Shared Values: What it Means to Have a Strategic Investment Partner on Board

in our on next session which is titled shared values what it means to have a strategic investment partner on board very interesting i'm looking forward to that one myself as well and nikita giving us some insight into um yeah what what happens after you actually made the deal sure over to you yeah thank you kay all right uh give me a second i'll um share my screen with the deck and uh we'll get we'll get it started yeah we're good okay awesome all right uh so yeah for for those ones who uh who just joined my name is uh nikita i'm with my games and uh yeah today i'm going to talk about shirt values and what it actually happens uh and means to have a strategic partner on board

before we started a few words about myself so yeah i'm part of my games which is one of the leading european game development and publishing companies and uh more specifically i'm working for my games venture capital which is a corporate investment uh arm of my games so my role is executive producer uh and uh well basically i'm all about full cycle deal making and after the deal is done helping our portfolio studios grow and avoid pitfalls and all the all the other um less less exciting operational things so prior to that i've been with wargaming and half marking consumer science background so yeah before before to start with i would like to make a brief overview of my games so like my games today has a range of business capabilities starting from in-house game development

to self-publishing to licensing to of course my games venture capital m a arm and beyond this uh we also upgrade our own infrastructure of gaming services that really eases things up for uh mobile free-to-play uh game developing and uh operating those uh game as a service products and on top of that we also upgrade our own digital store which is called uh my game store so yeah considering my game's performance we've made really strong 2020 with more than half of the billion gross revenue performance uh growing above average [Music] year-on-year growth figures for gaming industry overall and yeah this leads us to be in uh in top 50 gaming companies worldwide by revenue uh top 15 gaming companies in emea region

and on top of that as i've mentioned probably in the uh previous panel discussion uh where my game's venture capital is a part of top 10 uh gaming funds worldwide by by gaming uh by deal activity so my games is a truly international company these days uh we have hq in moscow russia but as you can see on this screen we have solid presence in eastern uh central europe we have our own uh publishing european branch located in amsterdam netherlands and also presence in north america and western regions are really important to us so we have a presence in u.s as well [Music] concerning key uh gross revenue uh drivers uh 75 of uh all gross revenues coming from international markets uh and the top three top three uh top performing markets for us are being

united states germany and japan and uh also like even though we develop and publish uh the games on all platforms the key focus for us is free to play mobile game as a services so um we are we're we're getting more than 70 percent of uh revenue coming from mobile space which which is great so overall across all platforms we have more than uh 150 uh games in our portfolio and as you can see on this slide the mobile side of our portfolio is the most diversified so we have titles ranging anywhere from mid-core shooters genre to hardcore rpgs to time management titles to female-skewed interactive story games and many many others well uh in the course of the last decade my games has had a really exciting

evolution uh more than a decade ago my games uh has been started uh with uh without say mostly um licensing and regional publishing of mmorpgs in eastern europe uh then we've transitioned to in-house development and publishing of our own ips on pc mostly and then back in 2016 we've made a successful transition uh to mobile with uh such titles as war robots and hustle castle i'm pretty sure that uh you guys are well familiar with uh these titles if you're into mobile and uh in the in the recent years um diversified our portfolio with more casual uh casual sku titles like grand hotel mania this is a time management game and also lovesick which is one of the leading titles in interactive story games

genre uh even though like uh there are a range of strategic partners that you as independent development studios might opt to partner with uh only a few of them have a proven track record of uh bringing their eyepiece cross-platform uh and uh well bringing the ips cross-platform i believe is one of the uh really important trends here uh in the in the gaming industry in the recent years and we've got really nice case uh with warface which has been initially created as an um as a free-to-play shooter free-to-play first-person shooter uh dedicated mostly for eastern european audience and after a successful launch we've managed to push the distribution of this game globally and then in the course of last two years we've brought warface to consoles to mobile and even beyond to switch and of course

