Lessons of Growing into a Large Studio - Three Ways Belka Crushed it to Grow from 30 to 300

growing into a large studio and three ways that uh and i'm quoting here three ways that belka crushed it to grow from thirty to three hundred uh yuri how are you doing hi oscar i'm fine saying good stuff great so i'm gonna hand over to you uh and obviously uh i'll be around so if you have any questions i'll i can help out so uh yuri over to you cool hi all i will share my screen and we will start in a few seconds let's start hi all again my name is eureka rasinikov and i had a business development and belka games

because that miracle worker isn't an official job title as vice president i am involved in many aspects of the internal and external parts of the studio business including giving talks and presentations like my today's session here thanks for inviting and i'm extremely hungry to do this by the way i also strategically maintain existing partnership and discover new ways to reach business goals including publishing and merging acquisitions okay let's go further and we'll know story of bilcas it's very interesting trust people often ask me what bialka means it means squirrel squirrels is cute move fast and i extremely silent so you will find a lot of squirrels in my presentation so can't squirrels during my talk after the speech we will connect with the winner and the price will be is one ticket for next

pocket gamer conference so my assistant will help you to provide the right answer okay i like to think that qualities about belkas which i mean above translate to our brand and culture at belka games our studio was started a decade ago by two friends dmitry hosseinov and hiri mazzanik since then the company has grown from 30 to 300 employees and to thrift in fun fast-paced work culture for sure we have some important milestones for us like first release of our hit clockmaker on social platforms after on mobile and great mobile release of funky bay our farming game and it had 2 million installs in a few days after release and especially i wanna highlight our strategic partnership with uploading in 2019 and as i and as our co-founder says

we are pleased to partner with employment which brings to the table and unparalleled knowledge of the global mobile gaming market and expertise in driving visibility and growth let's see what we can find after a year after this awards we can see that we had growth in team in revenue and even in new business in asia so right now we have more than 300 professionals on the board rnd department with a new game which will be released global soon and new publishing and m a opportunities for third-party developers so pink me if you wanted to discuss it okay i will have some words about our title so clockmaker it's it's not another martial games with deep dark styled meta gameplay so check it our second game funky bay uh it's a

farming game with exploration mechanics uh in this high quality art style in carton style and celitar cruise you will find it in stores in early of october it's our new global launch we are ready for it so it's a new genre for belka but we believe that it will be our third hit okay let's check how i good in math in three years we grown from 30 to 300 employees and didn't lose our culture where one belka is no milk so 300 to play employees it's great right 10 times gross but the game development it's always business yeah we deliver fun for millions and million players around the world but you could ask me yuri show us your revenue okay audience

let's see six times gross not from the zero level six times and someone could imagine that we spent all of our revenue on marketing or got a lot of features from platforms and you know uh if you thinking so uh you are you are close to the right answer we have our own strong marketing team and strategic partnership is applauding for market ingredients you should remember it from the previous slides we have cool games so our releases and updates are honored by platforms but generally the answer is no instead we do and defined changes and prepared a plan you will see on next slides

that uh our plan is to change something but in very aspect of daily work let's see so three ways new growth strategy for the company product and operational improvements and new marketing and business development strategy so the whole new strategy of growth for our company include orientation for long-term results it's mean that we were ready to invest to the team to opportunities to develop new products and improve quality of existing games our ceo alex bagdanov developed a new company culture based on the foundation of old one but it's un important to understand that when you expect growth of the team you should think about the team all the time and have some pillars to keep consistent so our pillars are individual approach it doesn't mean your company of

30 or of 300 employees team leads should help to achieve our first goal goal and able to take care about projects and for sure open communications it means that doesn't mean are you junior quality assistance engineer or your top level uh marketing lead you can ping co or founders in slack you can ask any questions and be sure you will get answer from them so our goal is keep two lines of communications opened without a lot of bureaucracy okay i will back to several slides and say that we have seen potential our games and this potential required new team members to keep growing permanently so we started our changes first

for sure operational improvements when you are growing daily weekly monthly you should be sure that you know what you will deliver your players at least three or five months ahead we have half year roadmaps and correct them if we need but generally we know what to do ahead from this slide i will highlight our data-driven approach with you which you will meet in every single decision product marketing business development it doesn't mean we should know how we will measure the result so we know what to do ahead and we know how to measure it another reason why our team is growing for sure our games are like games as a service so at this service should be excellent in every aspect

we need high quality graphs we need technical stability for sure and we need to be sure that our audience will get a new update in time our audience are waiting for it and we know it because we have straight dialogue through our customer support department i will trout try to show you improvements of our games and quality right now you see old characters three of even four years ago in clock maker right now we see high polished very detailed characters you know clock maker has celebrated eight years anniversary few days ago and it's amazing it's really amazing eight years this game is living in stores this game eight has three eight years history and continue growing

i will show you a short video about clockmaker it's a short inter movie i believe it's very interesting if you are bored with my speech you will enjoy this video uh and it is the level which meet our players from the start and we try to keep such kind of graphics levels and such kind of digitalization inside the game let's see [Music]

