My.Games' $50m a year benchmark for new forever franchises

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Hello, welcome to the Pocket Gamer.biz podcast video interviews where we speak to key figures in the mobile games industry about what they're up to, the big news, and the top trends. Today, we've got a great guest. We've got the My Games CEO, Elena Grigorian, to discuss how the company operates live games and the challenges of launching new titles in the mobile market. Elena has been with the company since 2015, becoming the CEO in 2023. Prior to that, she's worked at firms like the Walt Disney Company. At My Games, she oversees a publisher that has a number of studios and IPs, which we'll we'll we'll we'll get into all of these. Uh the company operates across mobile, PC, and console with more than 40 live titles, including War Robots, Rush Royale, Tactical, and Hustle Castle. Meanwhile, My Games has also expanded its publishing ecosystem through Knights Peak and MGVC publishing. And it also owns marketing platform Asodesk. So,

there's plenty of there's plenty to chew on there. So, welcome to the show, Elena. Thank you for being on here. How you doing? And if you want to give yourself a brief intro as well.
Yeah, hello everyone. Thank you very much for for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here with you and to talk about the mobile gaming. This is This is great. Uh about me, yeah, I am a part of the gaming industry for more than 25 years already. And for all these years, I have been a part of the different competences, and I leaded the different teams from localization to marketing, from live ops to business development, and strategic investment even. And over the last 10 years, almost, I am a part of the My Games family, and I started as a chief marketing officer in My Games, growing investment into marketing for all these years, 10 times or even more, helping company to grow business significantly. And nowadays, as a CEO, my focus is on building a company that can stay resilient through constant market changes while continuing to

create great games and grow the long-term value. In terms of my games, you're absolutely right that we are game developer and publisher with a huge experience with more than 40 titles in our active catalog at the moment. We known as the developer of the the War Robots, Rush Royale, Hustle Castle and you indicated our key products already like Left to Survive, for example. And I could say that nowadays we are in the interesting stage of the company development alongside with supporting of our evergreen live operation portfolio, we investing a lot into the new develop- new development products, new releases and I'm sure that we will talk about that a lot during our talk.
Yeah, that's I'd like to say there's plenty to to get into. So, we'll get right into it. So, firstly, we'll talk a bit about the live games sort of thing. So, Rush Royale, which I played I think when it came out, it's really interesting, great title. Merge mechanics I think mixed with tower defense. And so, that's recently passed

500 million dollars in lifetime revenue while War Robots has surpassed 1 billion dollars and 325 million players in 12 years. I remember that when it was first out, I think it was called Walking War Robots at first as well before it changed its name. I guess the big question that I wanted to ask is kind of how do you build forever franchises like this? And then how do you keep them going for the long term? So, how do you keep War Robots, for example, going for 12 years?
Yeah. You know, I don't think that there is any shortcuts how to build the long-lasting game. Our success stories like War Robots and Rush Royale definitely are the result of the years of hard work and constant less iterations and a lot of mistakes. But at the same time, the incredible talented team. People usually look at these success titles and think that they are overnight successes. But there are a lot of a lot of many years of work, understanding player behavior, testing ideas, learning from failures, and

knowing how to scale the things that truly resonate with the audience. And while the games uh prove the potential, the work actually starts in this moment. So, we have to keep the listening our community, improve the experience constantly, invest into live ops, and never assume that uh yesterday's our success guarantees tomorrow. So, that's how to build the franchise that players want to come back to year from year. It's so important to think about the community, to think about players, and to work constantly to improve your game. And we succeeded to do that with War Robots as a good example of that approach, and War Robots Royale, and many others of our products.
So, how do you share lessons internally across your teams? You know, and and do they share like resources? Or do the teams keep quite siloed? Kind of how do you bring it all together for for the live games so?
Yeah. You know, frankly speaking, uh knowledge sharing is actually big part of our of our culture at My Games. Yes,