we've learned a lot in the course of this journey and happy to share this expertise with our portfolio studios that that joined us so that basically to unlock your eyepiece to a new audience and create new revenue streams from other platforms starting from original ones original platform where the ip has started its path so uh yeah well uh how how did we get to that stage and that performance of course that's that's a hard work uh first and foremost but also it's really about our carpet corporate culture uh so among um among big publishers uh and we're really different uh because we're not a kind of a solidified development and publishing powerhouse however we are more of a collaboration

of partner studios and we have 13 in-house studios overall here in my games each of those studios keeping and nurturing its unique expert expertise gender focus and gender specific knowledge and basically this brings us to i would say three core pillars of my games first one is creative independence so we have majority of our in-house studios being led by the funders which have established those businesses a while ago uh keeping their own independent product strategy uh and executing on it uh the second aspect is uh constant expertise exchange so we have the ecosystem and also the infrastructure which i'm i'll be telling a little bit more uh in a few few minutes uh that really streamlines uh exchange of successful cases of problem solving and also the data and metrics that uh show high performance titles

across our portfolio that allow to learn for other teams uh the studios uh that the joint uh mgvc within strategic partnership and also the third pillar is uh experiments we constantly drive new experiments in all the areas of operations starting from prototyping to game development practices uh to publishing and user acquisition of course to live operations and uh with all this uh track record in my and uh thoughts in mind we've established my games venture capital three years ago and over the course of uh three years we've joined more than 37 uh development studios across the world and uh yeah one of the reasons why we've gathered so uh so much interest from the side of independent uh studios is uh the range of added values and uh

supporting services that strategic partners just like ourselves are bringing to the table of the partnership so first and foremost it's marketing expertise uh uh i'll be telling a little bit more about that in a few seconds also editorial support and by editorial support i mean the team of really senior and the seasoned game designers with great track records and versatile expertise that are working with our portfolio companies to basically help increase retention and monetization kpis uh improve unit economy and make sure that the products are becoming successful as business on top of this uh we have our own infrastructure and ecosystem that basically puts all the burden related to services and tools that are associated with free-to-play game as a service aside and that makes the teams and

the development studios that we're working with solely focused on the product that they are creating elaborating a little bit more about marketing services and uh marketing side of things as you may know in mobile free-to-play user acquisition specifically is one of the critical uh aspects that really differentiates successful uh products from from from not so successful so uh here at my games we actually have our own global user acquisition team which is driving ua to our top titles like warface like war robots and hustle castle and we have those folks driving ua with efficient roi to the products of our portfolio studios which is i would say one of the really game changers which differentiate us on the landscape of strategic partners also as you may know a solid pipeline of ad creatives uh

makes a difference uh when the game get is getting to scale uh on the market with paid user acquisition and uh we're helping our studios with on that aspect as well and last but not least influencer marking so we have the set of tools and expertise in-house to make influencer marketing on youtube on tick tock and instagram to be not only roi efficient by itself but also driving down the cpi uh cost per install costs for specific regions for like regular facebook to google to unity campaigns uh when we pair uh that user acquisition with influencer marketing celebrating librarian about our infrastructure a little bit more the particular tool that we are really proud of is myua it's a tool for granular user acquisition and product metrics analysis and also it solves for return of investment

prediction so basically we have a high accuracy tool which says what would be the return of investment in specific time frame let's say after three months or six months after marketing has been invest invested on top of that we have our own gdpr solution marketing attribution services and tools and of course our my games digital store all right moving on to the my my favorite part of the presentation which is cases and results so uh in the course of last three uh three years we've made multiple successful acquisitions and integrations of new studios and on this slide you can see uh cases of big sonic and swag marcia the studio that we've acquired in full and uh yeah well based on these graphs uh you can see that we've managed to multiple revenue performance of those studios uh in i would say relatively short time frame

so when considering uh partnership with a strategic uh it's really worth considering what are the synergies and what is what are the added values uh that this strategic is bringing to the table of the partnership and also from our site this is something that we are considering as well so among all the investment opportunities we are looking for those ones where our added value will make the biggest difference so that's why sometimes i call mgvc a grow fund because our ultimate objective is growth as as fast as possible and achieving really high scale now a few more products uh specific cases yeah so the first one is pixonic it's the russian studio which which has had a really well established product back in the day when we've