[Music] [Applause] great right and several years ago if you will say that such kind of quality will be used for mastery games no one will believe you and other slides will show you how we try to keep such kind of quality for every aspect of the game on this screen you can see the weekly events inside clockmaker and you can see how it is detailed how it's polished how we can try to pay attention for details and for sure to keep such kind of quality we should have a lot of professionals on

the board so when your game is growing try to support you're growing to hire new professionals into your team because it's like a new press for your game funky bay you can see the new type of event inside funky bay and if you will download it right now from the store you will not find it inside the game so it's next week update i i said before that we know what we will have three or five friends ago of ahead uh so it's like uh very uh very polished uh carton style event inside funky bay and again a lot of attention to details even in daily events you should deliver

deliver to your players a lot of content a lot of polished content because we should try to keep our players how long how as we can and several words about marketing and business development strategy uh because you know uh when uh your games is growing when your team is growing it's very important to support not only from a product side also from a marketing site in nowadays uh i i think that it's a very few chances to be noticed in stores without marketing so uh as i said high quality in every aspect even in marketing creatives

we have a very strong marketing not only just user acquisition managers for sure but also creators team who create marketing creatives from game assets that's it we have from 20 to 30 tests weekly and some of them becomes like we say best and we use it for promotion diversification of ua channels means that you should try uh to acquire users in all ways uh which you can and uh every channel uh we think uh should have a dedicated manager uh to be more effective and uh for sure marketing is the pioneer for using uh data driven technology approach uh when you know uh what is your ally for your campaigns for half year or

even a year ahead uh and for sure marketing analysis uh we have uh dedicated teams for product analytics and for sure for marketing analytics and uh these uh teams work like uh uh in uh communications which is each other but it's dedicated analytics team for products and for marketing and several words about business development strategy you know i often meet developers who wanted to get featuring from a platform and that's it it will not work trust me uh when you get featuring from platform when a platform honored you by the featuring twins promen stores try to be proactive and provide after featuring review uh which countries were

accepted your game in which country countries you had success uh what uh changed after featuring and trust me when you try uh to establish win-win collaboration with platforms with your marketing partners with uh i don't know with outsourcing who who will prepare um graphic assets for you uh you will uh have ability to grow your team to grow content inside a game because sometimes you need to prepare more content so you need additional and other partners or you should uh get more content from your partners when you establish win-win collaboration between communications not only to one side for for us for example

it's more easy to scale and yeah uh for sure a data driven approach even in business development uh because uh you should choose what kind of octa of activities you will do and what kind of of activities unfortunately you should skip because uh it's impossible to keep all of activities in effective way and you should choose which will uh close your or will will close you to your goals your goals determinate inside your company and try to exploring new markets and opportunities daily because we see a lot of potential in emerging markets and you shouldn't forget about it when you try to deliver uh your game

only to high prior users short summary and the main point that there is not a silver bullet at all because maybe our way is will be wrong way for you uh or we missed something which you uh highlight in your culture but uh the main aspects uh which i want to highlight in i believe in every successful game development companies that a strong team are led by experience led and every one every single team member should play and love your own games we have a team of 30 who loves our games and with a team of 300 people who continue loves our own games because without it you will not be able to scale your games you will

not be able to be sure that you don't lose quality of your games which for sure your players are deserve it and high quality content it's like let's say that high quality content could be a silver bullet for your studio when you uh when you are highlighted from stores when it's it it's more easy to have sales point for users why your game should be installed why you should games stay on users phones for years okay thank you very much for your attention uh i believe that i even in time uh you can find my contacts on

these slides and don't hesitate to ping me uh if you are looking for any kind of uh partnership or you want to be published by velvet games and for sure if you wanted to join belka team please ping me i will we are always looking for experience leads okay let's go to questions great thank you yuri that was great stuff and uh you know i think what for me i think i'm left with is just the how important the connection between the quality of the game the quality of the marketing strategy and also the way the team works is to your strategy i think that's something we don't often hear people saying enough about i mean is it is it a purely synergistic thing or is there a kind of consequence so for example do you have to be thinking of all of those three elements or is it that you have to have success uh in terms of acquisition first or

