitable teams and uh just a big number to show more than one billion total downloads across the whole portfolio of all games so obviously if you go to Google Play and try to search game District account you will not find it instead you can find many other teams like games Fried Chicken games play spare and many many others and they have lots of lots of good games and this structure is very efficient as it appeared to be we'll talk about it later so more numbers about game District uh game distant grows so we have here numbers for uh 2022 and first quarter of uh 20 23rd years again total downloads per whole portfolio so uh what's what's interesting about these numbers not only that we measure our downloads in

hundreds of millions but the most importantly uh it grows the number grows and uh as you may know the previous uh year 2022 was very disappointing to the developers and in terms of the market performance and we will we will see it right now so just just a couple of numbers to illustrate the idea so if we look into hyper casual hybrid casual casual games so uh disclaimer from now on when I say games I mean these three uh genres because these genres they have the most audience dividers audience and this is the generous that uh game District work with so if we check the downloads for the first quarter of 2023 uh it dropped 11

and if we go back to the first quarter of 2022 was worse than first quarter of 2021 so this is a long tendency CPI grows because of the changes adfa and others and just as an indicator of the overall state of the market we have hear the number about global VC funding which is dropped 50 as well so less money less money for new Studios which is not cool so basically main idea while market stagnating and Falls game District grows so how how do we manage to do it so we will talk about it uh yeah game district is growing against the trend and actually game District it's a quite unusual company uh first of

all this is 100 bootstrap company never took investment so this is a real success story of two young guys who had a dream so about making games Assad and Ahmed and they actually did it build from scratched to one 500 people and billions of downloads this company yeah Applause we have him here and and he did fireside chat uh we have everything under the roof so full cycle development all app store optimization all user acquisition so everything so never worked with external Publishers so all the success all the numbers uh attributed absolutely to the team itself and very important distinguish is that the company is focused on developing cash cow games I

will explain a bit later what what this means actually it's pretty obvious but if you um uh like read about the industry if you talk about the industry usually people say that uh game death is heat driven industry so everyone is trying to build a moonshot game everyone is trying to do a trend citing game hit game big game so you have low success rate high Roi on the successful game and so on and so on and so forth yes uh it is it was the case and I will explain the situation the change into the market a bit later and game District never had such big Trend setting games so none of game District game has 100 million downloads

although several games plenty of games have about 10 million downloads so we consider it also to be a success oh well yeah so uh basically the main goal the main purpose of this presentation is to do this announcement which is game District launchers it's a publishing initiative why do we think it's reasonable to do right now uh because first of all as we see on the previous slides the business model of game district is uh reasonable and profitable and the most importantly sustainable so while a market is being storming game District grows and we think that in this changed market conditions this sustainable predictable

and profitable business model will be very interesting for the huge amount of developers especially from Mina region so for us it will be also reasonable to scale our resources our expertise for the third-party developers and it will be pretty smooth transition because as I said the inner structure of game district is quite unusual it's more similar to like uh startup accelerator so we have pretty independent team and we help them to grow we focus on the team on the process on the tools on the analytic knowledge sharing and stuff and we know how to grow such teams how to help them to succeed and basically we will just apply the same internal process to the

external teams and we have like high chances that it will work so I already started this topic uh about the previous Market model we call it Winner Takes all so basically Publishers and teams they all focus on the huge big game that would earn millions and millions and will cover all the cost and will make the publisher uh very profitable and happy and developer as well uh the problem with this model is that it has very low success rate that means out of a thousand prototypes thousands of developers and thousands and thousands of prototypes maybe one will be successful all others will be unhappy as you see these blue faces those are not happy developers and only one is smiling

it used to work previously when when we had lots of investment money on the market so a lot of people can bake companies for a long period of time waiting until the companies can create actually heat and make a lot of money but right now the Venture funding and investment they go down and this model it results is very unpredictable and risky cash flow so basically when you have these low success rate you cannot expect to be profitable like soon you cannot make any prediction and uh the next problem is that because of the changed market conditions such huge hits uh appear to be not that huge so you cannot scale them as big as you uh could previously so because of the increased DPI uh decreased ltvs so these games appear to be not