we have studios inside which working, I could say, independently in terms of the development of their products. And I would say that the main part of them are concentrated on the different genres, but at the same time, we as a company don't want for them to overcome the same differences this is in difficult for this for independently. So, we are trying to to keep them moving forward, sharing the experience between all of them. So, through the year, we organize about 40 internal meetups at different different categories, like engineers, like marketers, game designers, art, and many many other discipline. And taking into account the huge size of our team, I would say that our internal meetups are so close to the international, you know, industrial meetings because in reality we have rather big team. It means that as soon as we decided to gather together all of our game designers to talk about details of our games, it's rather, you know, big event

to share. But what I would like the most important for us is that we united tracking system for all of our games. It means that this united tracking system creates the transparent knowledge system for all of us. It's open for everyone. It means that as soon as we decided to talk with other game designer with different team, they can discuss openly everything connected with numbers. It means that our internal events, it's events without any secrets. We can share all the data, all the numbers, and that is a significant difference compared with the industrial events. Because industrial events, which is much more important how to say something without saying some sensitive topics. But for us it's not the case. So internally we can share all the data. We can open the dashboard system and to show what exactly we are talking about, [clears throat] what is the reason behind this or that number. You can ask the question to everyone. So it's more about community

that can share all the details without any secrets. Every know-how is well spreaded between the whole structure, the whole system. And that is really, really important. And yes, sometimes we have or a kind of working group. For example, in case there is some difficult topic in one game, one studio, and it's necessary to overcome the challenge, we can combine the best game designers for the whole company to help this exact studios to overcome this uh these difficulties and to find some solution. So that's that's really important point of our communication.
You mentioned how big the company is, but I guess do you have like figures for that? Like how many staff do you actually have and how many studios is that kind of end up bringing together?
We have about 1,000 employees.
Mhm.
So, it's a, you know, huge enough. And 10 internal studios who's developing the games for us.
When you do these meetings as well, do you ever bring in any anyone like external kind of companies that help

share their learnings? And I think you also, because you also have like a publishing business, the companies that you work with on that side of things, do you bring them into to these discussions as well?
Frankly speaking, you're right. That's really true. Because I truly believe that the gaming industry hinge on the talents and ideas. It means that we're looking for the new great talents everywhere, not only internally, but externally as well. And for us, our publishing deals and our publishing communication with the industry is mainly for looking for the new talents and new ideas. It means that as soon as we understand that there is a potential in this team or that product,
Mhm.
are trying to involve them inside of our infrastructure, inside of our community. So, of course, we are trying to enrich them with the knowledge we have. Sometimes it's only money, for example. Sometimes it's just a publishing deal. Like we are helping them them with marketing efforts. We are helping them with the producing of the game. But in

the many cases, it's more about communication. It's more about sharing the experience. And you're right that we trying to involve them inside of our infrastructure and sharing the experience as well. That's why it's it's more about people than just about, you know, publishing expertise. It's more about looking for new talents.
That's really interesting. And then for your the big one of the big topics conversation at the moment is kind of direct consumer. And you mentioned a bit about community earlier how important that is. Can you say, I mean, firstly, I guess how important is that community building and then also shifting users to a direct consumer platform for my games. And then if you can talk about it, like how much of your revenue do you actually make from those platforms?
Yeah, uh you're absolutely right that direct consumer communication has become an important part of the new reality of the gaming industry. And that's really one of the strategic priority for us as well. And for us, D2C is significantly more than just improving quality unit

economy. It's more than just communication. It's about building the direct relationship with our players from the very beginning till the very end. Or creating the better overall experience in communication with them. So, we have built our own D2C platform bringing together live ops, payments, CRM, and player engagement structure into single ecosystem. And that works greatly. And yes, we succeeded to grow our revenue, for example, from D2C more than two times every single year, which is a great result. But it's more about communication for me than just about money. It's about future and increasing the overall experience for for our users.
Are you So, are you able to say like any sort of specific percentage of like how much revenue you make from from D2C versus versus
much more difficult topic because it depends on the platform to platform,