success in game design first or is it about having the right team first uh do you have a particular view on it is it something you have to do in order or is it something you have to have together i generally it should be all together but i believe that uh first for sure is team because right team and right people could make a great game from uh i don't know uh if if if you have an i uh an idea a great and right people could uh make from this idea ahead and wrong people uh could fail any idea uh which you have and after this you uh join uh marketing you uh join other fix to production you know uh uh for sure uh marketing guys and marketing team is

glad to work with high quality of product you know they can use just uh screen life from your games screenshots in their marketing uh assets and be successful and have ability to for user acquisitions they needn't to i don't know to make fake screenshots or something like this i mean i'm old enough to remember you know kind of the traditional uh role between the development team and marketing where basically marketing team were hated by everybody because the development team chucked the game over and left it to marketing to sell it and of course that was a true yeah now we work together in a synonym it's great um i have a bunch of questions for you um so as a cis game studio um uh there's a question about working with that blobbing do you have any kind of views on working with that plumbing yeah um i can share our res our results use

so that we has uh had growing in in this year and uh from uh uh from say a studio point of view we can say that right now we can uh get international expertise from appliance partners studios and we have access to game designer expertise from partnership studio and uh it's always great when you have uh direct communications with hit makers you know when you have uh one game for example several talented game designers on board who has ability to talk with colleagues from different uh country from different cultures with but who had uh who has

also hit games it it leads to make new ideas make new hits and we believe that it's a great collaboration between employment and us like say a studio makes sense yeah um oh just a quick note for other people uh apparently if we if you've managed to count the number of squirrels in yuri's talk they're going to basically give you a chance to win a pocket a ticket for pocket game we'll see if that how that works out anyway um i i think there's a few people in for at loving in the session as well trying to sort of uh you know obviously ask a few questions here um one thing interesting here was um do you have any suggestions for uh other studios who want to create the kind of relationship you've had with that learning uh to get that mutual leverage uh any sort of recommendations for other studios

uh i believe that um first of all you should have an idea of what you wanted to bring on the market uh from a product site it's all it's always should be your own idea and a game which you wanted to deliver to your players and uh you uh for for sure you should share uh cultural aspects uh for example uh priority of quality of your product uh understanding what you will do with uh your product and understanding who will do this product uh co-founders a small team for example and combine it's together you can for example send me a short pitch about your team

about your product and it's it's easy to establish uh such kind of partnership uh when you have an idea what to do and have visionaries of your game for example uh we will help to hire right people uh for your team but uh generally we believe that you should be uh like visioner of your own idea and wanted to make a great game yeah it makes sense makes sense um i've got another question here from giovanni uh piton um basically one that's very close to my heart how many people in your team are allocated to live ops uh and also in particular what do you you know when not just in live but um uh you know the sort of role on the way up to soft launch as well do you have you have you managed that process uh okay uh we have uh right we have

dedicated team for live ops operations and it's so for clock clockmaker it's around 30 people who create content we have dedicated for example narrative designers and game designers who know about the whole story of games but make like branch for characters uh new uh interesting uh stories uh yeah and for funky baits around sort of from 30 to 40 people because funky bay it's more content we should provide more content in funky bay in exploration mechanic makes sense makes sense cool um and how do you give feedback uh so a question here from eugene umkin um basically when you get featured by a platform but they did so without contacting you can you give them feedback how does that work do you have any views on that yeah it's very good questions thank you

you know when you've featured automatically you sh you uh by the way you should try to measure how it was uh effective and it's a great point to start direct communication with uh a platform manager uh in your region uh it's also a great point when you come to a manager and say uh okay please provide us with the featuring and in other way you came and say okay we were automatically featured and we got such kind of metrics we uh have a very high mark in the store for example in these countries in these countries uh we prepared a new update and maybe uh we will start direct dialogue with you to make sure that uh from

developer site uh all affects is ready to be featured by platforms with uh i don't know with game of the day like for clockmaker or for funky based that makes sense makes sense cool i mean like i say thank you very much for that i think it's great to hear kind of how successful you guys have been that growth and not just growth in terms of like um the scale of your audience but also growth in terms of the team i think that's a great lesson for everybody to take away from them so thank you very much for that thank you everybody for attending this session thank you for questions and thank you oscar for moderating always a pleasure always pleasure