acquired the studio in mid 2016. uh it's war robots it's a pvp multiplayer online battle arena which as you can see on the graph below uh which is representing revenue performance according to app penny uh prior to acquisition has been uh well enjoying organic traffic mostly in organic and performance in terms of revenue based on organic traffic immediately after acquisition we've injected our support and expertise in user acquisition and managed to increase revenue performance of war robots by four times in just one year which is an outstanding result and afterwards uh we've see we've secured uh the fact that war robots is becoming a durable game as a service title by helping the studio to establish efficient live operations which basically resulted in war robots generating solid revenue numbers over the course of

last five years next actually five years after the initial scale so yeah just just this year we've got a really exciting milestone of half of the billion uh lifetime revenue generated by war robots the second case is really different uh it's about us stepping into strategic partnership early on and uh yeah well showcasing other other strong aspects of cooperation with the strategic so yeah this case is about deuce craft and with deucecraft uh we've uh stepped into strategic partnership really early on uh when the studio has had only a solid mvp of uh their game called grand hotel mania it's a game in the time management segment and back in the day after after the partnership has been signed and put in place we've

supported the studio with our editorial team's expertise and support and basically worked with the studio to set up the kpis and unit economy in the product so that it allows for rapid scale uh with user acquisition once once once a trading uh so in the at the beginning of 2020 we've arranged soft launch uh with the help of our user acquisition team uh and uh when we've made sure that uh the the game is ready for launch uh we've moved to a scale phase right after global release which has been arranged only uh by my game's user acquisition team so since like by by the end of last year there were zero folks in the studio itself uh arranging publishing and marketing operations it was just central user acquisition team from my games which has basically uh delivered great result with scale in grand hotel mania

achieving 3.5 male per month performance in just three months after uh the game went global and uh yeah given that this is a penny number you can imagine that considering advertising revenue uh coming within this game as well uh the total performance is uh roughly five mil per month uh back in october and since then we've helped the studio to establish efficient live operations as well with our design team and now uh yeah well another interesting point is that with our help we've managed to actually shake up the whole genre of time management games globally uh with that uh with those uh editorial team support and and expertise in game design as well as uh user acquisition and scale with efficient return of investment so as you can see only within two months after uh global launch of grand hotel mania

we've got two top two uh most performing time management games in the category worldwide overall so yeah uh to sum up as uh here at my games where uh a game developer and publisher our own uh we understand that creating a successful game really costs blood sweat and tears and that's why we're super supportive to the studios the teams that we are joining within strategic partnership and we believe that we have like really shared values between the studios and studios motivation and objectives as well as ours so first and foremost we're about making great games that can become phenomenal worldwide and become a evergreen eyepiece that are enjoyed by the audience worldwide for decades and of course we appreciate creative independence uh of the studios that we are joining because

well that's that's that's something that really is critical to making a hit game uh that is differentiated from the peers on the market and of course we're aimed at growth rapid efficient growth uh with the fish with the positive return of investment and i believe on those three objectives and values we are really well aligned uh with the developer and uh developer and partners that might consider joining the strategic partnership so all in all even though there are range of ways and paths for development studios and development teams to get to top charts one of them being a fully independent path of well getting into a lot of pitfalls establishing own publishing unit and publishing operations and get to top charts organically the other path might be working with a

strategic partner which basically allows for streamlined growth and focus of the studio on the product itself at first and at the second strategic partner helping a lot not only with expertise in design and marketing but also with infrastructure uh that that basically streamlines uh games performance on the market and ecosystem and collaboration with other studios uh within its portfolio across the globe and of course last but not least funding so yeah i think uh that's that's that's pretty much it it's worth saying that uh we are here at my games having really ambitious targets to get into top 25 grossing publishers worldwide and uh yeah really welcome [Music] independent development studios to join us and achieve the ambitious goals together awesome