game to game because I don't want to share kind of general number because it depends on the of the genre. For example, we have some products which is much more midcore or even hardcore where the percentage is significantly higher. At the same time, we have a lot of casual games. It's a different different approach. It's a different percentage. So, the general one it's just nothing. It's much more important to take to talk in more details about the exact game. And that's why it's a different percentage for different companies because it's mainly connected with the genres and site platform inside, because in many cases PC combined together with mobile change this this percentage significantly. That's why it's not so easy to compare different companies. Here is the percent significantly connected with the portfolio set.
Mhm.
Why it's not so good.
I wanted to move a bit on to new games, and we talked a bit about also live games within that. But, it would look from the outside, but you can correct me, that My Games has kind of found it

tough to to launch a successful new kind of title, I'm talking about in the mobile space. If I look for about 18 months, unless stuff's been published under kind of different names. You've suddenly been relying on really like a War Robots to generate a lot of the revenue. So, I guess one, am I correct? And then secondly, you know, what are the key challenges you face in releasing a new hit game right now? And and why haven't you been able to release something new from an internal team?
Yeah, I would actually challenge the presumption a little, because we have launched several new mobile games over the past 2 and 1/2.
Mhm.
Some of them shows very encouraging first numbers, and already approaching 1 plus million players, which is a good result for the start. That said, yes, the reality is that launching of new successful games nowadays is much more difficult than it was 5-10 years ago. But, I don't want to repeat the common knowledge already about the high competition, so expensive price for traffic, and so on. I believe that all of us knows this

new reality. But, as result of this of this point, the industry simply doesn't produce as many breakouts as it was before. That's why our strategy now has two equally important priorities. One of them is continuing supporting our evergreen titles, and War Robots is a good example of that. It recently delivers its best performance over the last 7 years even, which is fantastic after, you know, almost 20 years in operations. The second is building the next generation of games. You are absolutely right, which is one of the key priority for us. Over the past year, we've essentially redesigned our R&D process. Now we work smaller teams, evaluate ideas much earlier, use common criteria of success across all the projects we have, and the goal is to test more titles, more ideas, to learn faster, make investment decisions based on the real data, rather than expert

opinions or any other assumptions. You know that not every prototype becomes a game and not every game becomes the hit. We all know that, and what we do with our philosophy at the moment, it's necessary for us to increase the number of smart experiments. So what we talking about and we think about what exactly smart experiments. For us, smart experiment is the combination of several fundamental components. First one is a strong, solid pursuit exactly what kind of game we would like to develop and why we believe this going to be successful. The second criteria, which is necessary to be inside of any prototype, why we, as a company, can do it better than all other company in the world. What is our USP? In this area, we are mainly talking about our detailed expertise in this exactly genre, for example, or we can do

this quicker than others because we have this tool, for example, or this solution that can, you know, increase our time and so on. And the third criteria, and I believe that maybe this is the most important, having the team that capable to execute this idea and who believes in it more than in anything else. So, having these two factors all together, it's okay for us to start and you experiment and we are trying to increase the number of these smart experiments inside of our R&D. R&D team.
When you say in the R&D team, so that's centralized, is that or is that within each individual studio that have like these teams? Sorry, how does that does that work? Is that
Yeah, it's a combination of it speaking. Because I would say that it's more studio oriented from one side, from another side there are a lot of joint communication between all of them, combining united united infrastructure

between them, where all of them understand what's going on in different R&D team, why they do this or that. And taking into account that we have a united green line process, we all discuss together what is going to be our our next experiment, why we will into this idea or that idea. So, even if it's situated in different studios, we decided together and centralized what exactly next experiment necessary to be done and how to check it and what is going to be the criteria of the success for this exact attempt.
So, are you testing a bunch of different ideas quite maybe even quite rapidly and then you see I guess you go through that that kind of that basic process. So, do you have like, okay, well this is we're going to do this is what we think is our big best. We're going to invest a lot in this and then it still goes through that process if that makes kind of sense. So, is that do you do you start with small ideas or like massive ideas and then
Pretty speaking, there is no any a strict rule what exactly size of the idea it's okay for us to go. Yes, we are