that big obviously Market is reacting so we as a developer we are trying to find new sub-genres like hybrid casual we're trying to make games with uh hyper casual CPI and casual or mid queries LTV obviously we are doing something but the reality is that it's increasingly more difficult to make such huge hit games so we consider that this Winner Takes all model is in crisis and markets want us to change and we must do it so basically what uh what we offer uh we call it win-win business model so instead of uh trying to hit this uh huge huge hit games that might be not very possible already we are focusing on uh Cash Cow driven model so we want

profitable games this model gives us much higher success rate so internally we have something around 30 percent success rate obviously uh how to create such high success rate you need to redefine success for for us successful considered to be any game that is profitable so uh any game that has LTV higher than uh CPI already a success and it appears that if you as a company owner as a studio CEO if you focus consistently on making such games successful where unique economy works it appears that very very soon like in a half a year you find yourself in a position where you have a portfolio of working games and your studio becomes uh

profitable and very very reasonable and you might not have a huge hit to boast on the conferences but you have enough money to sustain your company and to develop new products hire new people and to grow and in current situation it becomes very very reasonable so yeah it gives us much more predictable and sustainable business model for developers and Studios they appreciate this sustainability and margin margin stays again reasonable for a publisher and for Studios we all love profits advantages yeah uh so on top of this uh business approach that is reasonable and that works uh we um offer

additional like benefits uh which are the following so you as a studio if you come to us and partner with us you will be working directly with the developers rather than managers so in most Publishers you will work with managers and they don't quite don't understand that deeply your problems and your situation so uh we we're doing this developer to developer process and this way we can provide a real expertise in building games and developing the company so this expertise will be not about not only about the products and marketing but also about people and processes obviously internal analytics tools help with the action request for pitch and actual meaningful feedback in terms of

how to make the game work so even if your game doesn't pass like initial test that doesn't mean that we will not talk with you further it means that we will try to help as as much as we can disadvantages obviously so due to our deep involvement and limited resources we cannot like partner with everyone who who want to do so uh and the good news is that right now we can so since we only uh we only now launched this initiative so we still have capacity please if if you want to talk with us if you want to present us your product or your prototype please please do so we are open so basically who we are looking for this

would be small teams because small teams is much more uh is much easier to make profitable and even if you have big team it's usually very reasonable idea to split it into small independent agile fast teams obviously if you focus on this uh low CPI genres generous as I said this is our expertise Zone hyper casual hybrid casual casual games this is where we can be uh the most helpful and obviously you need to have something more than just a cool idea uh already published the game in stores or you have nice prototypes with monetization so don't be afraid to plug in some uh ad placements right from the beginning and get get the data and see how your users actually behave in your game with monetization so basically we're looking for the teams

that are serious about making games so yeah as I said our focus is not like a specific product but rather a team of people who are dedicated you know right now the market is tough a lot of companies close loads of Chief teams they go to work for hire or just quit Game Dev and stuff so we're looking for people who love games who want to keep making games who know how to do it and since we are going to invest not only our money our expertise but also the most valuable resources our time in such people we want to be sure that this these people are here to stay so if you are such a team please please talk to us and let's let's see how we can be helpful to each other yes our contact publishing at

gamedistrict.com or talk to me or talk to sat or whoever with such a t-shirt you can find just just grab them and say I have a great game let's let's talk guys we will talk that's it it was very fast thank you very much thank you it's all week always goes very fast this one is uh they don't have a question they want to ask while we're here I mean for me I'm going to Chuck one at you in case anyone's warming up I mean the team thing I think is really important isn't it and it's not just as a publisher who wants that any investor wants to see that and so on and so forth but in terms of the if you had to say one thing that was the the most important factor of what you're looking for when you see a group of people where you go yeah I know they're the right ones because what's the factor that makes A Team stand out to you uh yeah the question so uh what what is

the one the most important factor about the team that we're looking for yeah as I said we're looking for a team with dedication uh with with the games in their hearts uh you know the people uh who would not quit fighting who would not quit doing games even when the things are not going smooth because uh Game Dev is uh very uh risky with low success industry uh and it takes huge dedications and Power of Will to keep moving even when you uh do not have instant success and most probably you will not have instant success yeah I totally get that and for me there's a there's this boundary line between passion and grit and finding that kind of where you are on that spectrum is really about but I think it's another line that we try to use which is opinions firmly felt but loosely held because if you have passion

and you you can hold your you know your case and you argue something that's great but if you can't change it when data tells you you're wrong you're not going to function well as the team either thank you very much