thank you so much nikita i'm push is placebo um do you have a uh what's the best way to get in touch with you guys for people that are listening and are interested in having a conversation yeah so firstly i'm open for a chat on facebook and linkedin uh also we have uh mgbc.com website with application form out there and we're checking the the new applications really regularly cool um we have uh we have a little bit of time and we have a lot of q a questions um so if you're okay then i'll bounce some over to you um very first one actually um was working in such a globally um you know situated company like my games is the way you approach deals in each region slightly different or has that global market that we're basically operating in pretty much allowed for like a more straightforward method that you can apply to all different kinds of regions and games yeah that's a great

question uh actually we've started with mgvc with mostly i would say eastern european focus basically because it's our domestic region right for my games but over the course of last year we've shifted our focus globally and one of the recent disclosed deals is our investment in pizza club games which is san francisco based mobile game developer focused on hero collection battlers so i would say that the gaming industry is really global from the standpoint of operations right and from the standpoint of distribution and that basically allows us to work efficiently together with uh with the studios all over the globe so we have a few titles we have a few studios in our portfolio coming from north america and also one from brazil which is which is also a great region for uh development talent

yeah interesting cool um another one um this is one i'm actually interested in too because we've been in that situation um what advice would you give to a game developer who is looking to expand their game to new platforms um such as a switch if you're coming from mobile for instance um when you are traditionally a mobile company um any tips you can give there well yeah yeah good question actually i would say it really depends on the the initial gameplay right and the the question is how this particular gameplay uh considering that uh well the product is somewhat successful on one platform how does this gameplay fits other platforms like pc or console or even switch so say for considering warface uh being a first person shooter uh this gameplay works great for

uh for pc for console of course for mobile and all of all the platforms basically right but if we're talking about uh strategy uh games or uh real time strategy in particular i believe that console might be not the not the best option to push forward with in terms of expanding to new platforms and also yeah well uh it it all it is all about uh smart adaptation of the gameplay to a new platform and assessing the return of investment potentially uh considering the each specific market in each specific platform in particular yeah and uh just based on my own experience our own experience it's not trivial especially if you're dealing with different input methods from touch to keyboard to mouse uh to joysticks and so on so it's an interesting interesting challenge for sure but it can be worth it right yeah cool um we got uh we got one more question um

that uh that asked um how much weight should companies put on user acquisition should this be something to actually invest in early on curious what your stance is on that i mean this is what you guys are the experts of right yeah yeah sure uh oh looks like basically we have some more questions in in your nation but like what can you please rephrase this question like yeah so how much should be put into using yeah how much emphasis should put you know companies that built their first game right put on user acquisition and uh should they be investing themselves in this early on um i guess testing you know proving some some uh some fundamental kpis and so on so yeah as uh i believe everyone mentioned in the previous panel discussion uh market validation as early as possible in the course of uh products life cycle is uh

is critical not only for the development studios themselves because it basically uh drives uh the the way forward for future iterations with the product but also for potential partners just like vc strategic partners uh and even let's say some some other partnerships which might include marketing financing so yeah i believe it's it's critically important to put some money into ua and to get initial metrics to actually understand where you are uh with uh with retention with the initial checks uh of your audience uh in your game and uh what is the what it what what are the areas for improvement to tackle first firstly yeah of course that's that's the great um addition an important aspect in terms of like conversations and negotiations with

financial parties that really bring that publishing or marketing financing muscle on top of initial kpis on top of initial user acquisition to really get the product to the scale yeah yeah and i guess one important thing that i think is good to mention is also it's a it's a like a team effort right it goes across all the different uh disciplines that you have because you know design is involved in that technology all these kind of things so i think it's important to wrap your head around this as early as possible um okay unfortunately this uh closes our slot but um i want to thank you very much nikita um great insights there um and uh happy to have you with us and thanks everybody uh that tuned in um yeah hope to have you back uh in the future thank you thanks so much okay and uh once again always open for a conversation on facebook

and linkedin thank you great thank you so much