trying to concentrate our efforts mainly on the ideas that can be checked quick enough. It means that the main problem of this idea or the main hypothesis of this idea necessary to be situated can be checked as quick as possible or situated closer to the beginning of the development cycle? Yeah, this is a kind of extra extra priority, but in any case, we have some some bets that we trying to check much bigger ideas and invest more into that, but it's necessary to to have extra something extra inside of this idea and to believe into that.
And and uh just kind of one more thing on that is that are you looking for like kind of completely fresh innovation as it were? Like you're looking at, "Okay, what's like a completely new concept that we could that we think we could do to create kind of a a new genre almost?" Or or do you look at what's successful on the market and either kind of go closely to that or just like add still like interesting innovation, but like

it's you know, a smaller kind of adaptation a smaller innovation on that. How do you look at that?
Yeah, yeah. In case there are a lot of different approaches, frankly speaking, and different studios prefer to go different ways, which is great as well because for us again, it's a diversification of the approaches that we are trying to keep. Some of the studios prefer to combine different genres together and they succeeded to do that to do that in their previous life and they did it successfully and they are trying to keep the same line for the new development as well, trying to combine two different genres to creating something absolutely new, to innovate inside of the combination, which is great. In many cases in this category, there is no any strict benchmark that necessary to be close enough because it's a kind of new idea and it's the strong approach that's why this combination can be more successful than separated separated games. In other In other studios prefer to go and to have

benchmark close to them. For example, they are rather strong inside of the tower defense genre, for example, and they decided that the team at the moment have the strong competence inside of the tower defense genre and they would like to keep these competences and to deep dive into this idea. So, this is different approach. Again, it depends on the preferences of the team and capabilities of the team and the the exact game designers and the producers who live inside. So, yeah, sometimes it's a genre's preferences, sometimes it's a combination, sometimes it's a creative absolutely new story. Again, it's the it's the approach that can be applicable and we know a lot of a lot of success cases based on this approach to creating something absolutely unique. And that's possible to be done as well. And I believe that this opportunity offers us to diversify our approaches it's a great idea as well because we have many studios and all of them are

slightly different from each other in terms of the in terms of the competences, which is great to try all the ideas behind their preferences.
I know we don't want to deep into some of the challenges that we will like you said everyone's got their niches kind of discussed them. But so how I guess how much is the bar been raised from what you've seen during your time kind of with my games of what a successful game looks like over years and then the money required to make it a success. And then also, you know, what's your return window on that? So, if you were to launch a big new game you think's going to be successful, you fronted up the development cost, you got to front up loads of you way. Are you thinking ahead like okay, well, we might make our money back in a couple of years?
Mhm. You know, in terms of the investment, I would say that it would be better to split this discussion about the investment into two parts. First part of the investment necessary to be done pre-launch stage at the pre-launch stage. And the second part of the investment necessary to be done after

game launch. I believe that this factor that determines our investment potential they are fundamentally different at these different stages. And mainly due to different level of uncertainty at these two stages. And I think that uh the companies often distinguish themselves precisely on how they invest at the pre-launch stage. Because I think that pre-launch stage it's much more important to think about. And our philosophy in this area have already described that trying to to do our best with a small teams, with the rapid prototyping, with the early market validation, which is all about the pre-launch stage. So, we are trying to increase the number of attempts because we truly believe that it will be better just to check more to moving forward only with the cases that that are already worked out. Talking about the after-launch stage. And in many cases more about much, you know, bigger money than for the first stage. But in any

case, in any case I would say that it's much easier to think about the after-launch stage and the investment at this stage because you know for sure or with the high level of certainty what exactly unit economy you have, what exactly metrics you have. And it means that it's much easier for you to invest knowing almost for sure when are you planning to return this money. And we are lucky enough to use our own funds to invest into the game at the scaling stage. It's a scaling of the team for Life Oops, for example, or scaling in terms of the traffic and involvement and so on. So, for us there is no any significant limitations in terms of the investment at this stage. And moreover, even though we are talking not about only my games, I believe that there are a lot of different options on the market. There are a lot of funds or companies who will help you to find money for this already stage. So, there are a lot of options, a lot of money in the market are to be invested into

proven metrics. So, as soon as you have the game, this already proved enough in terms of the potential, it's rather easy for you to find the money for further investment. And there is no any significant limitations. The only thing that necessary to be taken into consideration, it's your right investment horizon. What is the investment horizon is acceptable for you, what is not. And that is the only topic that necessary to be discussed. In many cases, yes, it's 2-3 years something like that if we combine all the costs. UA and team and different supporting cost to be taken into that consideration. But again, as soon as we have the game that possible to be skilled, it's kind of, you know, good problem to find the money for them for scaling because it's much more important to invest at the second after is the first stage. That is the most difficult stage in game industry ever. That's why it's much more important to think how to

invest, how to be disciplined enough to invest into the first stage. But as soon as you are ready already to scale the game, it's not a big deal in terms of the investment. It's much easier to find them, whereas it's much easier to predict what is going on and when you are planning to return it and and so on. So, yeah, for us the the the first stage is the most important one.
But as with user acquisition cost getting ever higher, and this has been a thing that seems pretty consistent over at least a decade. But yeah, I guess in particularly now, does that actually change even the kind of games that you could release? So, for example, is there like a game, maybe you have an example of this, I don't know, but like a game that you could have released five that you could release five years ago, it would have been successful, whereas now the economics of that have just changed entirely?
Yeah, yeah. I think that there are a lot of discussions about that, that nowadays the price for UA next year is much more much more expensive than it was before. It means that you should have much higher LTV

potential for every user you would like to involve. And of course there are huge competition with the already existing products. Because already existing games like War Robots for example has a huge LTV for every involved users in in War Robots already. It's a game with the huge life hopes already existing in the game. Means that it's necessary to compete with War Robots abilities then you would like to acquire the same user. And that's why for new games that's not so easy to compete with the you know, old games which are success- still very successful. But again, I think it's all kind of common knowledge already that it's not so easy but it's possible to be done because innovative gameplay works great even now. And yes, there are a lot of different UA channels appears every single year that can be used to increase your abilities to involve more and more more and more traffic. Nowadays it's not only about

Facebook or Google as it was 10 years ago, you know. Today it's absolutely different set of of companies that necessary to be inside your pipeline if you would like to have the effective user acquisition campaigns.
So I have a I just a few questions left and the biggest topic for your LTV which is how are you using AI to support your teams? I guess whether that's in production, marketing, you know, new games, live games. What practical use cases do you have right now?
Uh you know, I think that we in my games uh have moved beyond the stage when AI is just something people experiment with separately. But today we're in the process of becoming uh AI as a part of our everyday workflow. I wouldn't be able even to name a single department in the company that doesn't use AI in its work. It's everywhere in development, in localization, in marketing, in finance,

in legal, in HR, everywhere. Here or there. And this is a problem about here or there. Whereas I think that the crucial next step for every company and for My Games as well is to ensure that this acceleration remains seamless across the whole workflow. Because in case it's not that way, we just move this bottleneck from one step to another step without any significant effect on the final result. What is really important is just to guarantee that we use AI and succeeded to increase the speed for the whole entire workflow. And this is the main pain for us at the moment, the main point of our interest. How to build the whole infrastructure, the whole process of game creation and game support with help of AI quicker than we did before and check more than we checked before. But it's so important to keep it seamless through the whole

the whole workflow.
Is your strategy that it's kind of you're telling stuff you have to use AI and here are the tools that you should be using or is it the teams that come and say, uh, we're going to have well, this is our process. We think AI might be useful here. Like you know, is it top down or kind of bottom up?
I think it's both. Frankly speaking, it's both. But initially we started it top down. But after that, just in some months, we realized and we saw the process from bottom up. So, but initially it was top down.
And why why did you do that? Is it just cuz you want to make sure that the teams are at least experimenting with these with the tools or what?
Because we realized how important it can be for the speed of the company. Uh, because we're talking about AI and these so so often. And we realized that at least for R&D, it can be the game-changer in terms of the speed of the checking of the new ideas. That's why that was top-down at least for them. And after that, it was the opposite

opposite process from bottom-up bottom-up. It at the moment is already everywhere.
Do you do you get any pushback from the teams?
Not so much, strictly speaking. Not so much. And I'm really happy about that.
Yeah, obviously as a whole, we could talk another hour probably about AI and the controversies versus the the practical uses, etc. But I we're about to run out of time. So I've got two questions. Um I just want to talk about some of the other parts of your business. We got to talk about the new games, the live games, kind of internal. But you also do you launch MGVC publishing in 2024, and you also launched Knights Peak that year. So I think MGVC is mostly focused, I believe, on mobile, whereas Knights Peak is kind of PC console. I guess what's your thinking in launching those those two things?
Yeah, talking about the MGVC publishing, talking about the publishing in mobile, as I have already said, more about spreading our scanning abilities to learn what's going on in the market, what exactly teams appears, how they

works, what the talents are there, and what the ideas they have. And we would like to help them with everything we have, with everything we know. That's why for us it's just the style of communication with the industry. And even if we call it as a publishing, but in reality, they are just under the cover, there are a lot of different collaborations. Some of them can be called like publishing, but another one it's more about investment and co-investment and GV and many different other business models. But the initial idea and the final final goal of this path is definitely look for new ideas and look for new talents involving them inside of our structure, inside of our ecosystem. This is all about MGVC publishing. Talking about the Knight Speak, it's a PC console premium publishing label. We launched it in 2024. And today its portfolio already includes several promising titles, and

many of them on the way. And for example, one of the releases we are especially excited, it's a game that's going to be released at the very end of this year. It's Heller of Mice and Magic. It's a beautiful co-op adventure that really reflects kind of high-quality premium experience that we want to bring to the audience. And for us, we don't want to choose between mobile or PC console. It's about building the diversified portfolio in different platforms, attract different audience, and we know that for sure. And support different business models. That's why using PC console inside of our lineup, it's opportunity to to work across the whole industry, and to see different opportunities between the different platforms and genres. So that's one one more that we would like to use.
So just on that, you know, I guess what do you consider a success that for a new game? So is it you mentioned you had a couple of games that had like a million players. Is a success a game

that's you could release that's profitable that, you know, supports the team? Is it, you know, the blockbuster successes where we were you were uh 100 million or like a Supercell like a billion or bust used to be? Like what do you how do you view it?
I would say that's not a kind of benchmark of success, but at least we have the internal benchmark of the titles we would like to develop. And they they can be kind of a part of part of answer. First of all, in case we start any production, it means that we believe that this game have the ability to earn more than 50 million per per year. This is a kind of our benchmark the games we would like to develop. In case there is no any ambitions like that, it would be better not to start even. So, 50 million per year, it's a kind of our good benchmark for the game we would like to develop. The second point, we would like to develop the game with the long-lasting tail, which is

really important. It's not about just growing at the beginning. Usually or in quite 100% times we think how we will operate this game for a long term. Is it possible to scale this game and to work with them for for the for the long term. So, this is another criteria. And involving millions millions people inside. So, we are not about niche games. We mainly think about long-lasting but but rather wide games in terms of the in terms of the audience. This is another criteria then we think if the game is applicable for us to develop and to start production or not. This is a kind of success.
The last question, where do you see My Games in 5 years and how do you get there? And I'm curious also for that, how much do you see mobile as part of that and how much do you see PC or console as part of that?
You know, I think that at the moment My Games are known as a company with a great games from one side. From another

side, we known as a company that continues to evolve no matter how the industry change. And our history for more than 20 years already proves that. And what I think about My Games that what I hoped to build. The game market is moving fast than ever and we all know that. Technology change, players expectation change, business model change and I don't think that success will come from knowing a lot about every single trend because there are a lot of changes behind that story. Uh and uh but I truly believe that it comes from building the organization that is able to adapt quickly without losing focus. So, I think that if we continue launch great new games while also growing our long-term products like War Robots. And we will remain the trusted partner for other developers, for platforms, for different set of our partners around the world. I will consider that as a success

in five years. So, three three components.
That's a good way to say That's a good way to end. So, thank you very much for being on the show. Really appreciate all your insights. And thank you everybody for listening or watching. And we'll catch you on the next show. We'll have more interviews coming soon.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.